Slashdot Mirror
France Considers Open Source
joestar writes "Reuters today announced that the French Government is considering Open Source Software adoption as an excellent alternative to reduce their IT costs. A cost reduction of several hundred millions dollars is planned by replacing proprietary licenses by Open-Source solutions. 'Microsoft must return to being one supplier to the state among others', declared a government Minister. France's culture, agriculture and finance ministries had already signed deals with Mandrakesoft for first Linux deployment tests. After Munich's new move in Germany, it seems that Open Source Software is currently a major movement in old Europe."
You just quoted in the article:
:-p and that could do them in (like it would be a loss???)
"In fact, open-source software is not free. It is very expensive because it shifts the cost to maintenance, services, integration and training," Microsoft France chief Christophe Aulnette said.
The scary part is, I highly agree with that statement. Price alone is not a factor for people going to open source, perhaps I should enlighten you people.
1) The upgrade trap, perhaps if people could upgrade on their schedule instead of yours.
2) The whole OPEN SOURCE part, or if I need a feature added or changed, I'll find a developer to do just that...
Yes, to the Slashdot community, I know you all know the best reasons for going open source, however I'm worried that MS doesn't
...in bed
...concerning MS in Europe? I'm just interested to see how deeply entrenched they are there financially. It may be just the stuff I'm reading, but open source seems to have a stronger foothold there than in the States.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
I've not been a France fanboy for quite some time, but I'll have to grudgingly give them their due here, they're making a step in the right direction by not giving MS automatic license fees.
With a few more current government clients joining this wave, MS might actually become a company again instead of the software dictator it is now. It will have to compete for business. This could only help software. (I still laugh at Sun and MS's statement that software will be what people pay for, and hardware will be free. Duh. Hardware is what you can hold in your hand and has real costs. Software will be free, the service/maintenance of that software is where the money is)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The article fails to mention that France would also "consider" Microsoft if the company counteroffered with a 75% discount. I think this is merely a bargaining ploy on the part of the French government. It's a smart thing to do, though, and anything that sucks cash out of Microsoft's warchest has to be a good thing.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
from wsj.com June 18, 2004; Page A10
The growing split between the U.S. and Europe has been much in the news, mostly on foreign policy. But less well understood is the gap in economic growth and standards of living. Now comes a European report that puts the American advantage in surprisingly stark relief.
The study, "The EU vs. USA," was done by a pair of economists -- Fredrik Bergstrom and Robert Gidehag -- for the Swedish think tank Timbro. It found that if Europe were part of the U.S., only tiny Luxembourg could rival the richest of the 50 American states in gross domestic product per capita. Most European countries would rank below the U.S. average, as the nearby chart shows.
The authors admit that man doesn't live by GDP alone, and that this measure misses output in the "black" economy, which is significant in Europe's high-tax states. GDP also overlooks "the value of leisure or a good environment" or the way prosperity is spread across a society.
[Germany and Arkansas]
But a rising tide still lifts all boats, and U.S. GDP per capita was a whopping 32% higher than the EU average in 2000, and the gap hasn't closed since. It is so wide that if the U.S. economy had frozen in place at 2000 levels while Europe grew, the Continent would still require years to catch up. Ireland, which has lower tax burdens and fewer regulations than the rest of the EU, would be the first but only by 2005. Switzerland, not a member of the EU, and Britain would get there by 2010. But Germany and Spain would need until 2015, while Italy, Sweden and Portugal would have to wait until 2022.
Higher GDP per capita allows the average American to spend about $9,700 more on consumption every year than the average European. So Yanks have by far more cars, TVs, computers and other modern goods. "Most Americans have a standard of living which the majority of Europeans will never come anywhere near," the Swedish study says.
But what about equality? Well, the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line has dropped to 12% from 22% since 1959. In 1999, 25% of American households were considered "low income," meaning they had an annual income of less than $25,000. If Sweden -- the very model of a modern welfare state -- were judged by the same standard, about 40% of its households would be considered low income.
