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| 24 Apr 08 | Geneva schools will completely switch to Open Source - About 70,000 students and their 7,000 teachers in the Geneva school district will gradually be moving to Open Source.
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| 24 Apr 08 | Una Laptop por Niño - Peru ranks 130th out of 131 countries in maths and science education, and 131st in the quality of its primary schools.
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| 24 Apr 08 | Russian Free Software Development Concept - A ‘concept’ is a kind of a detailed policy declaration, which may not be fully observed. Let's keep our fingers crossed!
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| 24 Apr 08 | KDE in Public Schools in Brazil - 53,000 Linux computer labs by end of 2009 will provide access to 52 million students.
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| 21 Apr 08 | Ubuntu 'reaping Linux dividend' - Mark Shuttleworth's announcement of the forthcoming Ubuntu release on Thursday is the 6th most-emailed story on today's BBC News!
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| 16 Apr 08 | Venezuela susses out "Intellectual Property" - "The consequences of treating ideas as if they are tangible property are the very destruction of science and education, and the elimination of individual rights and freedoms."
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| 13 Apr 08 | Ecuador Goes Free - A Presidential Decree that free software shall be used by institutions of the central administration.
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| 7 Apr 08 | Becta cautions against using OOXML - "Due to limitations in Microsoft's implementation of the Open Document Format (ODF) international standard, users should in the short term continue to save files in the more widely adopted .doc, .xls and .ppt formats."
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| 7 Apr 08 | FT Comment on ISO approval of MSXML - "The outcome, though messy, was probably the right one" but "Winning ugly will not do anymore".
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| 7 Apr 08 | 9000 PCs in Swiss schools going Linux only - The motto of Switzerland’s Department of Public Instruction is “Long Live Free Software.”
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| 4 Apr 08 | Birmingham, Al. approves purchase of 1,000 XO laptops - Birmingham, Alabama, that is.
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| 3 Apr 08 | Progress of Free Software in Russian Schools - Egor Grebnev describes steady progress, with a map showing (in red) the number of schools already using FLOSS in the Perm region.
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| 2 Apr 08 | The Learning Platform Stitch-up Uncovered - The Sirius Corporation blog explains why Capita and Serco are now lobbying against Becta's efforts to establish the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF).
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| 29 Mar 08 | John Pugh, MP, Rides to the Rescue - With a letter to the BSI and a Parliamentary Question regarding OOXML.
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| 17 Mar 08 | Icelandic Open Source Saga - Includes this: "5. Students in Icelandic educational institutions shall be given the opportunity of learning about and using free and open-source software on a par with proprietary..."
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| 15 Mar 08 | US Navy to focus only on open systems - Well, they played a big part in COBOL didn't they!
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| 15 Mar 08 | Update on Bristol City Council & StarOffice - Implementing StarOffice for 5,500 desktops in Bristol saved £1.1 million, but an uphill struggle to convince suppliers and partners to use ODF. (Kudos for making the effort!)
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| 14 Mar 08 | OLPC for Birmingham, Alabama schools - US City Council approves spending $3.5 million on 15,000 OLPC computers for school system. (Regrettably *not* Birmingham, UK).
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| 14 Mar 08 | EU Commission to increase use of Open Source - "Open Source software plays an important role in e-Government projects and interoperability..."
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| 11 Mar 08 | Open University studies open access to research - Richard Poynder describes in Computer Weekly how the OU is moving towards an Open Access policy, making its research materials freely available.
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| 10 Mar 08 | OLPC - Can it really work? - Encouraging story from Peru
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| 28 Feb 08 | GNOME Foundation Announces Program to Sponsor Accessibility Projects - this is a contest that aims to attract contributors to improve Linux accessibility with payments for their work.
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| 28 Feb 08 | Microsoft hit by record EU fine - Old news now, but the EU Commission has ordered Microsoft to pay another substantial fine for abusing its dominant market position. Groklaw has an interview with the Competition Commissioner. EU has now fined Microsoft a total of almost 1.68 billion euros.
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| 26 Feb 08 | Google supports ODF - "... Google believes OOXML would be an insufficient and unnecessary standard, designed purely around the needs of Microsoft Office ...".
