Slashdot Mirror
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"
Paris went open source since her famous video went to the internet.
Oh, wait...
That should keep her Sidekick from getting hacked again.
by distributing 100 dollar laptops with Red Hat Linux to every rioting teen
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
There is a french version of open office?
Never mind TFA, this is just payback time for the 'freedom fries' jibes... None of your nasty closed-source software - we will 'ave the free(dom) software instead!
:-)
Oh, and I spit in your general direction!
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Good Job France -- seems that the French/Freedom fry equality is true - they really do stand for freedom.
the rioters burned all the Windows licenses.
France surrenders!
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Employees don't see cost savings, so they need to see feature benefits. Hard to tell if there are enough new or better features to justify the the move.
I bet they will need support... and therefore, they will buy OO (oops, StarOffice) from Sun rather than instructing their employees to download it from the net. Therefore, they will just exchange one company for the other.
Good for Sun, good for OpenOffice... bad for Paris Hilton =)
http://www.automatiq.se
"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."
So basically they moved from the whims of closed-source suppliers, to the itches of open-source suppliers.
Some of the French youth are extremely happy about getting their hands on Firefox.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
From the article: The city is also responsible for IT matters in its primary and middle schools. There, it has installed Open Office on 2,150 computers, and plans to bring the total to 3,500 by the end of March, it said. French high schools are run directly by central government.
B-b-b-but those poor kids won't learn how to use Microsoft Windows! How will they ever succeed in the real world?!
(This is sarcasm, folks, regarding a commonly-cited reason for American school systems to standardize on Microsoft Windows.)
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Hmm, I hope they hurry the hell up and do the conversion BEFORE the city gets burned down around them. :)
Ok, Ok, some of us just can't resist a bit of taunting the French. Actually I do hope it can be pulled off for a change, getting tired of reading about conversion projects started and then scrapped as things either get complicated or Microsoft's wallet opens to local politicians.
Democrat delenda est
This could have a much bigger impact than just 17,000 users. Just about the only time I have to dig out IE is to access some crazy government site that I HAVE to use, but can't get to work with anything but IE. It might not be ideal, but if it becomes the case that Parisians can't pay their taxes or something unless they use Firefox, well that's got to be good for Firefox. After all, after being forced to try it, they might like it!
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
With MS, there is only one place to get real support; MS.
With nearly all (or perhaps all) OSS products, you can get support in a number of places. Other companies are offering OO support. Of course, Sun does good support, so I would not be surprised to see them win the contract. But OO is not a monopoly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm recycling a comment from another AC in another Scuttlemonkey/**Beatles-Beatles post. This guy's getting worse than Roland Picklepail:
Am I the only person who has noticed the numerous stories that get posted by *--Beatles-Beatles? Am I also the only person who has noticed that the link used in is name is a constantly changing URL (depending on the story) with pointers to various scammy sites? Is it not obvious what he's doing? He's using the awesome PageRank of slashdot do promote his sites based on searches that have the word Beatles in them.
It's a small price to pay for free advertising. Find a story, summarize it in 5 minutes, post to slashdot, and get a pagerank boost that advertisers would pay hundreds (or maybe thousands) for. (Text links on high-ranking sites is big business - just ask oreilly).
Slashdot should at least put a ref=nofollow in the links to submitters (or better yet, only link the submitter's name to his/her user page).
In closing, a quick bit of WHOIS shows that all the sites linked by **B-B are registered to Carl Fogle. Carl, cut this crap out.
IIRC, It was the Windows boxes that were broken into, and then accessed the sidekick. The sidekick was suppose to be open to the network, os it did what it was designed to do.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
....is what has their experience been during this migration? What are the things they've tripped over? This sort of info would be handy to combat the FUD that the PHB's have stuck in their heads.
Also, is this the largest migration to an open source environment that anybody has heard of? That piece of info would be nice to know.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
The unemployment soared to 30%. Pundents blame the lack of supply chain jobs.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I believe the move falls more into the "nothing personal, just business" stack. Windows' TCO sucks! Plain simple. Except from that, you made excellent points there.
Res publica non dominetur
We should definitely change the name to "Freedom Source".
Wait for it...
Wait...
It runs faster.
Well, just as one has America to blame for Microsoft, one also has America to thank for bringing us Free Software. I think it is purely a cost issue -- nobody likes to pay the Microsoft Tax, and, since American states like Massachusetts are stepping up and saying "No", I think it emboldens other governments to do the same.
In Finland, my home city had a widely publicised project to start using open source software. In the end, the project was scrapped, with the only thing achieved being that MS lowered it's licensing fees somewhat.
