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,

However, there is a slight inconvenience : these documents from the UNESCO site cannot be printed !. The PDF files are protected. This means also that those files cannot be harvested by search engines. Despite our mails concerning what we believe to be a clerical error, the PDF files are still protected. Fortunately, a way ( thanks JC !) was found to correct this clerical error, and you could get printable PDF files, however, these files were images. In August 2005, the PDF text file of the agreement was sent to us, and the HTML and PDF text versions are now available below :

• Matsuura speech
• Agreement

Old scanned files with the help of BPEM :

• Matsuura speech
• Agreement
• Appendix.

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