French Kids Get OSS on USB Sticks

daria42 writes "To help make kids aware of alternatives to proprietary software the Ile-de-France, the political district of greater Paris, will give 175,000 school children and apprentices USB keys loaded with open-source software. With a word-processing program, audio and video playback capabilities, an email client and an IM client, these are essentially computers on a stick. The council touts this as 'represent[ing] for students a tool of freedom and mobility between their school, cybercafes and their home or friends' PCs'." With the prevalence of internet cafes in Europe, that might work better than in the US ... but do you think such a project would work here as well? If so, what software would you want to see loaded up?

Comments

Outrageous!

[nick_davison]

This sort of thing is happenning all over the world, including the US and many other English speaking nations.

But suddenly, because its France, its due to anti-Americanism (in spite the fact that many of the distributed apps are written in the US) and anti-English (although all commercial equivilants to the distributed apps have french localisation).

Exactly!

Damn French! Most English people have been anti-American for ages but all of a sudden, along come the French, gain all the credit and manage to make it look cool in the process!

I demand other nations, beyond the French, get equal credit for loathing the current American administration.

Re:There is more....

[AKabral]

and renaming the "USB" sticks the "FrenchB" sticks . . .Take that you darn Americans!