According to major newspapers, starting with the municipal elections of 2008, Brazil’s e-voting machines will use the Linux operating system, to be developed by the technical team of the federal elections tribunal the TSE. According to the TSE’s IT division, the advantages of using Linux in the electronic voting machine are standardization, since it is possible to use this OS in all models of the device, as well as transparency, since this is an open mcchanism in which all the source code is available to the public and can be freely audited. Another advantage is zero cost, because no license fees must be paid.

OpenDocument, that is: The third stage, planned for mid-2008, will be the addition of the OpenDocument format for word processors to the list of export formats. "Imagine that you want to use a set of wiki articles in the classroom. By supporting the OpenDocument format, we will make it easy for educators to customize and remix content before printing and distributing it from any desktop computer," Sue Gardner explained.

"By now many of you might have heard of Joost, the extremely hyped “Internet-TV”-application by Niklas Zenström, author of Skype and Kazaa. What you might not know is that there is a free open-source alternative. It’s name.. is Miro..."

There will be a BRM (Ballot resolution meeting) in Geneva on 25-29 February 2008 to answer the comments by National Standard Boards on OOXML and to resolve issues. Microsoft has set up a situation where many of the shortcomings and thousands of comments which need to be resolved at the BRN will not be addressed. They have closed this process as much as possible and have delayed National Boards from having adequate time to review proposed changes.

Even though these days it's possible to run Hackintosh on normal Intel hardware, but still it's not stable and well there are hardware compatibility issues. So well other alternative to using MAC OS is either to purchase MAC hardware(which would be naturally expensive) and run full fledged MAC OS or you could tweak and customize your Ubuntu desktop to look more like MAC OS X.

Sun Microsystems has vowed to make its free office suite every bit as good as its paid-for offering..

A bootable 4 GB Flash Drive containing a portable version of Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available from Mandriva for 79 EUR ($89) and from Amazon for $94. The general idea is that you can take this little memory stick with you and be able to run Linux from it, do Internet and Office tasks with Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, and save your files to the free space on the drive. The Mandriva system can access Windows volumes, and the free space on the flash drive can be read from Windows.

The E-Commerce Times posted an interview with Jim Zemlin yesterday. Not surprisingly, he was very optimistic about the future of Linux, but his argument about cloud computing was particularly interesting.