The Liberal Democrats have hit out at the government's failure to use more open source software, three years after it pledged to avoid 'lock-in' to proprietary systems. The government published a policy document, 'Open Source Software: use within UK government' in 2004, promising to consider open source alongside proprietary products in IT procurements...

The Icelandic government has released a policy on free and open source software. In short, the policy states that when buying software free and open source software should be considered on an equal footing with proprietary software, that software based on open standards shall be chosen, that lock-ins to specific vendors should be avoided (choosing free software is one means to achieve this), that bespoke or customized software shall be reusable (and free and open source software achieves this), and finally that students of Icelandic educational institutes shall have the opportunity to learn about and use free and open source software on a par with proprietary software.

This policy applies to all state institutions and organizations operated with public funds.

Recent studies show that about 37% of servers in Korean government offices ran Linux-based operating systems in 2006 and annual usage growth is estimated to be over 10% for upcoming years. In 2007, the Korean government plans to switch to open source alternatives on a substantial number of its PCs and servers, and support the open source initiative.

If the government uses open source software, then the government is at risk because the security flaws are exposed publicly. The use of proprietary software protects the government from security attacks because its code is hidden and not released to the public.

Open source has changed operating systems, application servers and databases. Now, the benefits of open source are being realized in content management systems (CMS), traditionally a vendor-controlled world of expensive licensing and closed APIs.

If you’re like a lot of IT organizations, you’ve got servers from Hewlett-Packard, routers from Cisco, operating systems from Red Hat and Microsoft – and you may even have Solaris from Sun somewhere.

Switzerland's Federal Administrative Court yesterday decided that a government organisation's renewal of its proprietary software licences without a public tender does not harm the business interests of open source software service providers.

A new directive from the Government of Malta directs government agencies to give preference to the use of open source software. Agencies choosing not to use open source solutions must provide documentation supporting their decision

I received quite a few comments this past week following the publishing of California IT Policy Letter 10-01 which formally establishes "the use of Open Source Software (OSS) in California state government as an acceptable practice." While many of my security colleagues offered words of caution following the announcement (and even a couple of "are you crazy" comments), most were pretty enthusiasti