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| 17 Feb 08 | The £99 UK laptop - UK supplier Elonex will be launching a laptop for £99 at this year´s Education Show
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| 10 Feb 08 | World Bank funds Sri Lankan OLPC project - Two million primary school children to be provided with laptops. After so many countries failed to put pen to paper, this might tip the balance.
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| 9 Feb 08 | EU Initiates Investigation Against Microsoft OOXML Push - Further analysis and links to OOXML history can be found on Groklaw
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| 6 Feb 08 | UN University joins OpenCourseware Consortium - Advancing knowledge for human security, peace and development - and freely available.
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| 6 Feb 08 | Now there's a thought... - Ashlee Vance of El Reg lifts the lid on IBM's aspirations for web-scale computing.
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| 4 Feb 08 | Open Source Software in Serbian - The Serbian Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Society has organized the localization of several popular open source packages.
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| 30 Jan 08 | French police plan Windows-free jails, offices - No, not the kind of windows you might want to see through. Bravo, Clouseau!
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| 29 Jan 08 | Open Educational Resources (OER) Blogregator - Those interested in the development of open educational resources will benefit from this "Blogregator", which aggregates from a wide range of OER blogs. Lots of good stuff.
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| 18 Jan 08 | Teachers in Russia get Open Source systems - After testing in three pilot regions over 2008 and making adjustments, Linux is planned to be installed in more than 61 thousand Russian schools. Wha...? Yes: 61,000 schools!
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| 16 Jan 08 | Sun buys MySQL - More power to their elbow, while IBM gathers its strength.
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| 16 Jan 08 | Free Knowledge Institute promotes sharing of knowledge - The links alongside this Press Release read like a dream come true... in Holland. How long before our own gub'mint shows so much sense?
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| 16 Jan 08 | Two New Investigations of Microsoft by the EU Commission - Groklaw details how the complaint by Opera Software is being followed up, along with another by ECIS, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems which has implications for Microsoft's OOXML challenge to the OpenDocument Format.
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| 11 Jan 08 | Becta excludes Vista, Office - again Microsoft’s hopes of getting Vista into British classrooms have been held back at least another year after Becta issued a scathing report on the operating system and Office 2007
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| 17 Jun 07 | Ubuntu won't be doing a patent protection deal with Microsoft - Following Novell, Xandros and Linspire, Mark Shuttleworth responds to those who wonder whether Ubuntu might be next in line.
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| 17 Jun 07 | Microsoft funds questionable study attacking open source in education - ... unable to gain the participation of any UK OSS schools ...
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| 13 Jun 07 | Venezuela Launches Sale of "Bolivarian" Computers - FLOSS plus Chinese hardware cuts costs by 40%, for use in Venezuelan government, education and business.
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| 12 Jun 07 | The strategic case for adopting SIF within the UK - SIFBits has obtained a copy of the report prepared for Becta by Price Waterhouse Cooper, recommending adoption of SIF in UK. No suggestion that government money be spent on FLOSS, of course.
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| 10 Jun 07 | BBC - Getting the most from open source - BBC Click explains benefits of the Open Source desktop.
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| 6 Jun 07 | Kamloops school district gets an education in free software - It's always good to read success stories. Kamloops is in Canada.
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| 14 May 07 | Japanese government looks to go open source - 14th May has been quite a day, and it's still only 6pm...
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| 14 May 07 | Norwegian Standards Council Recommends Mandatory use of ODF and PDF - Note, mandatory use.
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| 14 May 07 | Microsoft takes on the free world - This article in Fortune is causing ripples, not least through acknowledgement of the global impact of FLOSS. See also Groklaw's take.
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| 9 May 07 | Google preparing to police the web - Nicholas Carr explains why webmasters need to keep an eye on their Google page link.
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| 9 May 07 | Java becomes Open Source - Yesterday saw the signing of the OpenJDK Charter, and launch of the OpenJDK community.
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| 4 May 07 | Netvoyager launches sub-£100 thin client - Neterm LX1000 consumes less than 10 Watts
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| 4 May 07 | OLPC machine won’t run Windows after all - Not even the $3 XP Starter Edition
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| 19 Apr 07 | Ubuntu Linux 7.04 Feisty Fawn launched - and it's even closer to 'it just works'.
