Portugal’s growing open source activities
I was invited to speak at this year’s Open Technology National Meeting on 19th april in Lisbon. It was a great event where about 600 open source interested people met to discuss related items. There were some really interesting speakers (beside me, of course *g*), e.g. Dan Kohn from the Linux Foundation and Zeev Suraski, one of the heads behind the scripting language PHP. The event was very well organized by three portugese companies, who want to spread oss in Portugal.
In Portugal there are some very similar problems and requirements for open source software in public administrations, one of the biggest challenges is the availability of business aplications for open source based operating systems. And the solution is everywhere the same, get multi-platformed or web based solutions 
I talked to someone from the Ministry of Justicy, which is introducing a self customized distro: Linius. They had some problems in the past, but now they can just do it - and don’t talk to much about it.
After all, I think there is a great opportunity for Portugal’s public administrations and many companies, to try an alternative to Microsoft Vista this or the next year. We’ll see.