He wanted to know, in the light of the Government's well-publicised new found enthusiasm for open source software, whether I thought they would all be using open source software in ten year's time and if so when and how would it all happen?

An attempt to use a "European Free Trade Agreement" to push software patents into the EU - another menace gets noticed

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.

China may no longer be able to use proprietary software from the United States without paying, which is great news for GNU/Linux and other Free software

"An intergroup1 on "New Media, Free Software and Open Information Society" was established in the European Parliament with the support of a wide range of political groups (EPP, ALDE/ADLE and Greens/EFA). Free Software promoters April (FR) and Associazione per il Software Libero (IT) welcome this decision that opens up the European Parliament to embracing the digital revolution..."

India’s open source software lobbyists allege that the country’s proposed draft recommendations for adopting open technology standards and software for automating different government departments and functions, favours popular software solutions from large companies such as Microsoft.

The San Francisco Committee on Information Technology has published a new software evaluation policy that requires departments of the city government to consider open source software solutions alongside proprietary commercial offerings.

The UK government has rejigged its open source and open standards software procurement policy, following pressure from OSS vendors last autumn. Early last year the Cabinet Office revised its rules on public sector open source software purchases, but many OSS players complained that the policy amendments didn’t go far enough.