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| 24 Mar 07 | Intel Classmate PC ships to selected test markets - Low budget laptop compatible with Linux and Windows in $350-$400 price range
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| 24 Mar 07 | Stockport schools take open-source route - FLOSS gives 30,000 pupils a range of services including calendar and content-management functions.
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| 8 Mar 07 | Tories want open source Whitehall - George Osborne, Shadow Chancellor, calls for greater use of FLOSS by government. Another indicator of critical mass.
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| 8 Mar 07 | HP Sees Huge Linux Desktop Deals - "We are involved in a number of massive deals for Linux desktops, and those are the kinds of things that are indicators of critical mass".
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| 6 Mar 07 | Schools across Japan may switch to Linux - 400,000 computers running Windows 98 or Me, what to do?
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| 6 Mar 07 | How the Open Source Movement Has Changed Education: 10 Success Stories - Hard to remember some of these were just dreams, only a few short years ago.
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| 4 Mar 07 | Utah State OpenCourseWare - The list of universtities and consortia offering open access to courseware keeps growing. OpenCourseWare finder has a comprehensive index of US initiatives.
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| 28 Feb 07 | And California Makes Four - California legislator drafts bill mandating open standards, aligns with Massachusetts, Texas and Minnesota.
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| 23 Feb 07 | South Africa government switch to open source - SA government approves a policy and strategy for the implementation of free and open source software (FOSS) in government.
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| 19 Feb 07 | Cuba Embraces Open-Source Software - Bill Gates described copyright reformers as "some new modern-day sort of communists", which is a badge of honor from the Cuban perspective.
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| 17 Feb 07 | Russian Court Tosses Out Microsoft Piracy Case - This doesn't mean UK schools can install Windows bought from a car boot sale.
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| 9 Feb 07 | UK Government stands against Open Access - A European directive called INSPIRE seeks to resolve issues that prevent national geographical databases from lining up. The UK sells publicly owned geographic data, and is of course against INSPIRE. The Free Our Data suggests what we can do about it.
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| 9 Feb 07 | Shot in the foot-sky - Russian schools consider switch to Linux after Microsoft threatens teacher over pirated copies
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| 8 Feb 07 | Sun Announces OpenDocument Format (ODF) Plug-in for Microsoft Office - Free download initially puts seamless, intuitive support for ODF into MS Word, with support for conversion of spreadsheet and presentation documents expected in April.
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| 8 Feb 07 | Canonical and Linspire Announce Technology Partnership - Here is Linspire's press release and Kevin Carmony's more detailed FAQ. According to Slashdot Ubuntu users will get access to proprietary software (DVD players, media codecs) via Linspire's newly opened Click 'N Run.
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| 6 Feb 07 | The return of Colossus - Replica of the code-breaker at Bletchley nears completion.
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| 1 Feb 07 | Michael Geist casts an eye over the fine print in Windows Vista BBC News Technology reports "an unprecedented loss of consumer control over their own PCs...(with) numerous limitations in the new software seemingly installed at the direct request of Hollywood."
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| 17 Jan 07 | Open source gets European boost - "...in "almost all" cases long-term costs could be reduced by switching from proprietary software produced by firms such as Microsoft."
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| 17 Jan 07 | Open Source Consortium sends Becta back to school - Assessment is "Could do much better".
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| 16 Jan 07 | SIFA UK includes Becta - and Becta is working on SIF - There's to be a meeting in March for parties interested in SIF.
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| 14 Jan 07 | "eWEEK Labs believes that either Ubuntu 6.10 or OpenSUSE 10.2 is worthy of replacing Windows XP as a desktop operating system"
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| 12 Jan 07 | EU Commission Study Finds You'll Save Money Switching to FOSS - Groklaw nicely summarises this EU Commission report (PDF)
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| 12 Jan 07 | UK students offered cash for open source software - Kudos to UKFSN who have reliably hosted Schoolforge-Uk since our inception.
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| 11 Jan 07 | Open source argument - John Pugh MP writes in The Guardian about the Early Day Motion
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| 11 Jan 07 | Microsoft wins extension to UK schools contract - But what's this ? UK schools at risk of Microsoft lock-in, says government report and Now Becta tells schools to shun Vista. The same Becta report also says "Becta is therefore calling on the ICT industry to ensure that computers for the education marketplace are delivered with a choice of Office productivity suites available, which ideally should include an open-source offering."
