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French Military Police Switches to Firefox
Oslo_the_CKC writes to tell us that French Magazine Linux Pratique recently published an interview with General Brachet of the Gendarmie Nationale. In the interview he discusses why they have moved over 100,000 personnel over to Firefox and Thunderbird (70,000 and 45,000 respectively). This follows on last year's switch to OpenOffice.org so it seems like the French Military Police are enjoying the success of open source.
but ferreal... who cares?
The more bricks that start falling out of the Microsoft monopoly will encourage extra bricks to fall and might take the entire wall down after some time. Don't forget street credibility! Every small step in the right direction is a small step in the right direction...
Dependency hell? =>
This would seem to be a pretty bold move - think about it. They're using software which wasn't blessed by the winPope at Redmond. Were it any other commercial organization, there would be an acknowledgement that somebody within the organization had to be pretty gutsy to press for a non-Microsoft solution to anything.
Unless the organization were, say, IBM or Sun or HP, for example. ;^D
For Christ's Sake.
20 comments - the majority of which are 'French surrender' jokes.
1) Some originality would be nice.
2) I thought 2006 was the year the American public would wake up to the way they're manipulated (can you remember having the same contempt for the french prior to their [justified] opposition to Iraq II?)
3) Leave the french-hatred to countries that have a reason to hate the french. Like New Zealand or just about anywhere in the South Pacific
4) Some originality would be nice. Every time there's a French story, its like reading fark.
5) Please see points 1 and 5.
My pics.
Oh please. The reason it made the front page is because it's a major switch to Firefox. Doesn't matter who switches, just that some large organization made the switch.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
I think all countries should be working on their own information exchange platforms.
How do you think Dept. of Homeland Security would feel if all of their computers were running on a closed OS manufactured by China?
It's like outsorcing your whole communication infrastructure to a different country.
Foreign countres would do well to consider switching all of their government computation to open source OSs, or developing their own. Firefox and OO are a good start though.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
...Our first goal is to migrate all the upper layers of the workstation to Open Source Software to be independent of the Operating System.(...)
To me, this was the single most interesting line in the entire article. Telling everyone that they must migrate to another operating system in one big step is bound to meet resistance and hassles. Instead they get people familiar with their day-to-day software tools, so that migrating to Linux/OSX/whatever later is largely irrelevant. If people's word processor and email system are still the same, they won't much care what OS is running.
With this strategy Windows loses its special status and becomes just a commodity, providing only storage and network access. It also becomes replacable on a whim (or close to it).
A quote would be:
Note the omission marks. Or more correctly
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
I don't get it, just because they refused to send their young men and women into Iraq to fight for basically American politcal interests, folks hated them?! And don't give me this shit about the Iraq war is part of the War on Terror. Show me some evidence that Hussein was in fact harboring terrorists and/or financing them!
Read slashdot more often and read the comments please. Comments in this previous story say that this isn't the department of Culture who said it, but the SACEM (the French equivalent to the RIAA). And another, more recent story (I don't care about looking for it) says that this bill proposal has been heavily amended and turned into a legalisation of P2P and reverse-engineering for open source software among others.
(Apart from that I agree with the parent post. The anti-France stuff is just another reminder that a lot of high-school kids post to Slashdot.)
It's amazing that the people who whine that we saved France in WWII so conveniently forget that Soviet Russia saved our asses in that same war... If it wasn't for the 20 million Russians who died fighting Hitler, who knows how much more bloody that war would have been for Americans.