One of the most interesting people I met during my trip to South Africa earlier this week was Aslam Raffee. He keynoted the Sun event, sharing his view of the South African government’s stance on Open Source.

Aslam has two roles: He is the Chief Information Officer at the South African Department of Science and Technology. He is also the chairperson of the OSS Workgroup in the South African Government IT Officers Council.

From Aslam’s presentation, it is clear that South Africa is ahead of the game when it comes to finding out ways to mandate the use of Open Source in Government. I had the privilege to talk to Aslam over lunch, and he described the …

Today marks a big day in the history of the Malaysian Government - they’ve released their first fully open source software package, MyMeeting.

Poking around their Trac installation, they use PHP and MySQL 5 (5.0.51a from Ubuntu, even!). Of course their install documentation suggests a lot of Windows usage, but this is a step in the right direction.

Give it a twirl. Report bugs. How many more governments out there are writing and releasing open source software packages? Or is this a first?

First up, I want to say, I’m truly impressed with Brazil. One day I will visit this amazing place, and spread the good word of open source with projects that are close to my heart: MySQL, OpenOffice.org, Fedora, and in due time, a lot more. This is a live-blog, from a most interesting talk, at JavaOne 2008. As I wrote on Twitter, “Brazil, simply impresses me. Their use of open source in government, makes me think that the rest of the world has a lot to learn from them”.

Free and Open Source Software: Use and Production by the Brazilian Government
Rogerio Santana <rogerio.santanna@planejamento.gov.br> +55 61 313 1400, Logistics and Information Technology Secretariat
Planning, Budget and Management Ministry
Brazilian Government

Households with Internet access: 70% in the US4k household income range. …

Jason Hull of OpenSource Connections, a company in my town, posted an article on what Sun's acquisition of MySQL means for the US government. I thought Planet MySQL readers might appreciate a different angle on the issue than many of the Planet MySQL posts, which are often focused on business or community more than government. (I'm just passing the link along, not agreeing or disagreeing).

For the curious, the slides for the eLiberatica 2007 presentations are now up at http://eliberatica.ro/2007/ - the slides include presentations from eZ CEO Aleksander Farstad, Brian Behlendorf, FSF Europe President Georg Greve, Ubuntist Kurt von Finck and MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius (and yours truly, but the slides are a bit weak - check out my …