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

Re:There is more....

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

No one should underestimate the amount of anti-Americanism in this "give-away".

Unbelievable.

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).

I think someone else how replied to you was bang on the money. Traumatic head injury when young.

We Hate France

[Anonymous Coward]

The primary reason for the current far-right hatred of France is the war in Iraq. When USia was pitching the war, France was one of many countries that said that it was an absolutely stupid idea, destined for disaster. Now that the French prediction has come true, one would think that France would be due a certain measure of gratitude and an apology, as well as an acknowledgment that their advice should have been followed. Unfortunately, one of the defining characteristics of the extreme right is that they are unable to admit mistakes. This has had the effect of deepening the hatred and resentment towards France that is felt in some of USia's more trailer-oriented areas.

Re:We Hate France

[ISurfTooMuch]

I have to agree with this statement, but I think it's important to point out that it's the right-wing nutjobs who hate France, not a majority of Americans. I still laugh at the whole freedom fries/freedom toast thing. Morons. These people seem to forget, or they never knew, that if France hadn't helped us during the Revolutionary War, we'd likely have lost, and, had we lost, you can bet that the British Crown would have punished us severely. We have a lot to thank the French for. They've given the world culture, good food, and philosophy, and they helped liberate us from Britain. Oh yeah, and there's that statue they sent us. I'd say they've earned our respect. As for the flash drive project, I don't know. I have a feeling that many kids will simply erase them and use them for storing files. I applaud the effort, but a live CD or DVD might have been a better idea. What I'd do is set the CD/DVD up so that, if the kid runs it, they'll find a link to send them to a page where they can request the flash drive. That way, the drive will only go to those who are interested in using it for its intended purpose. Sure, they can still wipe it, but at least they'll have the chance to experience OSS before they get the drive.

I think this is what their getting

[c41rn]

I just looked into something like this for myself and found portableapps.com. You can load up your standard OSS on a USB stick and then use them on any windows computer. I went out and bought the fastest USB stick I could find and loaded a few of my favorites on there (Firefox, 7Zip, OpenOffice and a few others). It's been really helpful to have the software I want when I am in a variety of locked-down university computer labs and I can do things with this software that the other students around me can't like open some obscure types of compressed files, save documents as PDFs, and browse the internet ad-free. Highly recommended if you often use public computers or work on other peoples' machines.

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!