Obama, the first true 21st century President, and his staff have arrived at the White House to find themselves stuck with 20th century Microsoft software… and they’re not happy.

Not from The 451 Group, unfortunately, but from Sun’s chairman and co-founder Scott McNealy, who told the BBC he has been asked by the new administration to prepare a paper on how the use of open source software within government can improve both security and the cost-effective use of technology.

The South African State IT Agency’s (SITA) Free and Open Source Software Programme Office (FPO) will host the second annual chief information officers (CIO) workshop on February 24.

We, at the Allahabad High Court, not only use but advocate open source software (OSS) and open formats. Many raise the question, 'Why is it so? Why do you do it?' Let me take this opportunity to explain it.

Slashdot misreported this. ZDNet's Dana did, too. Every little blog is picking this story up from these two and others. I'm going to correct them all on a couple of points, but I don't want them to take it personally. They just reacted instead of reading carefully. This is not about Linux.

Vietnam's government is going "100 per cent open source". VietnamNet Bridge reports that the Vietnam Ministry of Information and Communications has set out an aggressive policy to go "100 per cent open source" by December 31st 2010.

One of the most repeated examples cited to promote open source philosophy is that of an electronic voting system. If this process is not understood or transparent then its results cannot be trusted. The strength of this argument has gone up a hundredfold with the discovery that Diebold counting software has been missing ballots for four years.

Norway has become the the latest country to pledge funds for public sector use of open source software. Minister of Government Adminstration and Reform Heidi Grande Roeys is granting 2 million kroner ($285,000) to the national center for free software, and the terms of the deal are interesting.