The British government and “UK Digital Champion” Martha Lane Fox have launched a pilot scheme to help citizens who do not have access to the Internet buy their own refurbished Linux-based PC for 98 Pounds (about $156).

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed a plan for transition of power structures and the federal budget [to] free software. According to the document, the introduction of Linux in government should begin in II quarter 2012.

Only one month after the letters for the PDFreaders campaign of FSFE were sent, 172 public institutions have removed advertisements for proprietary PDF readers from their websites. Particularly outstanding were the responses from Croatia, Russia and Slovenia. In Croatia almost all reported institutions deleted the advertisement.

We would like to see the European Commission back up its public rhetoric regarding Free Software, Open Standards and interoperability with its own actions. This would require DIGIT to rethink some procurement practices in order to open up public software procurement to competition.

RMS recently called our attention to the Homeland Security Cyber and Physical Infrastructure Protection Act of 2010. This bill, currently being considered in a House subcommittee, has the potential to threaten free software.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, now reports the police force has upgraded its 85,000 PCs to Ubuntu Desktop Edition, removing its reliance on the Microsoft operating system completely.

Yamagata Shimbun on Oct. 30th reported, "It was revealed on Oct. 29th that Yamagata prefectural government decided on a plan to adopt OpenOffice.org as next PC office software for fiscal 2011 due to the fact that support for MS Office XP will end in July, 2011".

The European Interoperability Framework is just one battle among many. Besides the topic of interoperability in the public sector, there’s the task of reforming standardisation systems so that they produce Open Standards, and educating policy makers about the importance of the issue.