The Russian Post has started testing the free software to be used in ordinary post offices. Cutting costs for software is one of the main reasons to migrate to Linux. No details are reported. However, according to some sources, the Russian Post might prefer Red Hat.

Why is this part titled "The Black Hand"? Well, because I started this series using a nations metaphor. Citizens of Windows who expatriate and immigrate to Linux will be "foreigners" in Linux.

There are lots of different ways you can build software and the typical ways in which FOSS development and proprietary development are done are quite dramatically different. In this article, I’m going to talk about what problems the typical FOSS method can face when open source products are integrated within enterprise environments.

In an interesting twist (interesting for Microsoft and their OOXML apologists), about a month ago, MAMPU, the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, decided that they were going to go OpenOffice.org and go ODF, and dump Microsoft Office by year-end 2008. This made its round around news sites, and everyone was naturally talking about it.

The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) on Friday approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard. The adoption of ODF by South Africa opens the way for the businesses and government to adopt ODF more widely in their processes. ODF is already an international standard, approved by the International Standards Organisation, or ISO.

Argentina's congress is actively considering a bill that would require all government offices to use open-source software. It's partly a cost-saving move, and partly a way to bring the Argentine government into compliance with its software licensing

The schools of the Canton of Geneva are going to switch 9000 computers from Windows to GNU/Linux in September according to this article which is in German. Here is the google translation: http://google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pro-linux.de%2Fnews%2F200...

Efforts to increase the adoption of open-source software are being derailed by the efforts of a "loud minority" within the community who have made personal attacks on individuals who have expressed doubts about the software, according to one of the open-source movement's main advocates.