GateIN melds JBoss Portal technologies with the eXo portal to create a new portal framework. Red Hat originally announced the partnership with eXo in June and the today's availability of GateIN is the first deliverable.

A new platform designed to help software developers find money and resources for their projects has been launched in Brazil. The makeITopen site is Brazil’s first and only crowdfunding platform aimed at helping those involved in the development of free software.

The Brasília Protocol (now translated to English) started the process of implementation of the Open Document Format (ODF) within the Brazilian Government.

Open source experts from the public sector, SME and Plone community participated in the first Plone e-government international workshop. After two days of intense work the group decided to merge into 1 common project 3 e-government initiatives: CommunesPlone (Belgium, France), PloneGov.ch (Switzerland) and UdalPlone (Basque Country, Spain).

Portugal's National Association for the promotion of Free Software (Ansol) accuses the government Office of Construction and Property (INCI) of having broken procurement rules after it admitted on Monday that it had signed a 268,000 euro contract with Microsoft for the government's website on Public Expenses, Base, without a public tender.

Open Source Society president Don Christie's blog, on Stuff, is reporting the State Services Commission has agreed to release the code for the new New Zealand government portal under the open source GPL licence.

Yesterday, I had an interesting lunch with Flavio Grynzpan, formerly president of Motorola in Brazil. Now a consultant who actively promotes the Brazilian IT industry internationally, Grynzpan is one of those extremely well-connected people who have their ear to the ground, so it was good to get some alternative views before hearing the government pitch.

"Brazil’s Tribunal Superior Eleitoral will use 430,000 GNU/Linux machines for this year’s election, according to a press release (pt) published on the TSE website (h/t Ada Lemos). Giuseppe Janino, the Tribunal’s secretary of IT, promises that this migration will make the elections more secure and transparent, reducing the potential for ballot rigging and tampering..."

The Brazilian government’s experience with FLOSS was chosen as one of the best real-world cases for the adoption of free software in the public sector. The case was presented by Professor Christiana Freitas, from the University of Brasília (UNB), and Corinto Meffe, coordinator of Brazil’s Portal do Software Público.