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Prime Minister to French Government: Favor FOSS Wherever Possible
concertina226 writes with interesting news from France. From the article: "French government agencies could become more active participants in Free Software projects, under an action plan sent by Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault in a letter to ministers (PDF, and in French of course), while software giants Microsoft and Oracle might lose out as the government pushes Free Software such as LibreOffice or PostgreSQL in some areas. ... He also wants them to reinvest between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save through not paying for proprietary software licenses, spending it instead on contributing to the development of the free software. The administration already submits patches and bug fixes for the applications it uses, but Ayrault wants to go beyond that, contributing to or paying for the addition of new functionality to the software."
vi
Now could you please repeal that 3-strikes law? It makes you a bunch corporate lapdog douche bags.
Thanks. Love your fries.
But... the future refused to change.
Microsoft has refused to implement essential features from C99 that exist in nearly every other C compiler. Don't try to claim that Visual Studio is advanced software.
Example: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zb1574zs(v=VS.100).aspx
Two things:
1) "Wherever Possible" means that they know FOSS doesn't have a solution to every little problem. However, if it comes down to word processors, databases, web browsers, etc then there are numerous FOSS alternatives.
2) Visual Studio is great for MS languages like VB.NET but I find it lacking for C++ or PHP, which I use different IDEs for. It's like saying a full-size pickup truck is the absolute best vehicle out there. Sure, it's great for a lot of tasks but I wouldn't want to use it for long distance commutes, cross-country travel, navigating narrow city streets...
QtCreator
helping the french economy by cutting costs and if they employ some french nationals to actually do the work that might help the french employment...
whatever next
regards
John Jones
Emacs
Fixed that for you :p
nano
Liberté, égalité, fraternité A motto for FOSS.
I had numerous arguments with Belgian politicians (yeah I know, why bother sometimes) about the same thing. But here they rather open new Microsoft "innovation" centers (especially here in Flanders) and blow their own horn how "advanced" we are because of their exceptional thinking. It aggravates me sometimes because it isn't true at all and it only gets worse with the rise of Flemish nationalism. The government here clashes sometimes also with FOSS developers, look at the whole itextpdf tax debacle.
From a society point of view Open Source software within the government (or government services) makes a lot of sense. It gives more (local) companies a change to compete and every euro that goes to improvement of OSS software also benefits companies and the general public as they can freely download the software (with the improvements) for their own use.
Another thing is also that OSS is also a lot more "leaner" maybe even "greener". In a lot of government agencies I see bulky beefy PC's just to be able to run properiate (mostly Microsoft) stuff. Think about the savings (in hardware and electricity) you can have if you convert those thousands of workplaces to cheaper less demanding systems just because you use an OS that uses less resources or is more efficient. And seeing how efficient Linux sometimes works on ARM hardware, it has a lot of potential. And it not that they do heavy calculations on most of those machines or they have high demands regarding multimedia or games... .
Personally I rather have my tax money to go the companies that uses or develops OSS solutions, then some big multinational shareholders.
I work in a U.S. fed agency, and I use a Linux distro, but most of the rest of my colleagues use Microsoft Windows.
Some observations about Windows vs. Linux:
1) You still need to have above average skills to get your work done on Linux, even if you are using a relatively user-friendly distro like Ubuntu. Most people, by definition, are not above average.
2) Some proprietary software is and always will be much better than anything comparable in the open-source world:
a) As compared with MS Office (Word, Excel, etc.), OpenOffice is a piece of crap.
b) Ditto for Subversion. As compared with proprietary source control like Harvest or Merant PVCS, Subversion is also a piece of crap.
That said, a government putting some of its spending power behind some key open source projects could produce some quality open-source software to shore up some of these shortcomings.
Also, open source software provides unprecedented opportunity for others to innovate with the software itself in ways you cannot do with proprietary software.
So, I fully approve of and support France's direction in supporting open source software in their government administration.
