The South Asian hub of the world-wide NGO-in-a-box initiative was launched at the start of this year by Mahiti.org, Bangalore with the support of Hivos, Netherlands. NGO-in-a-box is an initiative of the Tactical Technology Collective, Netherlands with the aim of providing effective Free and Open Source Software applications tailored to specific needs of the non-profit sector.
In India, Kerala State Government has released the State draft ICT policy to promote the free software and offering special incentives to companies developing Free and Open Source Software.
Tamil Nadu (TN), the state of India is adopting open source software to solve security and high costs of Windows systems. The State Government has announced that the sate adopting SUSE Linux.
[This article was published in the January 2007 issue of the eGov Magazine (http://www.egovonline.net) ]
SMEs in the IT industry learn about FOSS
Sun Microsystems, computer giant will offer programming language Java for the open source community.
The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), Philippines, is now training key employees to become open source experts as part of a department-wide shift to using open source software.
South Africa’s department of science and technology (DST) is taking bold steps towards switching to free and open source software (Foss) and is starting to move its first desktop users over to Linux.
On the occasion of Software Freedom Day 2006, the Free Software and Open Source Foundation (FOSSFA) called on heads of state, policy makers and all Africans to support free and open source software (FOSS).
The Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit is ready to move into the second phase of its open source initiative, which is to expand use of the technology to more government agencies.
A non-governmental organisation is working to involve civil society organisations in the formulation of government Information and Communications Technology (ICT) policies.
