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The Gendarmerie, France's largest administrative body, intends to change in the next years the operating system of 70 000 workstations presently running on Windows XP to Ubuntu.

This is a movement that continues the French Government's efforts to promote migration to open source for some years now. The Gendarmerie had already adopted OpenOffice.org and Firefox, the French National Assembly has also recently switched 1100 computers to Linux and the Ministry of Agriculture has started the migration from Windows at the end of 2006.

The French Government's plans to migrate to open source was based on a study by technology services company Atos Origin, that: "showed that open-source

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The European Commission has recently extended its formal probes launched on 14 January 2008 against Microsoft in two cases where it has been alleged that the multinational firm had abused its dominant market position.

The first case was brought by a complaint from web browser Opera, which complained that the tying of Microsoft's Internet Explorer to its Windows operating system was anti-competitive.

The second case under investigation was the complaint filed by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems for the Microsoft's refusal to disclose interoperability information on some Microsoft server products, Office and NET Framework. In relation to this case the Commission also intends to

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FLOSSMETRICS/OpenTTT guide presents a set of guidelines and suggestions for the adoption of open source software within SMEs, using a ladder model that will guide companies from the initial selection and adoption of FLOSS within the IT infrastructure up to the creation of suitable business models based on open source software.
http://guide.conecta.it/

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The Pirate Bay, the famous torrent Swedish website, may affect BitTorrent programme by developing a new software standard for Internet downloads.

According to Peter Sunde, Pirate Bay's co-founder, the site might have a new, more open alternative of file-sharing software at the beginning of next year. In his opinion, BitTorrent might develop in the future some features discouraging the trade of some "pirated materials" which might affect very many users of the site. There are also fears that BitTorrent may gain total control over P2P traffic which led to the creation of a working group that will build an open protocol that could be further developed by anyone without being controlled by anybody. The working group has also in view the

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The first international workshop of Open Document Format (ODF) public sector users took place in Berlin on 29-30 October 2007, hosted by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The position of the German Foreign Office, as host of the event, was made very clear. The Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in his opening word, called ODF "a completely open and ISO-standardized format", considering it an "excellent basis" for "a free exchange of knowledge and information in a time of globalization". The Foreign Office has already linked its foreign missions in a network using open-source programs and shifted to OpenOffice and Linux operation systems on their laptops and has

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Today's digital networks offer extraordinary new opportunities for sharing and building upon our global, public pool of knowledge. Shedding light on the scientific, educational, economical, ethical and political importance of the digital public domain has, therefore, become crucial for the future of our knowledge-based societies.

This is the rationale behind a freshly launched project: COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network on the Public Domain in the Digital Age.

Funded by the European Commission under the eContent+ programme and coordinated by the Politecnico di Torino's NEXA Research Center for Internet and Society, the three-year long project held its kick-off meeting in Turin, Italy, on 28 September 2007.

Microsoft supported format Office Open XML (OOXML) did not received a positive vote in the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) ballot that ended on 2 September 2007, failing to achieve the number of votes necessary for its approval as a standard.

Open Office XML is a XML-based file format specification for electronic documents, developed by Microsoft and sent to Ecma International, an international, private standards organization, to be published as the Ecma 376 standard in December 2006. Ecma International submit it to ISO for adoption as an International Standard, through the "fast-track procedure".

Microsoft OOXML claims there is a strong international support for its adoption as an International standard: " The Ecma Office Open XML file formats are being rapidly adopted across multiple platforms and products

The Open Invention Network (OIN), the Open source patent-swap body, has received Google as a new member. This means that Google has implicitly agreed not to file any patent infringement action against the Linux community.

An OIN member has full access to a collection of more than 100 patents and patent applications which is attractive "for companies that want to repackage, embed and use Linux to host specialized services or create complementary products. Additionally, it helps ensure the continuation of innovation that has benefited software vendors, customers, emerging markets and investors" as OIN site expresses. A member, however, has to agree to take no legal actions against Linux developers, in an attempt to support open source developers to avoid patent infringement suits. All members must