Governments continue to march toward open source. The Dutch government last year committed to use open standards, the French government has deployed Kubuntu desktops to over 1,000 members of parliament and staff, and a few days ago the United Kingdom government announced an Open Source action plan.

As a kind of pint-sized free software fidei defensor I feel obliged to counter some of the misconceptions that are put about on the subject around the Web. But I find myself in a slightly embarrassing situation here, in that I need to comment on some statements that have appeared in the virtual pages of Computerworld UK.

Is free and open source software (FOSS) a way to cut business costs? As concern about recession deepens, more and more companies are asking this question. The safest way to explore FOSS is one step at a time.

Oh sure. Microsoft loves open source. If your open source company is willing to admit Microsoft owns Linux, acknowledge the legitimacy of its proprietary standards, and put “whatever Microsoft wants.”

There's a job offering for testing games on the FSF's homepage. Read how this made me feel.

Over the past decade open source software has become popular with technology users in India. The benefits of open source - affordability, availability of source code and freedom of choice - have made open source a preferred platform for many innovative Indian organizations and individuals who want to harness the power of high quality software which can be freely adapted to their own requirements.

Microsoft's Web Sandbox Live Labs project is now available under an open source license. Microsoft chose the Apache 2.0 license for the project, but pointed out that the project will not become an Apache project, although the vendor has been a member of the Apache Software Foundation since July 2008.