Only a few weeks ago the City anounced it would purchase a new MS software for all of its computers.
This was probably due to proficious wining and dining on the part of MS.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
"given their hate for America"? o.O Wow. Talk about trolling.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
How is that modded to insightful?
France does not hate America and doesn't really care about the anglicization of the French language. Only a few really vocal conservatives care about anglicization and they go "shopping" and "park" their cars next to the "building".
Also your comment about a French version of Windows being poorly translated is false. It is very easy to have a completely French computer if all you install is French versions of the software you want. Mix and match your software and you could see Korean and Elbonian on your computer.
Please stop with that fallacy about France hating America. The only thing France hates about America is now at record lows in approval ratings. Seems you have more in common with the French than you might expect.
"And thank the French language for having separate words gratuit and libre, to distringuish the meanings of free. No excuse for the open source buzzword coerupting ouyr message there.,"
gratuit = gratuito (esp) = without cost
libre = libre (esp) = free
those languages (fr and esp) are more subtle, english is way to easy
cheers
[JL] IH8U
*I* managed to see the humor, sarcastic as it was.
Yeah! Another post related to France. I can't wait for the flow of rioting cheese eating surrender monkey hate posts to follow. Boycott France, United we stand and God bless america.
0
The French Scapegoat http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/10/19/193648/4
(Score 5: Offtopic.)
Not to worry, french people being currently reached by "your message" perfectly understand the two senses of the english word. I suspect this is true for most non-american countries.
I don't have much to add.
... how to properly insult the stupid french over this. But then I saw that, really, this represents the french surrendering to our open source power.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
...you support malaria, riots, and car-torching.
I read
"Given their hate for America" ? Duh? France doesn't "hate" America any more than any country in the world, and probably like America more than most countries in the world. As for the "anglofication" of the language, well the Elders try to prevent it, but most of the youth use a lot of english words (like "cool", "joystick", "chat"), and a lot of english words are also commonly used ("parking", "joystick", "week-end", etc...). Many efforts are made to keep the french language and culture alive though. And I think it's great because the french culture is good (a lot of renowned book authors or poets for instance). Not "the best culture in the world", because no such thing exists, but definitively a great one.
I used a French version of windows ocne. Only the very front was translated, any error messages, anything practically not visible at first view was still in English.
I use a French Windows everyday, and basically everything is translated, except maybe the Blue Screen Of Death. I think what you saw could be third-parties software error messages not translated. Microsoft actually did a great job (aaar! don't mod me down!) translating their OS's to French (I don't know for other languages).
And thank the French language for having separate words gratuit and libre, to distringuish the meanings of free. No excuse for the open source buzzword coerupting ouyr message there.
Just for the people who don't know: gratuit means free (as in beer), libre means free (as in open source and freedom). So Firefox is gratuit and libre.
My sister in law is student in "teacher's school" (no idea how you call that in english) in france.
She'll be a teacher in primary school next year. They have computer courses to be able to teach children how to use a word processor, web browser or graphic editor. What's interesting is that they learn everything on free software, are given a cd full of OSS (for Windows), and encouraged to distribute it around them.
They're told not to use commercial software with children, simply because their parents are not necessary wealthy enough to pay for the stuff at home so it would create ineqalities among the children. Very good idea if you ask me. Now if they could make a program to build very cheap computers and give one to each child it would be even better. But that's a start.
The right to burn a car is your fundamental right to exercise your Liberty in the Sixth Republic of France. Note, however, that when burning a car, you need to carefully check, whether the the design of the car is Free; that is, it is licensed as GNU GPL. If it is, you're obliged to use a version of Molotov's coctail that's formula is licensed under a GPL compatible license to ignite the car, as the coctail is then linked to the car by the fire and is as such, becomes a derivative work of it.
Those using a non-Free or a non-GPL-compatible version of Molotov's coctail when burning a car shall be subject to a fine of up to 10,000 F and the material costs of the burned car.
*ducks*
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
Why not do what we did: make your office PDF free?
.rtf, anything sent outside the office gets converted to .pdf before sending. Your method makes you a troll, apparently.
.doc format.
Because PDFs work, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it? Anything that's edited in-office is
The files are enormous
It depends how you make them. I can LaTeX up a file and the resulting pdf will be (typically) 30->100kB in size. Others are just comprised of scanned pictures, and the largest I've seen is 2.5MB. If you think that's enormous, get some more storage (it's really cheap nowadays) and then look at the
the readers are bloated (and at 56+ Meg just to open a fucking file, I'd call "bloated" generous)
Evince is using 40.4MB to read a typical PDF with standard text/pictures for me, and that's hardly putting strain on the total memory. While Firefox is using over 100MB.
and they're a pain in the ass to alter
Some people might consider that a strong point. Try printing it out and writing on it if you need to edit it so badly.
