In the past few months we have brought to you stories about American companies and the US Government implementing Open Source solutions. The article highlights noteworthy international Open Source projects.

IDABC: UK: Open Source reduces cost of London's public transport card system

"Switching to Open Source software reduced by 80 percent the costs for software licensing and hosting of London's Oyster card system which handles payments on the city's buses and underground."
"The IT news site Zdnet last week reported on the move to Open Source by Transport for London (TFL), following a presentation by Michael Robinson, a senior consultant with Deloitte, who discussed the migration at the Open Source Forum event in London."
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BG: Government's increasing use of Open Source inevitable

"The Bulgarian government will turn more and more to Open Source software, predicts Krasimir Panayotov, coordinator of the GNU/Linux User Group in the city of Rousse, the country's fifth-largest city."

"The Open Source advocacy group are confident that Bulgarian public administrations migrating to this type of software find it reduces the cost of IT and at the same time improves the security of their systems. To help get this message across, the user group is organizing software demonstrations next month tailored especially for representatives of public administrations."
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IDABC: FR: Education Ministry encourages Open Source use

"The department at the French Ministry of Education that is handling purchasing of software and software licenses is increasing its Open Source offerings to some 1.5 million teachers and education workers in 250 institutes France."

"This is how Dominique Verez, spokesperson for the 'Software Group for Higher Education and Research', explains a recent agreement it signed with Mandriva, a French company developing a GNU/Linux distribution by the same name. The two agreed last month on a 60 percent discount for the purchase of the commercial version of the free software for all teachers and staff at France's schools and universities. "Our goals are to promote alternative solutions, to offer more choice and to make our users less dependent on software vendors."
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IDABC: UK Companies to support schools using Open Source

"At least three British companies specializing in Open Source software have submitted tenders for a 270,000 GBP (340,000 euro) project to support a sustainable and significant community of schools using and developing Open Source."

"The project, titled 'Schools Open Source Project' was launched earlier this month by the British educational IT agency Becta. "We wish to ensure that schools are aware of and can access the wide variety of Open Source software in the marketplace." To achieve this, Becta says, it must organize support in adoption, deployment, use and ongoing development. The IT organization wants this project to result in a sustainable and significant community of schools that use and develop open source products."
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CIO: Open Source is Entering the Enterprise Mainstream, Survey Shows

"Open-source solutions used to be adopted quietly by company boffins who snuck in an Apache Web server or an open-source development tool suite under the philosophy "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission" (not to mention "It's easier to do it with open-source tools than to get an IT budget")."
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IDABC: Administrative Court publishes automatic document conversion tool

"The Dutch Council of State is willing to Open Source its application that can centrally convert documents between open formats and proprietary formats, said Marcel Pennock, the tool's developer, Wednesday at a conference on Open Document Format (ODF) in Utrecht."
"The administrative courthouse's in the Hague is currently testing his conversion software. "As far as I am concerned, the software will be released as Open Source."
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InternetNews: Open Source Making the Grade in Higher Education

"Open source and higher education have a long and storied history. After all, BSD Unix originally came from the University of California at Berkeley, and Linux itself was created while Linus Torvalds was a student at the University of Helsinki."
"Yet new research from Gartner indicates that open source is taking hold in universities in more areas than ever before, a fact supported by a string of wins from commercial open source vendor GroundWork."
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IDABC: Proof of progress on Open Source Geographic Information Systems

"A group of European scientists will be showcasing their evaluation of Open Source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) at a conference organized in Warsaw, Poland, in early June."
"The conference is meant for, among others, public administrators interested in Open Source GIS applications and its use for security and environment monitoring."
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CNet: The most important open-source projects...to Google

"Chris Dibona, head of Google's open source program office, sat down to talk with CNET's Stephen Shankland. In the course of that interview, Chris provided great insight into how Google views open source and contributes back to the various communities from which it derives benefit."
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IDABC: Geneva schools 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."
"The decision to move to Open Source was taken by the Geneva Public School District (Département de l’Instruction Publique Genevois (DIP) in March 2006, says Manuel Grandjean, project leader for the Geneva district's Open Source migration. "The district wants Open Source software to become the default." Complete Complete Story