Auto maker PSA Peugeot Citroën last month said it will start using Linux on 20,000 of its workers' PCs. Novell Inc., which sells a version of Linux and is supplying it to Peugeot, says it has recently signed up several large U.S. financial institutions that are installing Linux on some employee PCs.

This week the NSW state government went to market for its desktop, notebook and small server needs for at least the next three years, designating the ability to purchase Linux-based systems as "highly desirable".

"As soon as support ends for XP, we will look at moving to Linux [desktops]," Babhoota said, adding the back-end switch to open source had cost 17 percent of what a proprietary upgrade had been costed at, with the agency doubling the amount of business it processed in the same 12-month period.

UK government departments moved a step closer to using open-source operating systems such as Linux after a study found that they are "viable" products.

The sixth Australian Open Source Symposium (AOSS 6) will be held in Perth on Thursday October 28th, 2004.

Linux Australia in collaboration with the Open Source Industry Association (OSIA) and the Baker & McKenzie Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre at UNSW is proud to present the first Open Source Forum, which will deal with the increasingly important, but often misunderstood, issue of software patents.

OASIS (the world's leading ebusiness open standards consortium) is organising the following conference:

Postal officials hired SAP's professional services group to oversee the transition to a new HR system. The postal agency will run the new software on mainframe Z990 processors and Linux SUSE, both from IBM Corp.

TAIWANESE GOVERNMENT ORGANISATIONS, as well as its industrial and academic organisations, have recently started a plan, which will help the island's industries using Linux software to turn out up to an NT$110 billion revenue in three years.

"Sun has addressed our key total cost of ownership (TCO) issue through innovative design and pricing which will reduce TCO by up to 20 percent, leading to potential savings of up to $1.5M USD ($2M AUS) per year. This means we'll be able to dedicate our time and budget to serving our customers rather than worrying about desktop costs and support issues."

THE NSW Government is on the verge of putting its government-wide Linux plans into action, preparing to go to tender for a raft of enterprise Linux products to be used across state agencies in a project worth up to $50 million.

The Australian Democrats believe participation in the online global community should not be restricted or controlled by multinational software companies, and that the FTA carries a serious threat to this independence. The Democrats are therefore launching a public awareness campaign to ensure Government legislation does not lock Australians into such restrictions.

Businesses and governments in Western Europe are buying more services around open-source software, and spending will more than double in the next four years as open source becomes mainstream, according to a new study from IDC.

The crackers currently have the whip hand over Windows, and Microsoft's assertion that Internet Explorer is now part of the operating system shows its flawed reasoning.

The French Ministry of Equipment's migration to Linux project is replacing 1,500 office and infrastructure Microsoft Windows NT servers with Mandrakelinux Corporate servers.

Oracle continued its bullish optimism for its Linux strategy at its OpenWorld customer event in Melbourne today, revealing that 90 per cent of new Australasian customers had deployed its database on the operating system over the last 12 months.

The move is a landmark for open source software, according to Daniel Mayo, lead analyst for financial services at Datamonitor.

THE NSW Government has made official its push into open source, launching a $1.5 million deployment of what may be the state's largest-ever rollout of open source software on the desktop.

Civil service minister Renaud Dutreil told Reuters France wanted to use "open-source" software providers to resupply some of its almost one million state computers, under a government cost-cutting drive designed to trim a bulging public deficit.

This adoption of open source means that Brazil is the biggest public sector user of Linux in South America. Government targets are committed to exporting around $2 billion worth in software every year; to replacing Windows with Linux in 300,000 federal computers; to transferring $1 billion from the Telecommunications Fund to the free software-based Digital Communications System and to network the country's 200,000 public schools using open source.