Could somebody please tell me why people use PDF's in the first place?
Because they're what you see is what you get, anywhere? Compare that with almost all word processor formats where the layout is dependent on fonts, printers, the program, all sorts of things. Not to mention that it's well-supported.
Stop complaining about the file format just because you've been using them badly. PDFs were never intended to be a word-processor format, so stop treating them as one.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Now we know the true cause of the riots. They were obviously financed and sponsored by Microsoft in retaliation.
No I do not think it is the largest. For example by the end of 2005 the 70,000 workstations used by the French Gendarmerie will use Open Office. This is the biggest French migration. The Gendamerie hope to save 2 million euros per year. 10,000 computers bought since 2004 will have OO preinstalled. The Gendarmerie say this saves 75 euros per PC for an MS Office license.
The Gendarmerie say it is not just a simple question of money. Managing Microsofts complicated license structure was becoming a nightmare for the Gendarmerie - reason alone for the migration.
The Gendarmerie is also redevloping in Java a number of standard VB macros written for word to automate form filling. The idea is to leave open a possible future migration to Linux. XML will be used as a storage format along with PDF and open document formats. Stephane Kimmerlin for MS France says it is not a victory for OO, the Gendarmerie only used a fraction of MS Office's features so didn't really need the power offered by MS Office.
In France the interior ministry will move 50,000 workstations to Open Office, the finance ministry is moving 8,000 PCs to OO, the public works ministry is looking to move 60,000 PCs to OO and Customs have migrated 16,000 PCs to OO and its use is mandatory since January 2005.
Hope that proves useful.
David
ps I've consulted for the French Education ministry for their Antares project - a Java based system for managing recruitment which used JBoss and also Weblogic.
First, they start with beheading a stupid queen.
Then, a bunch of punk ass kids get away with acting out violent Grand Theft Auto scenes.
If that weren't enough, they made the gov't admit systemic racism to boot.
Now they're all going open source? What the $!@# is goin' on? I guess you can really have your cake and eat it too!
I'd pack up, move to Paris and join all that debauchery if I weren't scared piss of the US gearin' up for Operation Liberate France! Them nuke-totin' anarchists will not be allowed to get away with all this terrorism.
My issue with the French stems largely from WWII as well. To my mind, their reaction to the Nazis cost them all rights to any future griping. Any group of people who is sufficiently mentally defective to vote to allow the Nazis into your country so that they don't bomb your musems, is too mentally defective to be allowed a voice in any future decisions.
Sure, Mr. Hitler, come on in. Round up our Jews, our staunch Catholics, our Gypsies, and kill our people. Just, please, oh please don't bomb our musems.
What a bunch of logic that was!
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
Just because France is doing this and (if you listen to the likes of Bill O'Reilly) they're sworn enemies of America?
Honestly, if London, Berlin, Dublin, Madrid or any other European city had opted for OSS, would it have been viewed as a political news item?
This bollocks is, well, a load of bollocks.
Have you ever used a foreign Language version of Windows? The core is still in English.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Am I the only one who originally read the title as "Particle Accelerators Move to Open Source" and was preparing a "Beowolf cluster of strangelets" reply before realizing the truth?
Let me give you an example:
Do you know that since maybe 8 years we have halloween day here too ? It didn't exist before that, it has never been in our culture. All we knew about halloween was from the US movies. But suddently one day in october we've seen all the halloween merchandising invade the supermarkets, shops in town decorating their windows with spooky themes, disco clubs having halloween nights and children coming at our home asking for candy. That's it, some bright bastards had managed to make a huge campaign to sell their merchandising for a nonexisting celebration in france, and had managed to involve schools, and whatnot to create a tradition.
You might say that we could just refuse to celebrate it if we don't like it, but the children had been intoxicated with the stuff with all the "halloween special" shows they had seen on tv during the preceding month, and their teachers who realized that children love to make spooky masks. So the children genuinely wanted to celebrate Halloween, even if they didn't had the slightest idea of the cultural background behind it, like their parents.
So now they come for candy, try to say the same phrase that children say is the US to have their candy and we try to react like the american characters we've seen in the movies because we don't know what we're really supposed to do. It's just surreal...
It's not that we don't like american culture, I mean american movies are quite watched around here, but we don't like to have a different culture , any culture, pushed down our throat like that.
