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Free Software Wins Court Battle in Quebec
courteaudotbiz writes "In a court battle in the province of Quebec, Canada, initiated more than two years ago, free software activists Savoir Faire Linux (translated 'Linux know-how') won the right to submit offers (Google translation; original French version) when the government takes public requests for submissions to replace its desktop operating systems and office suites. This opens the possibility in the future of replacing Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office in favor of Linux and OpenOffice.org, or any other operating system and office productivity suite. In his judgment, the magistrate said that the government acted illegally when it discarded the proposal of Savoir Faire Linux for replacing Windows XP with a Linux distribution."
Whenever the province of Quebec appears in the news, what is usually lacking in the story is any mention of the ever-present language issue. Basically, the seven million people in Quebec speak French and the other five hundred million people in North America don't. To deal with this situation, the fanatics that have controlled Quebec for the past forty years (more or less) have institutionalized and perpetuated a peculiar fantasy that everyone else in NA must adapt to their need to continue using this legacy language in all manner of public interaction above the level of conversation. This is why you see French translations on products in places like Southern California and Mexico, where no one speaks French.
Now personally I like the French language. It's one of the civilized languages of the world, along with English and C++. All the other languages are distant also-rans. But the present generation of native French speakers are totally clueless as to how to restore this beautiful language to its proper place in the world. They are such nit-wits that they are risking the possibility of having French disappear from use in the next hundred years like all the other European and tribal legacy languages, like Polish and Apache.
What is desperately needed is a powerful, free, and widely-available computer program that accurately translates English, and eventually the other superfluous languages of the world, into French. And French back into English. The Turing test for this program would be to say something (speech-to-text included, of course!) into the program, translate it Eng to Frn, re-translate it back to Eng, and have it comprehensibly match the original speech.
This is what the people of Quebec should be working on during those long cold winter nights that start in mid-September and last until mid-May. But instead, we who venture to their beautiful country, get endless amounts of merde about our unwillingness to employ this wonderful language in our attempts at self-improvement through conversation with the people in this wonderful country. But mes amis, it's not unwillingness on our part, it's inability. It's not our fault that we were born in the 99.4% of the world that doesn't have French as a birth language. So, s'il vous plait, cut us some slack, Jacques.
And start developing the machine that will do the translating for us. It is more important than all the other technical issues in this wonderful country.
Je me souviens: Quebec I forgot: Ontario I never gave a shit: California ?Que?: everyone else in the western hemisphere