This week on WorldWatch, the most popular story was a paper covering a large sucessful migration to Open Office in France. [1] But the most significant news is that eight large consumer electronics companies have announced the formation of a group, CE Linux Forum, [2] which will adapt and optimize embedded Linux for their products.

We also posted a paper from Oxford [3] which makes a good argument that Open Source projects are less prone to bugs. The news that the EU was delaying its vote on software patents [4] was welcome; we also saw three articles in the French press about the whole issue of software patents. [5]

The Free Software Consortium, in recognition of Linux's increasingly important role in the public sector, announced Gonux, a suite of applications currently in use in many Latin American countries. [6] We also saw IBM continuing to encourage Linux use in the Middle East; [7] this article includes a link where you can obtain Arabic language support for Linux.

Willy Smith is Editor in Chief of WorldWatch [8] and lives in Costa Rica.