The UK Government Service Design Manual says to "Use open source software in preference to proprietary or closed source alternatives, in particular for operating systems, networking software, Web servers, databases and programming languages." The policy is in place to move forward.

The thesis of Marcus Manfred Dapp offers an explanation of why software patents are bad for Europe (and for any other continent/country for that matter)

The policy requirements for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution include the structure and contents of the Debian archive, several design issues of the operating system, as well as technical requirements that each package must satisfy to be included in the distribution.

The Icelandic government has released a policy on free and open source software. In short, the policy states that when buying software free and open source software should be considered on an equal footing with proprietary software, that software based on open standards shall be chosen, that lock-ins to specific vendors should be avoided (choosing free software is one means to achieve this), that bespoke or customized software shall be reusable (and free and open source software achieves this), and finally that students of Icelandic educational institutes shall have the opportunity to learn about and use free and open source software on a par with proprietary software.

This policy applies to all state institutions and organizations operated with public funds.

Ars Technica's Ken Fisher suggested in his article, WGA failure highlights major flaw in Microsoft's anti-piracy strategy, that Microsoft needs a new "anti-piracy" strategy. I not only agree that they need a new strategy, I'll even go so far as to help them craft it.

The United States Department of the Navy has adopted a new policy which requires that open source software must be considered in every software acquisition the Navy makes.