In other words poverty is relative, and in the U.S. a large 45.9% of the "poor" own their homes, 72.8% have a car and almost 77% have air conditioning, which remains a luxury in most of Western Europe. The average living space for poor American households is 1,200 square feet. In Europe, the average space for all households, not just the poor, is 1,000 square feet.
So what is Europe's problem? "The expansion of the public sector into overripe welfare states in large parts of Europe is and remains the best guess as to why our continent cannot measure up to our neighbor in the west," the authors write. In 1999, average EU tax revenues were more than 40% of GDP, and in some countries above 50%, compared with less than 30% for most of the U.S.
We don't report this with any nationalist glee. The world needs a prosperous, growing Europe, and its relative economic decline is one reason for growing EU-American tension. A poorer Europe lacks the wealth to invest in defense, a fact that in turn affects the willingness of Europeans to join America in confronting global security threats. But at least all of this is a warning to U.S. politicians who want this country to go down the same welfare-state road to decline.
In quasi-Socialist America, corporations benefit greatly from a close relationship with the government. The more the government spends, the more money they make. Therefore OSS could actually do a lot of good in upsetting that relationship.
Microsoft made $521M in sales from the US Army a procurement cycle ago. Imagine if by switching to Linux for most of that, the US Army could cut down the market by $450M. If the government's contract values go down significantly because of Linux then the major companies will have less interest in selling to the government.
In the long run this will reduce the reasons for why we are taxed so heavily by our Congressional overlords who at present cannot account already for approximately at least 1/22 ($100B) of the federal budget. To put that in perspective, that is approximately 1/80 of the wealth generated by Americans that is wasted by government bureacracy. That is not even counting the waste at the state level and the good old boy/girl networks commonly known as your average municipal "public service."
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I suspect that a great many European Slashdot readers are happy about the French plan not only because it could be a victory for Open Source, but also because it sends the message that America and American companies have come to expect blind acquiescence from the rest of the world.
Action, meet Reaction.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
If you want higher quality, pay up for visual studio.
This is an obvious troll, but I'm going to reply anyway. What can you do with VS that you can't do with kdevelop? I've had considerably less problems with kdevelop (even ugly versions of old...) then I ever have with VS. OK, I've said in previous posts and I'll say again, I'm no code guru, but, I've had a MUCH easier time with GNU utils then anything from Redomd...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Ok it loooks like
SUSE -Germany
Mandarke -France
RedHat -USA
Are we going to have classification of countries by operating systems that they use majorly????
Hello , this is my way.
Which way is yours ?
btw there is no right way
What would be fun to watch is if some country decided to switch to an Open Source OS, and then did a separate bid for office software.
Microsoft would be in a position where it could compete for the position of supplying office software, but only if it ported their office software to the Open Source platform.
I wonder what they would do.
It would fun just to watch what they do in that predicament.
This is why so many people in the industry have problems; the value is not IN the IT, but what the IT enables you to DO.
After 30-40 years seems like maybe, just maybe, some people are finally catching on. You measure cost inside IT. You measure value outside of IT.
Open source gives free tools to everybody. World class, kick ass tools.
This is slightly contrived, but the same principles apply to Open Source software. The French language is free. Anyone is free to use it. Now if the French were unwilling to make any expenditures the language would stay free but become whatever time and the Germans or whatever happen to make of it.
To oversimplify, the software is free but an opinion (that matters) is not.
Just try to have an opinion of what OpenBSD should be/do.
Compare a whim of Linus versus IBM's agenda regarding Linux.
Don't let the apparent low cost fool you. It can be had for cheap, but it is really exorbitantly expensive software that is affordable. For a ridiculously large range of definitions of affordable.
