Slashdot Mirror
French Parliament To Go Open Source
dhoyte writes, "Newsfactor.com reports that next June the French parliament will be switching from Microsoft to open source products such as Linux for desktops and servers and OpenOffice for day-to-day documents. They see it as a cost-cutting measure." The French have not settled on a Linux distribution yet. The article quotes an analyst voicing a note of caution: "'The evidence on the cost savings attributable to a switch to Linux has been mixed,' according to Chris Swenson, director of software industry analysis at research group NPD. 'There has been some evidence that companies have to spend a good deal on training and support after you deploy...'"
It'll probably Mandriva. Isn't that a French company anyway?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Although I am a little bit skeptical about news that states large organisations will be switching to open source. I recall similar a story in Australia, in which Telstra (IIRC) was going to switch to Linux until M$ offered them below normal pricing.
A game has objectives and is competitive, anything else is just play
'There has been some evidence that companies have to spend a good deal on training and support after you deploy...'"
Nonsense! Linux is so easy to use you can take it out of the box and plug it in. And be working that same day.
I'm sick of hearing about retraining as being a reason not to change to Linux. The facts are that you're going to have to retrain everyone when you're forced to upgrade anyways. The big difference being that your Linux rollout will cost less, and provide future savings in the form of not having to upgrade and retrain for the next big change in an MS Office menu.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Can anybody get some estimates of the cost of training and support for a recent majour MS Office update? I figure that that should be somewhere near the cost of a switch...
FOI request anybody?
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
It seems to me that money spent on education tends to pay off all around especially when that education teaches people how to do things without being locked to a certain vendor. Education passes from one person to another whereas buying commercial software locks you to that vendor and is not allowed to pass from person to person. Even if the costs are identical the opensource solution empowers the user more than a commercial solution.
My experience though is that if the tasks you need to do can be done using opensource you will save quite a bit of money. If there are rough spots you need fixed you can spend a little bit of money to hire, or sponsor, an existing developer of that project to make things work the way you need. For what you could spend to buy a few licenses of your average commercial app you could have the opensource equivilant customized to your needs. That is power over your own fate. How much is that worth over years or decades?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
As Stallman explained at WSIS, if we argue based on cost, they can offer that too, but if we argue based on freedom, they're not even in the running.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
The French have not settled on a Linux distribution yet.
Translation: We want to see what Microsoft's counteroffer will be; if it's too low, we'll state we're picking Ubuntu, and if Microsoft still hasn't given a huge keep-me deal, we'll say we probably want Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
[
...must be a nexus point in the Matrix, déjà vu seems to happen quite often around here
~~~ Paf. Le chien.
Most of the things that are different are not used by the average person anyway. A French Parliament member would likely stay in their home directory, not use the command prompt, etc.
you have to remember that its the French Parliement. Parliement, not any kind of technical branch of the government. The people affected by this move will only surf the web, write reports and emails.
I dont think that a massive training will be needed to switch from IE to Firefox, etc. Nor will it be from scratch. From a strictly user view, for the computer illiterate, the only changes they will notice will be maybe fonts, or colors.
~~~ Paf. Le chien.
It's hardly a "from scratch" situation for normal users. Normal users will adapt to the new system the quickest. They'll complain the most, but they will actually have the least difficulty. Actually, quite a bit of skills will transfer over nicely, people will complain, but the actual differences are moot. The hardest parts to switch will be in the server room where your database setup depends on functions unique to MS SQL server and other such problems. Then again these switches will be implemented by people who are expected to implement "from scratch" solutions. I do understand that these training costs are going to be higher than normal, but in the long run I think they are hardly viable arguments. What if for instance they had never switched over to computers because of the training costs?
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Slashdot has ads?
The path of least resistance is to switch pure functionality servers first. Things that provide services like DNS, DHCP, and NTP. The Linux machines can also hold the file shares even if Windows is still serving the directory. Anyhoo, you start simple and work up slowly on those.
On the desktops, deploy FOSS apps one at a time as dependencies allow. Even Office is tough if a lot of bespoke apps laying around use it as a development environment. Sneak up on that as long as you can too. Once the users are broken in on FOSS app replacements, begin switching the OS for those users you've managed to get using purely FOSS apps. Move up through the users from there. The last and most difficult cases can be handled with virtual machines and terminal servers.
If things are done this way rather than in one fell swoop then you avoid a user rebellions with great missing chunks of missing functionality amidst the kludges. You can also try things out first with the users who have a bit of clue and build up experience within the organization. Most of the negative Linux organization switch stories I've heard involved either the Fell Swoop approach or not having sufficient Linux/BSD/UNIX admin talent on hand.
If posting as an AC implies BS, what should we make of you?
I really doubt that. I don't have any experience with the French Parliament, but I did a lot of contracting with the Canadian Parliament for a few years, and I can tell you that they have a huge data management task. They were responsible for the timely publication of every single formal statement, document, report etc. from our politicians. And we all know that politicians do love to talk.
One of the services we offered the was daily Hansard (a record of everything spoken in Parliament during a session), which was fielded by and indexed, cross-linked in both official languages and searchable by language, Party affiliation, region, riding and protocol (e.g. Question Period, Votes, etc.). Every morning by 07:00, we had everything spoken the day before prepped and readied for our customers. This data was merged into the existing infobase, creating a tremendously powerful research tool. And that was only one aspect of the kind of data management services they offered.
I'm inclined to say that the French Parliament probably did a needs analysis and decided on FOSS for precisely the opposite reason you're suggesting. If my experience in Canada is any indication, their typical workstation needs would be quite advanced, and the ability to create special purpose data management tools in open, interchangeable formats for a reasonable cost would likely be the most compelling reasons to move to Linux.
I say that from experience. It was the work I did with these guys (and other clients at the time) that convinced me to move away from Windows entirely. I haven't ever regretted that decision.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
I think governments just say that so M$ lowers their price...
> Getting someone to use OOo doesn't make it one bit easier to switch from Win32 to Linux on the desktop.
Oh hell yes it does, especially in an organization. If all of an organization's data is in Office format that organization will probably stay on Windows. Crossover Office ain't going to cut it (Office license + CX Office license and forget getting a sweet deal on the Office licensing) and neither will OO.o's import filters. First time a document doesn't work 100% in the initial testing a MS fanboy (MCSE type afraid of learning) will raise holy hell.
Get everyone off of Office and IE first and swapping out the underlying OS is a lot easier. Remember, people don't run an OS they run applications.
Democrat delenda est
Universities.
... and then they built the supercollider.
do tell me whats so complex about a linux desktop? using kde, it couldn't be more simple, and has modes of operation compatable with the classic windows interface.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
For 98% of people, 98% of their skills. As 98% of office workers just click to open a document, type, and click on a button to format, click on a button to print or email. The support techs are the ones who will have to actually learn anything new; and as they're already using Linux servers, that won't be a stretch for them.
The 2% who have VBA mactros and such will need more hand-holding. But it's certain that an upgrade to Vista would cause a lot of grief for them too.
Yes, I made up the figures. But it's based on my personal observation of what real people in offices do all day.
Like all of the other large rollouts that get announced to great fanfare and then get abandoned to even greater press releases, white papers and case studies, Microsoft will go in and make em an offer they won't refuse.
That's how i would feel about such an announcement in general. But it's now a couple years in France that the police switched to Open Office, and more recently, the tax office underwent the transition. There might be more administrations, but i don't know about them, having no insiders. The parliament switch looks like a continuation, not some brand new announcement. The french state has *already* started to switch to an open solution.
This post is awesome.
A strict subset cares about freedom, and they're probably already running Linux.
Or they're the kind of people used to looking at the bigger picture and beyond the next quarterly results, such as, say, governments?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
There are a few situations I can see where everyday workstation users might have a bit of trouble without any training. One would be, as you touched upon, mounting devices, CDs, floppies, USB sticks, etc., to get files that aren't on the primary hard drive or to save something. OK, maybe a French depute doesn't need to understand all of the mechanics and optional arguments of dd or mkisofs, but eventually someone will want to take work home with them on a disk/CD, load something off a pen drive, or burn a graphical presentation to a DVD. Having to tell them as part of the IT department, "Oh, that's too complicated for you. Yeah, I know even someone as stupid as you could figure it out in Windows, but it's a bit trickier now--there's more to remember. I'll come by and do it for you later" is simply not going to be tolerated very long. The problem only gets harder when one considers that the older you get, the more resistant one becomes to new information and ideas. And parliaments aren't exactly full of people in their prime.
Another problem that could arise is if the XServer crashes and the user, who maybe hasn't used DOS in 10+ years, is suddenly met with this command prompt and a lot of text about XFontErrors and core dumps. Their first thought probably won't be, "Woops, I guess I'd better restart the XServer and e-mail this core dump and a list of things I was doing at the time to the appropriate people. How mildly inconvenient," but rather, "Oh, shit, oh shit oh shit, I just destroyed the computer. I'm going to be fired!" and that's when, thinking back to their days in Windows when they needed to fix a crashed program, hit the power button to reboot the computer...without unmounting any of the filesystems or properly shutting down.
I'm too young to have read tech magazines in the late 80s/early 90s (other than those often funny often unfunny Fifth Wave strips in the Xxxx for Dummies books). Was there all this bullshit back then too about how people shouldn't switch from MS-DOS/Mac/etc. to Windows for Workgroups because of the "high cost of training people?"
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
THere's no such thing as "standard point of sale hardware". They *all* have different protocols. Commercial POS software tends to only support a tiny fraction of the hardware on the market, so generally when buying a POS system - you'll look at the software that does what you want THEN select hardware that works with it.
The nearest thing there is to a standard for the hardware is at the signalling level - it's generally all still RS-232, or if it's USB, it's USB set up as an RS-232 USB device (or if you're unlucky, USB set up as a HID generating keyboard input). The protocols used by the hardware are pretty simple though - for example, most barcode scanners just spit out the data in ASCII and that's that. Cash drawers are often not directly connected to the computer, but connected to the receipt printer - and you tell the printer to pop the draw open.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
OTOH Linux, as you say, can start working on the same day, unless, of course, you start the installation less than ten minutes before midnight, in which case it won't be working until the next day.