If we let you share Bonfire Night, can we join in on Bastille Day?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I used the English version of Windows NT for some years, and I would sometimes get an error message saying 'Datei kann nicht gefunden werden' ('File can not be found' in German), so I consider it highly likely that not all of the error messages in the French version are in French...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Speaking as a French, that sounds like a nice compromise ;-)
was the whole bit about "This fine british paper" that Powell presented. A paper from, suposedly british intelligence origin, describing all the Über-Threats from Iraq and the dangers coming from them. When it hit the news that the entire paper was copy and pasted from an american students essay posted on the internet, related to Desert Storm in 1991 - copied with exact same typos and all - I was laughing my head off for half an hour. I still crack up today just writing about this. ... The sad part is that they usually do.
Absolutely hilarious with cheap and phony shams polititians use to try to get away with things.
"Fine british paper." An instant classic. Absolutely.
...
As a matter of fact I've been laughing to tears again the last 5 minutes at the end of this post.
Monthy Python really pales compared to the bizarness of this incident.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'm sorry but no i'm trying to convince the germans to swap bastille day with the beer festival. It's longer, much more alcoolized and you get to pee while standing at the bar. But once it's here you guys sure can come. We never refuse an invasion of alcoolized streakers in our beer festival.
That's just great, do you want Microsoft to translate the variable names?!
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
"english is way to easy" Not too easy?
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
They are just doing it because it's free.....! NoMorePoints.com soon to be NoMoreFreeLoaders.com
;) nice, busted, anyway, "English been too easy" is like an unbased statistic, it's just my opinion pulled out of my ass.
[JL] IH8U
I mean, look at it this way....
With a fire wall like that, they sure as hell won't need security.... "I try to root your box!" "Hon hon hon! yahr beurx eeeez on fahr!!!!!!"
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Ah, but you can see how USA - Americans would think so. After all, being scared $#!7less about the actions of the current US government looks alot like hate.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
It's quite simple actually. You give them candy. That's it. That is Halloween. I have no idea where you got the idea that there was culture behind it. We bastardized someone else's culture to produce Halloween. It's just an excuse to sell shit and eat junk food. The problem is you have corporations and retailers that saw how their American brethren were making piles of money on superficial holidays and they decided they wanted a piece of the action ;)
I hope you're at least talking about NT 4.0, but even then you're talking about software released nearly a decade ago.
You can blame many people for the English tradition (yes English tradition, not American) but Americans are only part of the reason why Halloween appeared in France.
n ce.htm France Télécom has about as much to do with the tradition spanning to France as American television did. The first I saw of Halloween was in Saint-Pierre and Miquelon in 1990. I hear from friends in Bretagne that in Rennes locals are resisting the tradition.
- 30-298586 I was in Canada at the time but could tell that France was going through some deep changes from the looks of it.
According to this link: http://french.about.com/library/bl-halloweeninfra
The first I heard about Halloween in mainland France was when Orange (France Telecom partnership with the English operator) decided to put thousands of pumpkins around the trocadero to sell their new phone. http://www.humanite.fr/journal/1999-10-30/1999-10
I'm not sure Halloween should be something to "blame" on the USA on and actually come to think of it France should concentrate on American cultural memes which disfavor some of France's finest achievements. I'd be more scared of the commercial beers, process cheese and fast food crap that does inroads on the French market. All of these things replace to some extent the fine wines, liquors and ciders, outsanding cheeses and excellent restaurants that are unequaled world wide (IMHO).
If anything France should adapt with Halloween and use it to market their nougats, papillotes, guenots and other local candies. I believe 99% of what French people ingest is of better quality than what crap we eat here in North America. Chocolate bars in France don't have wax in them, MSG is illegal in restaurants, etc...
France still has a lot of fronts to defend their qualities on. Not having Halloween isn't imho a quality.
Chirac's opposition to the war is not really the French issue with we right wingers. Chirac using France and Europe as a counterpoint to American power is. In other words, Chirac sees France as the leader of an opposition to the United States simply for the sake of opposing it.
Chirac made numerous trips around the world decrying everything about American culture and as a consequence, the American people, and he's attempted to rally the world to his vision of France as the leader of a block standing against the American "threat". If he wants to view the USA as a threat, that's fine by him, but you can't honestly say France is a friend to the United States for painting us that way.
Thus, we on the right believe that to say the USA has alienated our "French ally" has missed the point. France is not our ally. She's a "friendly" rival because she wants to be, and I just don't see a reason why the United States needs to kiss up to France if France is going to be so petulant.
This is my sig.
Even the French understand irony.
Trust me, I work for the government.
