Slashdot Mirror

Making it easier to vote by moving the action from a polling station to your pocket could only increase turnout, especially in the primaries.

There are many professional elections that have switched to online voting in France and every time the E-Voting proponents trumpeted the turnout boost this would no doubt bring. Unfortunately they have essentially been wrong every time.

For those who read French, here is the actual text of the law.

You can read it there in french : http://www.senat.fr/leg/pjl07-405.html

Sir, i am an american. Let me categorically assure you that i most definatley can not.

Some violence began just after election: (Yahoo's Article). (All the links will target French content, use translators, or learn french)
Here are the links to see major points of his program :
First, his ideas on genetics : Suicide, pedophilia and homosexuality are genetic, if one of your parent is pedophile, you are a criminal too.
Sources :
http://www.liberation.fr/actualite/politiques/2467 52.FR.php/ ,
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-823448,3 6-892092,0.html?xtor=RSS-3208/,
http://fr.news.yahoo.com/09042007/202/genes-les-pr opos-de-sarkozy-pas-scientifiquement-fondes-pour-l es.html/,
http://www.france.qrd.org/actualites/article.php3? id_article=2976/.
On civil liberties, the Human Rights League has announced that democracy is in great danger with Sarkozy :
http://fr.news.yahoo.com/26042007/202/la-ligue-des -droits-de-l-homme-attaque-le-bilan.html/
Since 2 years now (Sarkozy was in the Government), since you are seven year old, the police can take your DNA if you are caught in a fight (even in the school yard) or any reprehensible act. Exemple of new criminal act : be more than 3 people in front of a building (that was to prevent suburbs criminality)!.
Sarkozy wanted a law to drug to calm restless children, since they are 3 years old. There was too much opposition at the time and the law was temporarily abandoned, but in an interview he said his delinquency prevention laws will be activated if he becomes president (http://www.senat.fr/leg/pjl05-433.html/).
Wish us good luck, no more civil or human rights in France.

I understand that Bush was reluctant to sign that law, but doesn't he have at least veto power?

Here in Uruguay, if a law is vetoed, the General Assembly (that would be the Congress-equivalent) has to enact it by a 3/5ths majority. The governing party usually has close to half the seats anyway (and, unlike the US, legislative elections are held the same day as presidential ones), so a law the president dislikes is unlikely to be passed.

http://www.senat.fr/senatsdumonde/english/uruguay. html



According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veto the US has Veto too... doesn't Bush command at least 1/3rd of the Congress?

I never expected Bush's inmigration policy to be labeled enlightened, but after some reading, I have to concur that it is indeed much better than the alternatives proposed by Congress.

According to this Figaro article, french living abroad have increased in number by 40.5% over the last decade, reching over 2 million. The proportion of engineers leaving the country to find a job has doubled. There are already over 300,000 french living in London, making it one of the largest french cities by comparison.

There is also this Time article dating from 2000 but which simply calls this emigration "the french exodus".

If you can read fench, then this french Senate report on emigration has a lot of numbers although it's from 1999. Its conclusions leave little doubt:
- french emigration has accelerated a lot
- this emigration concerns people with a high level of education, the number of french studying abroad has doubled in a decade
- the number of french fleeing the ISF (taxation of high net worth) has increased dramatically though it only concerns a small fraction of this emigration
- the number of french people staying abroad instead of coming back has tripled over the 16 years the study spans

héhé

http://www.senat.fr/leg/tas05-088.html

You'll probably have to wait for the english translation though....

This document (in french) confirms that it is not compulsory to even possess an ID card in France.

On the other hand, you do have to be able to prove your identity using some other ID (driver's licence, employee ID, even a local public transport ID).

I read the press trying to get a few hard facts on the said court ruling. All I got is from imprecise sources such as newspapers, so take it with a grain of salt.

