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Paris Accelerates Move to Open Source
* * Beatles-Beatles writes to tell us that the city of Paris is moving to open-source software a little faster than originally intended. As a part of the strategy to 'reduce its dependence on suppliers' they anticipate replacing both server and desktop applications with free and open-source software. From the article: "Earlier this year, volunteers among the city's 46,000 staff were invited to download and install open-source software to their desktops, including the Firefox browser and the Open Office.org productivity suite. Now, the city is planning to migrate all the users of one city department or all of those in one of the city's 20 districts, not just the volunteers, to test a larger migration. The city has 17,000 workstations, up from 12,000 in 2001"
This sort of info would be handy to combat the FUD that the PHB's have stuck in their heads.
So, you're assuming that anybody who doesn't want to go OSS "FUD" stuck in their head? I use very little OSS in my business, and I can assure you that "FUD" has nothing to do with it. If anything, I'd like to see an end to the FUD that OSS zealots constantly are trying to stir up. I can't even begin to count the hours that I've wasted because of OSS zealot FUD. Personally, I wouldn't have wasted hours and hours playing with the OSS that I did, just trying to get BASIC functionality, if not for the zealots screaming about how Linux and other popular OSS apps are "easy to use". Please, take your own FUD and shove it up your ass.
This was probably due to proficious wining and dining on the part of MS.
More likely it was due to the fact that OpenOffice.org, while young and promising, still sucks terribly for real-world daily usage. Your home city probably thought it could simply get a "free lunch" by using it, rather than recognizing that it is still a needy, infantile project. OpenOffice.org is at the stage where early adopters *MUST* become co-developers for it to succeed. (both on a grand scale and for the success of their own deployments)
Let this be a lesson to any of you advocates and political types out there. OpenOffice.org is Free Software, but it's not free quite yet, in the sense of "install and forget about." For the sake of effective advocacy, don't confuse people and don't stretch the facts! It's not yet the highly-polished, feature-rich, hastle-free software that Office is. If you're going to promote OpenOffice.org, make sure that people know that they will have to invest fairly heavily in making it work properly, including contributions to its development community. (read: paying developers to fix the many show-stopper problems you'll encounter with it)