On behalf of the Director-General, I
would like to acknowledge with thanks receipt of your communication, in
which you ask UNESCO to make public the details of the agreement signed
between UNESCO and Microsoft on 17 November 2004. I am pleased to
advise you that the ful text of the cooperation agreement, together
with the Director-General's speech, is available online at the
following web address :
http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=3D17589&URL_DO=3DDO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=3D201.html
With regard to the comments on FOSS,
please note that UNESCO remains very interested in the free and open
source development model and as reiterated by the Director-General,
will continue to support the ongoing and future activities in this
field. UNESCO would like to emphasize that the agreement with Microsoft
is not an "either/or" situation - it is not mutually
exclusive of other relationships.
Yours sincerely,
Abdul Waheed Khan
Assistant Director-General for
Communication and Information
Unfortunately, at this URL, the PDFs files of the Speech and Agreement are protected against printing
( a side-effect is that such protected texts cannot be harvested by search engines ).
We contacted in vain UNESCO to correct such an error that only be a clerical error, since
it would be unthinkable that UNESCO would try to prevent people from printing the agreements.
Fortunately, a way ( thanks JC !) was found to correct this clerical error, and
you can find here printable PDF files :