Slashdot has for some reason ignored some big articles on Governmental Open Source. This is what I mean: Brazil has a government department bent on migrating all of the government's software into Open-Source software. This department already has 2,000 employees DEDICATED for migration operations. It's estimated that over 300,000 computers will migrate to Linux. As it stands it still is the largest government-backed program for Open Source. This is nothing new. This dept. was created back in December of 2003 and was covered by Wired. In any case, the most amusing consequence of this was Microsoft's response calling this program "ideologically motivated" in a veiled allusion to President Lula's left-leaning socialist tendencies. But of course, an instant loss of 6% in revenue for Microsoft makes them a bit, uhm, "twitchy". A few links if anyone's interested: Wired Article The Register Folha de São Paulo (in portuguese)
I seem to remember hearing that much of the online income tax infrastructure in France is now already supported by Linux boxes, with an Oracle database.
The general overhaul of the tax IS towards Linux and open source was a huge shift, in a governmental agency traditionally bent towards mainframe and proprietary vendors.
It was mainly done under the impulsion of one "open-source ayatollah" at the French tax department..
OK, I live in england, I'm celtic by ancestry, you might refer to me as "a Britisher"
My parents generation fought ww2, on my mums side 5 kids, all of them signed up, their father, my grandad was torpedoes three fucking times and lived to tell the tale... he was a bosun on the murmansk run on oil tankers, he used to chew tobacco (can't smoke on tankers) and that's what eventually killed him, colostomy and bowel cancer.
Of his five children the eldest was a telegrapher, RN, was ordered to stay behind at the fall of singapore and report on the nips, was mia for 9 months and eventually made his own way overland to india, next eldest was another RN telegrapher (the radio shack was a prime target btw) my mum was a wren who was a plotter in devonport, plotted the d-day practices in which thousands of americans died through the sheer incompetence of their commanders, going to cut a long shit load of history short here, not much point going on about a thousand years of clanging swords with someone or other which is basically what english history is, let me tell you how WE see american military in first hand observations from ww2 (my father etc) through korea (before you lot went into nam properly) to the present day.
in 1943 when the british army couldn't even get a pair of boots and 20 rounds of ammunition to every soldier, the american military machine could get chocolates to every soldier, and all the boots they could wear and ammo they could carry, "over sexed, over paid, and over here" was a 1943 sentiment about americans here in the southwest training for d day, but EVERYONE was in absolute awe of american logistics.
Similarly, from 1943 through korea etc to present day, nobody ever thought american soldiers lacked courage.
While american logistics were awesome, most people rated american military hardware as sub-standard, when germany had tiger tanks you were running around in shermans, worst thing about a sherman was the motor, 2 stroke detroit diesel was NOISY bastard, made it real easy to shoot at... similarly because supply of bullets was never a problem american weapons and soldiering were much more automatic fire than semi automatic, times where supply chain breaks everyone shit themselves if americans on the flank, waiting for them to expend all ammo and then fall back.....
no, BY FAR commonest sentiment about american military machine was the soldiers were not as highly trained or versatile as ours (this is still true, simply because US military budget is so fucking huge we HAVE to be better at everything, on a per platoon basis) and american brass were by and large grandstanding assholes, just like we used to shoot in the back when going over the top in WWI....
americans go on patrol in iraq in armoured vehicles all toting fully automatic weapons and more importantly crew-few medium calibre automatic weapons, anything tougher than a columbine schoolkid pops up and you hunker down and call in an airstrike.... such tactics are inevitable when you have a HUGE military machine with awesome logistics and vast numbers of under trained cannon fodder troops.
british go on patrol in iraq in open backed landrover (4wd, a british "technical" really, often minus the 50 cal) response is very short ammunition conserving short bursts of 3 or 4 rounds at most, of not single shot mode, if it turns bad retreat and regroup, or die there, we just don't have that kind of air support or even heavy armour.... such tactics are inevitable when you have a small military machine with shite logistics (remember, we had to canniballise our biggest liner just to get troops to falklands, and she was built that way just in case too...) so every soldier must be a minimum of proficient at many tasks and bloody good at one or two.
same thing is true of bar fights, in american bar fights there is much pre fight posturing and strutting, like bears in some mating ritual, much opportunity for both to mutually cool it off without losing face according to some strange set of rules...
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal