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AFUL, the french Free Software user group, held a half day conference touting the benefits of free software to a government panel in the French Prime-Minister's building. The government panel (MTIC) is responsible for introducing new technologies to different ministries. A french customs official described the easy introduction to their intranet of a Linux web server which has shown itself to be very reliable. Another presentation discussed the commercial need to force customers into an update cycle. It compared Windows 3.11's reliability to that of women's stockings which are designed to break quickly. The french city of Lille's computer department also enjoyed Linux' ease of use, scalability and efficiency on older hardware. Finally, Bernard Lang's presentation did not pull its punches. He discussed the dangers for the French economy of relying on foreign black-box software: proprietary software reduces local employment, tends to concentrate power monopolistically, while free software increases local employment (since most software jobs are in the service industry), guarantees originality, competition, conformity to open standards, and a free choice of service provider. The website referred to is the French Prime Minister's Governmental website, so we can be hopeful things will start happening. Links courtesy of Nouvelles Neuves Linux, and Translation services available from Babelfish.

Nouvelles Neuves Linux quotes Merill Lynch as stating: "When all the smoke around the year 2000 has finally cleared away, the survey suggests there will be a shift away from the Windows-based client server environment. Within a 3-year time scale, the majority of users are expected to have moved to a network computing platform, with Java applications taking a more dominant role. The survey also notes that Linux is becoming an important industry trend. What is missing is an industry leader pushing open software towards the mainstream, but Merrill Lynch expects that by mid-year IBM Corp may slip into this role, offering Linux service and support. This slide towards open source has been backed up by Sun Microsystems making Java in part open source. According to the survey, the outcome of these changes could, in time, have as drastic an effect on software pricing as the advent of microprocessor did on hardware pricing." Seperately, on last Friday's Wall Street News with Louis Rukeyser, the small caps investor said she was not investing in Software Companies because most companies would want to stay with software they knew rather than installing new products until 2000.

Stephane Arguin writes "The french site "Les Nouvelles neuves de Linux" say that Compaq France will support Linux on all their Intel and Alpha machine by the year 2000..." Mind you the page is in French, so for all I can tell they might be talking about anything. Update There is a quick translation attached now. Jean-Francois.Gadoury@cesart.com Jeff has translated the blurb above into something less French for the rest of us. He writes "According to Jon Hall, Executive Director of Linux International, Compaq for whom he works, will soon support Linux on all platforms it proposes, Intel and Alpha. Installation of Linux will not be done by Compaq so that no distribution is favored more than another. Instead the installation will be done by resellers or VARs. This Decision was announced yesterday at DECUS. Other computer manufacturers are exptected to announce similar decisions soon. "

Several folks wrote in to mention an Interview with Matthias Ettrich of KDE fame. An anonymous submitter also noted the lack of a nice KDE icon here on Slashdot. Anyone got one? Anyway, its a good interview. Worth a read.

A new Linux distribution has been released. This one is called Linux-Mandrake and has nothing to do with Mandrake of Enlightenment fame. Its goal is to provide an easy to use environment for beginners, and provides out-of-the-box support for French users (accents, etc). It's based on Redhat 5.1 (with all bug fixes up to 17th July) and a fully functional KDE. Users can mount their CD's without messing with /etc/fstab. It seems a good idea as an introduction as long as it does not lead to dumber users. Please, NO QT FLAMEWAR. It just gives our moderator more to delete.

Stefane Fermigier wrote in to tell us about Yet Another Linux Web Site. Cool Linux sites are multiplying like rabbits, its pretty excellent. Anyway, The Linux Center is a nice little site. Not comprehensive yet, and I don't think I saw a 'search' anywhere, but a quick glance through it shows that its not a bad starting point for Linux stuff.