• The ruling is a summary injunction (référé), which means that it has been issued by a single judge.
• The matter has not yet been appealed to a court of appeal. We should probably wait until such things get appealed to the supreme court (cour de cassation) before we conclude that French jurisprudence has been defined with respect to sites abroad selling forbidden material. Unfortunately, with the current overload of the supreme court, it should take several years.
• As with the Georgia Tech case, the lawsuit was not brought by the government but by private nonprofit associations, LICRA (International League against Racism and Antisemitism) and UEJF (Union of Jewish Students of France). Therefore it is wrong to conclude anything from this case about the position of either the president, the cabinet, the national assembly or the senate. They apparently ask for reparations in accordance with article 48.2 of the (revised) law on the Press of 1981 which allows a nonprofit association whose statutory goals include fighting racism to ask for reparations even though the association is no direct victim.
• Apparently, the motive of the lawsuit is article 24 of the same law, which prohibits inciting discrimination, hatred or violence against a person or a group of persons because of their origin or their belonging or non-belonging to an ethnic group, a nation or a determined religion (punishable by one year of prison and/or a 300,000 FRF fine, not precluding the civil damages). Means of such incitation to hatred include drawings or emblems (article 23).

• Whether or not a nazi emblem promotes racial hatred;
• Whether or not a French court can order an US company to comply to its rulings (apparently, the matter will have to be brought before an US court); of course, Yahoo France must comply.

Furthermore, as far as I know, are exempt from the ban prints of such items for education or scholarly research. I do not know where this comes from legally. Surely indeed, some public libraries, including the National Library of France have printouts of Mein Kampf available for readers!

I therefore think the Slashdot community should wait and see further progress in the case; jumping to conclusions is clearly overreacting.

Reading on in the discussion on http://www.senat.fr/Vforum/5/forum.html , there is a useful posting from one Julien Rousseau just below the posting from Senator Lafitte. (Click here to see it)

The salient points: (translated materials in italics, all else my comments)

It seems to me there are some errors in the wording of the law... The first (..) is the use of the phrase libre en droit.

Libre de droit is associated with the notion of public domain in French law - free software is not necessarily public domain.

The second error is (...) in the principle of requiring the use of free software even though it isn't necessary. This complicates the law and its application. Furthermore, it is not guaranteed to resolve the problem. (...) I think most people would take a dim view of any requirement to use free software. (...) Even the most ardent defenders of free software recognise that free software can't do everything at the present time.

In my experience there is no adequate free solution for SGML editing. There are decent commercial ones, but even those are few. There are certainly other domains in which this is true. As an SGML advocate, I have to agree with M Rousseau, and have second thoughts about this type of project.

A solution has already been proposed by several people on the Senate forum: require the use of open data formats rather than mandating particular software.

I am in full agreement here. I think with XML we're making some progress on this count, and a government mandate would certainly help.

M Rousseau goes on to other matters as well. For those of you who are French-compatible, I'd advise you to take a good look at his posting.

Another posting - an earlier one, before that of Senator Lafitte - by a user named Phillipe raises an interesting issue. (It's here)

He rasies the point that if an institution is to be required to use free software, they will have to support the free software community, since the institution's requirements are not likely to be spontaneously met by the developers. This is not an insignificant consideration. If an institution is to use only free software, it must either become a software development shop or contract other individuals and companies to write or modify free software for its needs.

This lends itself to two questions. One: is it cheaper to pay for the development of free software than to deal contractually with non-free vendors? And two: does the free software community want to find itself dependent on government subsidy?

Another poster, Lucille Fievet, suggests here, that before this bill (Law 495) is passed

We need to start thinking about law 495's little brother and create a French Public Interest License, which would permit:

1- the recognition of (...) the first author (...) as artistic licenses do.

2- the copying, recopying, sales (and) use for commercial purposes (of software under this license).

3- the modification of free software, on the condition of sending the original owner or some sort of national repository a copy of the modified code.

4- obviously, the publication of the source.

5- (and) forbid reserving the right to convert the free program to a proprietary license.

I disagree here. I do think a rigourous legal definition of what constitutes free software has to happen first, before any other free software related law is passed. That legal definition should allow GPL and Berkeley license software to be seen as free, as well as public domain offerings like the nsgmls package. It should be relatively liberal.

I disagree however, with all the additional requirement the author of this posting asks for. The requirements of the GPL license seem sufficient to me.

A national repository of free software doesn't sound like a bad idea to me. I have some questions as to how it would be run, but that is a different issue.

Serge Oudet (posting at http://www.senat.fr/Vforum/cgi-bin/Vforum-1.6.cgi? action=lire&page=1&id=489&forum_num =5) also raises the issue of how free software can be certain to comply with French law regarding cryptology. For the French nationals out there, this is quite interesting.

Personally, it does not concern me (je ne suis pas français - il y a d'autres pays francophones dans le monde), however, it suggests a second interesting notion:

All cryptographic systems used by a government or mandated by one should be free software, available to all. This is the only protection against encryption systems with hidden key recovery schemes. Recently, it was revealed that a Swiss cryptography outfit was, in fact, secretly owned by the NSA and had been selling compromised equipment to Iran and other governments. Accessible source and public algorithms strike me as the only sure way to prevent this kind of thing. I feel it would be quite appropriate to mandate free software in this context.

______________________________________

Ce n'est que mes deux sous ;^)

Reading on in the discussion on http://www.senat.fr/Vforum/5/forum.html , there is a useful posting from one Julien Rousseau just below the posting from Senator Lafitte. (Click here to see it)

The salient points: (translated materials in italics, all else my comments)

It seems to me there are some errors in the wording of the law... The first (..) is the use of the phrase libre en droit.

Libre de droit is associated with the notion of public domain in French law - free software is not necessarily public domain.

The second error is (...) in the principle of requiring the use of free software even though it isn't necessary. This complicates the law and its application. Furthermore, it is not guaranteed to resolve the problem. (...) I think most people would take a dim view of any requirement to use free software. (...) Even the most ardent defenders of free software recognise that free software can't do everything at the present time.

In my experience there is no adequate free solution for SGML editing. There are decent commercial ones, but even those are few. There are certainly other domains in which this is true. As an SGML advocate, I have to agree with M Rousseau, and have second thoughts about this type of project.

A solution has already been proposed by several people on the Senate forum: require the use of open data formats rather than mandating particular software.

I am in full agreement here. I think with XML we're making some progress on this count, and a government mandate would certainly help.

M Rousseau goes on to other matters as well. For those of you who are French-compatible, I'd advise you to take a good look at his posting.

Another posting - an earlier one, before that of Senator Lafitte - by a user named Phillipe raises an interesting issue. (It's here)

He rasies the point that if an institution is to be required to use free software, they will have to support the free software community, since the institution's requirements are not likely to be spontaneously met by the developers. This is not an insignificant consideration. If an institution is to use only free software, it must either become a software development shop or contract other individuals and companies to write or modify free software for its needs.

This lends itself to two questions. One: is it cheaper to pay for the development of free software than to deal contractually with non-free vendors? And two: does the free software community want to find itself dependent on government subsidy?

Another poster, Lucille Fievet, suggests here, that before this bill (Law 495) is passed

We need to start thinking about law 495's little brother and create a French Public Interest License, which would permit:

1- the recognition of (...) the first author (...) as artistic licenses do.

2- the copying, recopying, sales (and) use for commercial purposes (of software under this license).

3- the modification of free software, on the condition of sending the original owner or some sort of national repository a copy of the modified code.

4- obviously, the publication of the source.

5- (and) forbid reserving the right to convert the free program to a proprietary license.

I disagree here. I do think a rigourous legal definition of what constitutes free software has to happen first, before any other free software related law is passed. That legal definition should allow GPL and Berkeley license software to be seen as free, as well as public domain offerings like the nsgmls package. It should be relatively liberal.

I disagree however, with all the additional requirement the author of this posting asks for. The requirements of the GPL license seem sufficient to me.

A national repository of free software doesn't sound like a bad idea to me. I have some questions as to how it would be run, but that is a different issue.

Serge Oudet (posting at http://www.senat.fr/Vforum/cgi-bin/Vforum-1.6.cgi? action=lire&page=1&id=489&forum_num =5) also raises the issue of how free software can be certain to comply with French law regarding cryptology. For the French nationals out there, this is quite interesting.

Personally, it does not concern me (je ne suis pas français - il y a d'autres pays francophones dans le monde), however, it suggests a second interesting notion:

All cryptographic systems used by a government or mandated by one should be free software, available to all. This is the only protection against encryption systems with hidden key recovery schemes. Recently, it was revealed that a Swiss cryptography outfit was, in fact, secretly owned by the NSA and had been selling compromised equipment to Iran and other governments. Accessible source and public algorithms strike me as the only sure way to prevent this kind of thing. I feel it would be quite appropriate to mandate free software in this context.

______________________________________

Ce n'est que mes deux sous ;^)

Reading on in the discussion on http://www.senat.fr/Vforum/5/forum.html , there is a useful posting from one Julien Rousseau just below the posting from Senator Lafitte. (Click here to see it)

The salient points: (translated materials in italics, all else my comments)

It seems to me there are some errors in the wording of the law... The first (..) is the use of the phrase libre en droit.

Libre de droit is associated with the notion of public domain in French law - free software is not necessarily public domain.

The second error is (...) in the principle of requiring the use of free software even though it isn't necessary. This complicates the law and its application. Furthermore, it is not guaranteed to resolve the problem. (...) I think most people would take a dim view of any requirement to use free software. (...) Even the most ardent defenders of free software recognise that free software can't do everything at the present time.

In my experience there is no adequate free solution for SGML editing. There are decent commercial ones, but even those are few. There are certainly other domains in which this is true. As an SGML advocate, I have to agree with M Rousseau, and have second thoughts about this type of project.

A solution has already been proposed by several people on the Senate forum: require the use of open data formats rather than mandating particular software.

I am in full agreement here. I think with XML we're making some progress on this count, and a government mandate would certainly help.

M Rousseau goes on to other matters as well. For those of you who are French-compatible, I'd advise you to take a good look at his posting.

Another posting - an earlier one, before that of Senator Lafitte - by a user named Phillipe raises an interesting issue. (It's here)

He rasies the point that if an institution is to be required to use free software, they will have to support the free software community, since the institution's requirements are not likely to be spontaneously met by the developers. This is not an insignificant consideration. If an institution is to use only free software, it must either become a software development shop or contract other individuals and companies to write or modify free software for its needs.

This lends itself to two questions. One: is it cheaper to pay for the development of free software than to deal contractually with non-free vendors? And two: does the free software community want to find itself dependent on government subsidy?

Another poster, Lucille Fievet, suggests here, that before this bill (Law 495) is passed

We need to start thinking about law 495's little brother and create a French Public Interest License, which would permit:

1- the recognition of (...) the first author (...) as artistic licenses do.

2- the copying, recopying, sales (and) use for commercial purposes (of software under this license).

3- the modification of free software, on the condition of sending the original owner or some sort of national repository a copy of the modified code.

4- obviously, the publication of the source.

5- (and) forbid reserving the right to convert the free program to a proprietary license.

I disagree here. I do think a rigourous legal definition of what constitutes free software has to happen first, before any other free software related law is passed. That legal definition should allow GPL and Berkeley license software to be seen as free, as well as public domain offerings like the nsgmls package. It should be relatively liberal.

I disagree however, with all the additional requirement the author of this posting asks for. The requirements of the GPL license seem sufficient to me.

A national repository of free software doesn't sound like a bad idea to me. I have some questions as to how it would be run, but that is a different issue.

Serge Oudet (posting at http://www.senat.fr/Vforum/cgi-bin/Vforum-1.6.cgi? action=lire&page=1&id=489&forum_num =5) also raises the issue of how free software can be certain to comply with French law regarding cryptology. For the French nationals out there, this is quite interesting.

Personally, it does not concern me (je ne suis pas français - il y a d'autres pays francophones dans le monde), however, it suggests a second interesting notion:

All cryptographic systems used by a government or mandated by one should be free software, available to all. This is the only protection against encryption systems with hidden key recovery schemes. Recently, it was revealed that a Swiss cryptography outfit was, in fact, secretly owned by the NSA and had been selling compromised equipment to Iran and other governments. Accessible source and public algorithms strike me as the only sure way to prevent this kind of thing. I feel it would be quite appropriate to mandate free software in this context.

______________________________________

Ce n'est que mes deux sous ;^)

Reading on in the discussion on http://www.senat.fr/Vforum/5/forum.html , there is a useful posting from one Julien Rousseau just below the posting from Senator Lafitte. (Click here to see it)

The salient points: (translated materials in italics, all else my comments)

It seems to me there are some errors in the wording of the law... The first (..) is the use of the phrase libre en droit.

Libre de droit is associated with the notion of public domain in French law - free software is not necessarily public domain.

The second error is (...) in the principle of requiring the use of free software even though it isn't necessary. This complicates the law and its application. Furthermore, it is not guaranteed to resolve the problem. (...) I think most people would take a dim view of any requirement to use free software. (...) Even the most ardent defenders of free software recognise that free software can't do everything at the present time.

In my experience there is no adequate free solution for SGML editing. There are decent commercial ones, but even those are few. There are certainly other domains in which this is true. As an SGML advocate, I have to agree with M Rousseau, and have second thoughts about this type of project.

A solution has already been proposed by several people on the Senate forum: require the use of open data formats rather than mandating particular software.

I am in full agreement here. I think with XML we're making some progress on this count, and a government mandate would certainly help.

M Rousseau goes on to other matters as well. For those of you who are French-compatible, I'd advise you to take a good look at his posting.

Another posting - an earlier one, before that of Senator Lafitte - by a user named Phillipe raises an interesting issue. (It's here)

He rasies the point that if an institution is to be required to use free software, they will have to support the free software community, since the institution's requirements are not likely to be spontaneously met by the developers. This is not an insignificant consideration. If an institution is to use only free software, it must either become a software development shop or contract other individuals and companies to write or modify free software for its needs.

This lends itself to two questions. One: is it cheaper to pay for the development of free software than to deal contractually with non-free vendors? And two: does the free software community want to find itself dependent on government subsidy?

Another poster, Lucille Fievet, suggests here, that before this bill (Law 495) is passed

We need to start thinking about law 495's little brother and create a French Public Interest License, which would permit:

1- the recognition of (...) the first author (...) as artistic licenses do.

2- the copying, recopying, sales (and) use for commercial purposes (of software under this license).

3- the modification of free software, on the condition of sending the original owner or some sort of national repository a copy of the modified code.

4- obviously, the publication of the source.

5- (and) forbid reserving the right to convert the free program to a proprietary license.

I disagree here. I do think a rigourous legal definition of what constitutes free software has to happen first, before any other free software related law is passed. That legal definition should allow GPL and Berkeley license software to be seen as free, as well as public domain offerings like the nsgmls package. It should be relatively liberal.

I disagree however, with all the additional requirement the author of this posting asks for. The requirements of the GPL license seem sufficient to me.

A national repository of free software doesn't sound like a bad idea to me. I have some questions as to how it would be run, but that is a different issue.

Serge Oudet (posting at http://www.senat.fr/Vforum/cgi-bin/Vforum-1.6.cgi? action=lire&page=1&id=489&forum_num =5) also raises the issue of how free software can be certain to comply with French law regarding cryptology. For the French nationals out there, this is quite interesting.

Personally, it does not concern me (je ne suis pas français - il y a d'autres pays francophones dans le monde), however, it suggests a second interesting notion:

All cryptographic systems used by a government or mandated by one should be free software, available to all. This is the only protection against encryption systems with hidden key recovery schemes. Recently, it was revealed that a Swiss cryptography outfit was, in fact, secretly owned by the NSA and had been selling compromised equipment to Iran and other governments. Accessible source and public algorithms strike me as the only sure way to prevent this kind of thing. I feel it would be quite appropriate to mandate free software in this context.

______________________________________

Ce n'est que mes deux sous ;^)

Reading on in the discussion on http://www.senat.fr/Vforum/5/forum.html , there is a useful posting from one Julien Rousseau just below the posting from Senator Lafitte. (Click here to see it)

The salient points: (translated materials in italics, all else my comments)

It seems to me there are some errors in the wording of the law... The first (..) is the use of the phrase libre en droit.

Libre de droit is associated with the notion of public domain in French law - free software is not necessarily public domain.

The second error is (...) in the principle of requiring the use of free software even though it isn't necessary. This complicates the law and its application. Furthermore, it is not guaranteed to resolve the problem. (...) I think most people would take a dim view of any requirement to use free software. (...) Even the most ardent defenders of free software recognise that free software can't do everything at the present time.

In my experience there is no adequate free solution for SGML editing. There are decent commercial ones, but even those are few. There are certainly other domains in which this is true. As an SGML advocate, I have to agree with M Rousseau, and have second thoughts about this type of project.

A solution has already been proposed by several people on the Senate forum: require the use of open data formats rather than mandating particular software.

I am in full agreement here. I think with XML we're making some progress on this count, and a government mandate would certainly help.

M Rousseau goes on to other matters as well. For those of you who are French-compatible, I'd advise you to take a good look at his posting.

Another posting - an earlier one, before that of Senator Lafitte - by a user named Phillipe raises an interesting issue. (It's here)

He rasies the point that if an institution is to be required to use free software, they will have to support the free software community, since the institution's requirements are not likely to be spontaneously met by the developers. This is not an insignificant consideration. If an institution is to use only free software, it must either become a software development shop or contract other individuals and companies to write or modify free software for its needs.

This lends itself to two questions. One: is it cheaper to pay for the development of free software than to deal contractually with non-free vendors? And two: does the free software community want to find itself dependent on government subsidy?

Another poster, Lucille Fievet, suggests here, that before this bill (Law 495) is passed

We need to start thinking about law 495's little brother and create a French Public Interest License, which would permit:

1- the recognition of (...) the first author (...) as artistic licenses do.

2- the copying, recopying, sales (and) use for commercial purposes (of software under this license).

3- the modification of free software, on the condition of sending the original owner or some sort of national repository a copy of the modified code.

4- obviously, the publication of the source.

5- (and) forbid reserving the right to convert the free program to a proprietary license.

I disagree here. I do think a rigourous legal definition of what constitutes free software has to happen first, before any other free software related law is passed. That legal definition should allow GPL and Berkeley license software to be seen as free, as well as public domain offerings like the nsgmls package. It should be relatively liberal.

I disagree however, with all the additional requirement the author of this posting asks for. The requirements of the GPL license seem sufficient to me.

A national repository of free software doesn't sound like a bad idea to me. I have some questions as to how it would be run, but that is a different issue.

Serge Oudet (posting at http://www.senat.fr/Vforum/cgi-bin/Vforum-1.6.cgi? action=lire&page=1&id=489&forum_num =5) also raises the issue of how free software can be certain to comply with French law regarding cryptology. For the French nationals out there, this is quite interesting.

Personally, it does not concern me (je ne suis pas français - il y a d'autres pays francophones dans le monde), however, it suggests a second interesting notion:

All cryptographic systems used by a government or mandated by one should be free software, available to all. This is the only protection against encryption systems with hidden key recovery schemes. Recently, it was revealed that a Swiss cryptography outfit was, in fact, secretly owned by the NSA and had been selling compromised equipment to Iran and other governments. Accessible source and public algorithms strike me as the only sure way to prevent this kind of thing. I feel it would be quite appropriate to mandate free software in this context.

______________________________________

Ce n'est que mes deux sous ;^)

The text of the bill itself is available here. I will attempt to translate it, but my ignorance of legal jargon (English, and, to some extent, French also) will probably show: this is hardly better than Babelfish.

Keep in mind that this is not really a bill. It is only a suggestion of a bill, made by a small parliamentary group (the RDSE group, which isn't even a political party as far as I know). Also note that the Senate is the less powerful of the two house of parliament in France, and normally the more conservative one (curiously enough, the Senate's web site runs on Apache, whereas that of the other house of the French Parliament, the Assemblée Nationale, runs on Netscape Entreprise).

As Senator Laffite points out, this draft is concomitant with another bill proposed by French Justice Minister Elisabeth Guigou which would make digital signatures legally binding, and both bills might be merged into one.

Anyway, here's my translation:

Article 1 Communication between state and local administrations, as well as between the local administrations shall be performed by electronic means. The conditions of the switch from the current means (circulars, letters, summons, etc.) and generalized electronic mail shall be specified by a decree.

Article 2 So as to insure a good transparency and a more rapid access to information for business, public calls to bids and their ancillary documents will use electronic communication.

Responses will likewise be sent by electronic means.

During a transitional period, a paper communication may be added to the electronic communication. A decree shall specify the duration of this transitional period and the cost of the paper communication made on demand.

Article 3 The state and local administration and the administrative services, except as stated under article 4, may only use software that is free of rights and whose source code is available.

A decree shall specify the means of transition from the current situation.

Article 4 Certain specific software programs may be used and obtained by administrations and services mentioned in article 3 after authorization by a competent service. A decree shall specify the geographical location of this service and the conditions for obtaining this authorization.

Article 5 So as to hasten the application of this bill, a service of electronic information shall be created in each prefecture for public services and local administrations, and consular assemblies for the companies involved.

The text of the bill itself is available here. I will attempt to translate it, but my ignorance of legal jargon (English, and, to some extent, French also) will probably show: this is hardly better than Babelfish.

Keep in mind that this is not really a bill. It is only a suggestion of a bill, made by a small parliamentary group (the RDSE group, which isn't even a political party as far as I know). Also note that the Senate is the less powerful of the two house of parliament in France, and normally the more conservative one (curiously enough, the Senate's web site runs on Apache, whereas that of the other house of the French Parliament, the Assemblée Nationale, runs on Netscape Entreprise).

As Senator Laffite points out, this draft is concomitant with another bill proposed by French Justice Minister Elisabeth Guigou which would make digital signatures legally binding, and both bills might be merged into one.

Anyway, here's my translation:

Article 1 Communication between state and local administrations, as well as between the local administrations shall be performed by electronic means. The conditions of the switch from the current means (circulars, letters, summons, etc.) and generalized electronic mail shall be specified by a decree.

Article 2 So as to insure a good transparency and a more rapid access to information for business, public calls to bids and their ancillary documents will use electronic communication.

Responses will likewise be sent by electronic means.

During a transitional period, a paper communication may be added to the electronic communication. A decree shall specify the duration of this transitional period and the cost of the paper communication made on demand.

Article 3 The state and local administration and the administrative services, except as stated under article 4, may only use software that is free of rights and whose source code is available.

A decree shall specify the means of transition from the current situation.

Article 4 Certain specific software programs may be used and obtained by administrations and services mentioned in article 3 after authorization by a competent service. A decree shall specify the geographical location of this service and the conditions for obtaining this authorization.

Article 5 So as to hasten the application of this bill, a service of electronic information shall be created in each prefecture for public services and local administrations, and consular assemblies for the companies involved.

The text of the bill itself is available here. I will attempt to translate it, but my ignorance of legal jargon (English, and, to some extent, French also) will probably show: this is hardly better than Babelfish.

Keep in mind that this is not really a bill. It is only a suggestion of a bill, made by a small parliamentary group (the RDSE group, which isn't even a political party as far as I know). Also note that the Senate is the less powerful of the two house of parliament in France, and normally the more conservative one (curiously enough, the Senate's web site runs on Apache, whereas that of the other house of the French Parliament, the Assemblée Nationale, runs on Netscape Entreprise).

As Senator Laffite points out, this draft is concomitant with another bill proposed by French Justice Minister Elisabeth Guigou which would make digital signatures legally binding, and both bills might be merged into one.

Anyway, here's my translation:

Article 1 Communication between state and local administrations, as well as between the local administrations shall be performed by electronic means. The conditions of the switch from the current means (circulars, letters, summons, etc.) and generalized electronic mail shall be specified by a decree.

Article 2 So as to insure a good transparency and a more rapid access to information for business, public calls to bids and their ancillary documents will use electronic communication.

Responses will likewise be sent by electronic means.

During a transitional period, a paper communication may be added to the electronic communication. A decree shall specify the duration of this transitional period and the cost of the paper communication made on demand.

Article 3 The state and local administration and the administrative services, except as stated under article 4, may only use software that is free of rights and whose source code is available.

A decree shall specify the means of transition from the current situation.

Article 4 Certain specific software programs may be used and obtained by administrations and services mentioned in article 3 after authorization by a competent service. A decree shall specify the geographical location of this service and the conditions for obtaining this authorization.

Article 5 So as to hasten the application of this bill, a service of electronic information shall be created in each prefecture for public services and local administrations, and consular assemblies for the companies involved.