Why can't Slashdot have an Edit button? Reposting as Plain Old Text:
I'm assuming the -s suffixes are pluralizations. Someone once told me that Pomme d'terre (Earth apple) is French for "potato". I've always strongly associated deep-frying ("fritere" in Norwegian) with French cooking.
German and Norwegian share a great number of words, idioms and grammatical constructs. A linguist once said that the easiest language for a Norwegian to learn is Low German. It's apparently not the same as regular German, but having the name, I'm guessing it's in the same ballpark. German is easy enough. A Norwegian can allegedly speak the language fluidly after only 6 months in Germany.
It kinda spoils the fun of linguistic nationalism each time you stumble across what seemed an ultra-Norwegian word and it turns out to be borrowed from German.
But talking about the manufactured evidence that supposedly incriminated Iraq in the eyes of the hypocritical invaders (Chinese military occupation and genocide in Tibet seems to be perfectly acceptable for both Blair & Bush!), it's the story of the one mentally unstable Iraqi refugee, a pathological liar nicknamed Curveball, that explains how crazy unverified rumours were processed into "undeniable facts" by the wannabe aggressor regimes.
In the run-up to the war and long into the invasion the "wholly-embedded" US media was scarily jingoistic so it is a minor relief that the "patriotic" war-journalism has finally given way to some soul- and fact-searching.
How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball' The Iraqi informant's German handlers say they had told U.S. officials that his information was 'not proven,' and were shocked when President Bush and Colin L. Powell used it in key prewar speeches. (LA Times, November 20, 2005)
It is a long and detailed chronicle of an empire hell-bent on starting a war, and how media-massaged 88% popularity ratings make it easy for the most hapless of Führers to manipulate the state machinery and the populace of "the greatest democracy".
I wonder how many americans are still boycotting produce from the democratic and anti-war Old Europe but have no trouble buying Chinese imports and thereby aiding and abetting the oppressive and expansionist dictatorship there? Actually almost the whole planet was against the war but the fact that some sycophantic governments took decision to participate in the "grand coalition of the billing" against the popular opinion camouflaged that fact from the american public for a while. Meanwhile the Chinese state propaganda machine is still having a field day reporting about the American military quaqmire while the Communist Party is busy creating alliances with anti-Bush developing countries around the globe.
The most unfortunate long-term result of that American uni-lateralism may not be the civil war and splitting of Iraq into smaller ethno-religious states but the split between the USA and Europe which will benefit the Sino-Russian neo-imperial block. With moral-free business ties reigning supreme so far above the so-called "western values of freedom and democracy" that it isn't even funny, the politically bullied or already occupied neighbours of those authoritarian powers will be the biggest losers in this sad saga started by a handful of neo-cons backed by the american religious far-right.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
how about the term "inclusive" ? It's so rarely used by marketing people producing English language adverts, and can be such a useful word.
"Buy a car, get a free road tax and tank of fuel"
"okay, I'll have the free road tax and tank of fuel, and leave the car"
as opposed to
"Buy a car, get inclusive road tax and tank of fuel".
no confusion possible.
a Beowulf cluster of misreadings. And all of them leading to a reply.
Well, as you can see I referred to the fictional Sixth Republic of France, so I didn't want to use the €. But I didn't know that it was FF instead of just F.
/. naturally does not recognise the € sign, as its charset is iso-8859-1, aka latin-1. The € sign is not part of that charset; AFAIK only iso-8859-15, aka latin-9 (and closely resembling latin-1), and various Unicode charsets, such as UTF-8, have the € sign included.
Btw,
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
Thank Amireca for bringing Free Software ? Yes, there's some people in America writting free software, but there's also people from all around the world.
wtf.n0x.org
I use a French Canadian version at work. Some applications installed in English still have Ok-Annuler buttons instead of the Ok-Cancel ones.
Our contract is up for renegotiation this year and I'm wondering if there are any other union contracts that direct their employers to make a move to Open Source as a cost saving measure to save jobs during budget cuts.
Also, can anyone recommend the most accurate reports that detail cost savings per workstation by moving to an Open Source OS or OpenOffice?
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co
What the parent means is that occasionally dialogs pop up with English in them, typically errors and warnings, sometimes only button labels. It's more unsettling than one would think if one truly speaks no English.
Look at the parent comment moderation. Yesterday it was +4 with already the reasonable flamebait score. Today modded down all by overrated. Nothing wrong in getting modded overrated, but it's quite a strange distribution, all favorable and "responsibly negative" ratings first, all cowardly unfavorable later. So what, you say? Imagine a beowulf cluster of a microsoft astroturfers' fake slashdot accounts.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol