"The protection of FLOSS is from now on a firm component in the UN declaration on the information society. From the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva....some countries wanted to omit free software completely from the WSIS process, in particular to protect their own monopolists from competition. In the current draft of the declaration, all variants of software are now equally mentioned."

From an article in El Mundo (Madrid, Spain) by Natalia Guilarte: "...in Brazil, more of a third of the population survives with less than a dollar per day, yet it's a country which spends 3.2 billion dollars [annually] in the computer industry, of which one third is destined to pay software licenses..."

This article is a significant exposure of Linux and FLOSS to the general public in Spain.

On September 17 Romanian IT&C minister Dan Nica and Steve Balmer signed a strategic partnership between the Romanian government and Microsoft. During the next 3 years, the Romanian government will continue to implement proprietary solutions from Microsoft in key areas of administration. But, The Linux Hardware & Software Solutions Expo in Romania will be held next month at The World Trade Center in Bucharest, which should draw a lot of attention from young Romanian entrepreneurs.

Submitted by St

"The cities are among the largest in the state of Rheinland Pfalz: Alzey, Kaiserslautern, Koblenz, Landau, Mainz, Neustadt, Speyer, Trier and Worms."

While most people might be hard-pressed to locate Bulgaria on a map of the world, it's a place worth watching; I would personally love to go there to see what's going on! Here is correspondence between Yovko Lambrev, of the Initiative Committee for OpenFest (World Day of Free Software) and Board Member of the Free Software Association in Bulgaria, and Georgi Parvanov, President of Bulgaria. I have also put up some other links in case you don't know about the other interesting things that have happened there during the past few years.

Japan announces major funding for 'alternative' operating systems in embedded applications. Microsoft replies that governments should not be allowed to help in such competitions.

The court decided that SCO's statements will damage business. The general idea in Germany is that SCO's claims have no basis.

"In order to guarantee national security, it is indispensable to count on systems which have no elements that would allow the remote control or the possible undesired transmission of information to a third party. Therefore, systems are required whose source code is freely accessible to the public, in order that it can be examined by their own State, the citizens and any number of independent experts in the world. Many countries have [already] formally recognized the exclusive use of free software in the state sector. "

Probably the most significant announcement is that the House of Representatives will not renew licenses for MS Office software, and will study OSS alternatives for that application suite as well as its email system. Also some quotes from Richard Stallman.