Hungary starts embracing more Free software, but Novell is a mismatch. THIS is not yet another report about Microsoft's corruption in Hungary [1, 2, 3]. Hungary is actually beginning to soften (not Soften) and consider Free software. Mistakenly however, an official in Hungary lists Novell as a prime candidate, despite the fact that Novell - by its own admission - is merely a mixed source company.

Hungary's public administrations will by default use open document standards for their electronic documents, as of April this year, the government ministers agreed on 23 December, and all public organisations are encouraged to move to open source office tools. Hungary's government also in December decided to cancel the funding of proprietary office suite licences for all schools.

Hungary decided to re-vote due to irregularities. Here is the rest of the story, notes by Tomka Gergely, who attended the second meeting as a technical expert.

Jobbik is not a new Linux distribution, but a political party, hell bent on making Hungary an open source powerhouse, if wins the upcoming general election, in April. This is an awesome news.

Hungary's state Competition Authority raided the offices of Microsoft Corp.'s local subsidiary as part of a probe into the company's relationship with large software distributors. Microsoft used sales conditions and offered software distributors incentives - described as "loyalty discounts" - so they wouldn't offer clients anything but Microsoft Office products.

Our panel focused on barriers to its adoption and steps that free software advocates could take to reach out to government agencies.

In reading through IDC's excellent report, "2007 Industry Adoption of Open Source Software, Part 2: Project Adoption," analyst Matt Lawton stumbles across an intriguing observation in open-source software adoption. He apparently believes it is a weakness of the current open-source landscape, but I believe it is a strength. The observation? That IT departments do most of the services around open source, rather than third-party consulting companies.

Beyond expressing a preference, does anything else need to be done to make sure that governments that say they are going "open source" really do so?" Quotas -- dictating specific percentages of open source usage -- seem an obvious answer, but in countries that have tried them, open source has not necessarily flourished. One country where quotas on open source use have been instituted is Hungary.

Hungarian Parliament has made the use of open standards mandatory by law in the intercommunication between public administration offices, public utility companies, citizens and voluntarily joining private companies, conducted via the central governmental system