“In September 2003 the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) announced that they would be coordinating, with the support of the Office of the e-Envoy, “Proof of Concept” trials of Open Source Software (OSS) in a range of public bodies in conjunction with IBM. In December 2003 the OGC announced that the scope would be extended to include the involvement of Sun Microsystems in trials coordinated by OGC. This report by OGC summarizes the key findings from those activities and, to supplement the reports from the trials, also takes into account information obtained from other public sector activity in OSS planning and deployment in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.”

“In the first quarter of 2005 Open Source Law (http://www.opensourcelaw.biz) conducted a review of use of open source software within Government in Australia and around the world, excluding South America, Africa and China. The review was based largely on publicly accessible documents supplemented in some instances by telephone interviews. The results of the review were presented at the Open Computing in Government Conference hosted by the Australian Unix Users Group in Canberra on 18 April 2005.”

Peruvian Congressman refutes Microsoft's "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt" (F.U.D.) concerning free and open source software (Sept. 2005).

The Peruvian government recently introduced a bill (English trans.) mandating the use of open source software by the state. The bill admirably proclaims:

"The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law, such as:

*Free access to public information by the citizen.
*Permanence of public data.
*Security of the State and citizens.

Microsoft General Manager Señor JUAN ALBERTO GONZÁLEZ responded by writing this letter to Peruvian Congressmen Edgar Villanueva Nuñez, containing many of the fallacious arguments that Microsoft has used against open source software in the past.

Congressman DR. EDGAR DAVID VILLANUEVA NUÑEZ replied with an insightful letter that cuts through the empty Microsoft arguments to expose the fallacies of its F.U.D. tactics. Here is his letter in its entirety (translated from Spanish): (Original in spanish)

• Open source software (OSS) is changing the face of the software industry;

• OSS presents significant opportunities for governments;

• We are recommending that the GoC adopt a balanced approach to open source software; and

• There is a significant amount of work to do (e.g..Procurement policies, guidelines, education,..).

"The overall goal of this report is to raise the level of understanding of why and how the open source paradigm and its products, services and communities are important to Canada, both domestically and internationally. The report addresses this goal by:"

· Surveying the Canadian software landscape to understand what the current level of Open Source Software (OSS) adoption and development activity is..
· Gathering and analyzing Canadian public and private sector opinions vis-à-vis the long term prospects of OSS and relevant strategic issues.
· Presenting an environmental scan of the current state of OSS and relevant worldwide trends.
· Developing a high level market analysis of opportunities, barriers and conditions for adoption.
· Providing a synthesis of the findings and analyzing the implications and opportunities of OSS to the public and private sector"

"This report documents the results of a short email-mediated study by The MITRE Corporation on the use of free and open-source software (FOSS) in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). FOSS is distinctive because it gives users the right to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve it as they see fit, without having to ask permission from or make fiscal payments to any external group or person. The autonomy properties of FOSS make it useful for DoD applications such as rapid responses to cyberattacks, for which slow, low-security external update processes are neither practical nor advisable, and for applications where rapid, open, and community-wide sharing of software components is desirable. On the other hand, the same autonomy properties complicate the interactions of FOSS with non-FOSS software, leading to concerns—some valid and some not—about how and where FOSS should be used in complex DoD systems."

"The OSS fact sheet is the first part of the Study into the use of Open Source Software in the public sector ordered by the DG enterprise into the IDA program. The fact sheet is not exhaustive. It gives an overview of the current situation (springs 2001) and an assessment of availability and potential use of OSS based solutions, by software category, and a selection of about 100 typical OSS solutions (out of several thousands of OSS “projects”)."

"With the exception of education, Open Source Software (OSS) is still not extensively used in most of the European Member States’ public administrations: OSS advocates opened the way, and in some leading countries they are now relayed (or recuperated) by political responsible ministries, but concrete large scale OSS projects are still rare. After examining the market we have to conclude that on general-purpose servers as well as on office desktop, Open Source software will present tomorrow the most realistic, and sometimes the only real technical and economical alternative to Microsoft products. This is due to a growing support of many Information Technology and Service giants (following the example of IBM), as distributors and specialized “Linux SMEs”.