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| 5 Jan 07 | DOPA dies a slow death - Steve O'Hear reports on how the US Deleting Online Preditors act will no longer undo e-learning 2.0 efforts
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| 5 Jan 07 | MIT Free Course Materials on Copyright Law - Four 2-hour video lectures with reading list, etc. covering software copyright including GPL. It's US Law of course, but worth keeping an eye on MIT OpenCourseWare, and indeed our own Open University OpenLearn
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| 4 Jan 07 | TinyZIS 0.2 Released! - Tom Hoffman has announced the next update to TinyZIS, the open source glue for connecting different school management information systems.
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| 4 Jan 07 | Rwanda joins the One Laptop Per Child initiative - That's eight countries now: Rwanda, Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Thailand and Uruguay. There's been some interesting discussion of the OLPC project on the Schoolforge mailing list.
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| 2 Jan 07 | UCLA chooses Moodle for Common Collaboration and Learning Environment - UCLA is the University of California, Los Angeles, and they've chosen Moodle as the single open source platform for their common collaboration and learning environment.
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| 15 Dec 06 | Software Freedom Law Centre argues case in favour of Microsoft - Wha..? The US Supreme Court is hearing an appeal by Microsoft, supported by a brief from SFLC. If they lose, the absurdity of US Patent law is unleashed on the rest of the world. And if they win... Groklaw explains further.
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| 1 Dec 06 | Software Freedom Law Centre asks USPTO to revoke Blackboard patent - Sighs of relief all round. See Groklaw for why this is important, especially for Moodle.
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| 28 Nov 06 | ODF Alliance Hails Brazil, India, Italy and Poland for Recognising OpenDocument Format (PDF) - Phew! Four in one day!
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| 27 Nov 06 | French National Assembly switches to Linux - Not only that but French gov't report recommends standardizing on ODF With Welsh and Scots also deciding for FLOSS, how long can Albion hold out?
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| 22 Nov 06 | Free software’s Faustian moment - This OpenDemocracy article clarifies issues raised by the recent Microsoft/Novell agreement. Note ZDNet's response: Microsoft and Novell: Fox marries chicken, both move into henhouse. See also Bruce Perens' letter to Novell
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| 21 Nov 06 | The Office 2007 'kill switch' - Now children, read the nice man's End User Licence Agreement very carefully...
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| 21 Nov 06 | Welsh Culture Minister launches bi-lingual OpenOffice.org - Agored is based on OpenOffice.org and developed at the University of Wales, (There's a Scottish project for Gaelic, too).
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| 17 Nov 06 | Video of how Squeak is used in Extremadura classes - The attractive Squeak system is also being used as part of the OLPC Sugar system software.
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| 15 Nov 06 | The OLPC arrives - Pictures of the first OLPC to arrive in Cambridge.
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| 14 Nov 06 | Sun opens Java - Sun Microsystems opens key Java implementations under GPL. Check out What they're saying and from Simon Phipps Sun's Open Source Evangelist.
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| 7 Nov 06 | Munich's migration to LiMux forges ahead - Detailed look at how the project is moving steadily towards completion in 2009.
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| 2 Nov 06 | Ingots 1 step closer to being part of National Qualifications Framework - Ian Lynch's The Learning Machine is now a QCA awarding body. The Ingots ICT certificates feature transferable skills education and include a community service element.
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| 28 Oct 06 | Open University launches OpenLearn - Free and open educational resources for learners and educators around the world. The project includes the experimental LabSpace where on-line course materials may be edited and remixed to individual requirements.
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| 24 Oct 06 | Firefox browser for web 2.0 age - BBC News reports on the upcoming release of Firefox 2.0.
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| 12 Oct 06 | Are you thinking what I'm thinking? - A TimesOnline introduction to the virtues of FLOSS. Useful reference for those still in doubt or ignorance.
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| 12 Oct 06 | EC boosts open source - The Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) will encourage European administrations to use each other's software and develop common projects.
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| 8 Oct 06 | Firefox Set Free in IceWeasel - If you ever noticed that FireFox has a different logo in in Debian and Ubuntu, here's the reason.
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| 5 Oct 06 | French gov't recommended to standardise on ODF - Report says that all government documents should be made available in OpenDocument Format
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