At the moment, the French economy is not doing well, to say the least: austerity has become the rule in the EU and so far, no signs of recovery have been observed (I for one don't think austerity is the right answer, but let's stay on-topic). As a FOSS enthusiast (and, incidentally, as a French...), I'm glad to see this kind of effort finally happening. But I also suspect our government sees this as a cheap way to cut licence costs and won't invest sufficiently in the migration. I think it makes sense from a economic standpoint in the middle/long term, but there is a transition period which I'm not sure they'll be willing (or able) to handle with sufficient resources.
iMac
Fixed that for you. :p
Why such a low reinvestment? Is that for external developers only? I would total up support costs, etc compare to licence fees and then reinvest 80% of the "savings", especially if it was 70% internal reinvestment (paid staff) and 10% external developers. Save yourself some money, but if you want to future effeciency and capabilities invest as much as you can.
Complexity Happens
Too much of FOSS is based on emulating existing desktop software. It's not doing a great job, and I don't know why. Libre Office is a joke compared to Microsoft Office, once you get out of the "writing letters to Grandma and recipes" phase. In the same way, there is no substitute for Visual Studio, a competitive Photoshop replacement or Open Source video games that compare with the commercial variants. These are task-oriented software products which lead users to anticipate a fully articulated tool.
Where FOSS shines is in areas of technical interest that are not driven by the needs of the consumer, but by other technology, and consistent with prior technology. The many FOSS programming languages, web servers, databases, etc. show why this is the case. These are more infrastructure-related projects which are not going to be driven by consumer demand, and are granular and don't require one great idea but building on other ideas. The tool is formed from stringing these "tool-lets" together.
Instead of trying to essentially rip off successful software packages, FOSS should recognize that the free enterprise model, in which individuals are rewarded for exceptional contributions and given "parental" rights to direct the development of their ideas, is better for specific task software packages especially on the desktop. FOSS should also recognize that the academic/collaborative model works better for infrastructure-oriented software, and go in that direction instead.
Why would a letter from the prime minister of France to other French ministers, not be in French? is the editor trying to be sarcastic? the grammar is so horrible (e.g. there is a common missing in front of "of course") that I can't tell if this is a dig on Franco-phones?
With some products like PostgreSQL, they can go to the enterprise fork vendor and put in the contract that government-made features will be submitted back. Therefore they can get the best of both worlds. If EnterpriseDB truly screwed them over, hopefully all of their patches would be good enough to make it into PostgreSQL proper. That's a compelling carrot/stick that Microsoft and Oracle don't have.
Ballmer and Ellison exhorting "zut alors!"
Silence is a state of mime.
Visual Studio is nice, but is not as productive as Eclipse, IMO.
Yes, I am a professional with 20+ years in the field in C++, Java and .Net. Yes, I've use Visual Studio and Eclipse extensively. Yes, I still like to use VI because there's nothing else like it out there.
So please, drop statements that 'Professionals know,' because you don't seem to know.
I work in a publicly owned water utility. I wish we could participate with others in the industry in expanding upon the public domain EPA-NET, and build an open source hydraulic modeling program. Instead we are trained to use an expensive proprietary product (which is based on EPA-NET, how's that for socializing costs and privatizing profits?). But I have to post this anonymously because I think powerful people would have a shit fit if anyone suggested that the tool we're using now was not the best choice.
Two things:
1) "Wherever Possible" means that they know FOSS doesn't have a solution to every little problem. However, if it comes down to word processors, databases, web browsers, etc then there are numerous FOSS alternatives.
The Netherlands' government has been operating on a "comply or explain" principle for years. All government agencies are required to use open source software and free standards, or else explain why they don't. All the government agencies I've seen in the past couple of years (municipalities, provinces, and a couple other government and semi-government organisations) use Microsoft software everywhere, with the exception of the databases, for which they use Oracle. Spatial planning is done with the proprietary ESRI stack. The only open source is usually the CMS they use for the web site, either an existing one or a home grown one which they open sourced themselves, and they have an ODF plugin installed in Word so that they can fulfil their legal requirement to be able to communicate using the ODF standard. Of course, everyone uses doc and docx.
I think the main reason is that they simply don't employ any real IT staff, just a few technicians who know how to swap out a machine and which phone number to call the supplier on when something breaks. It's difficult to find people who, given a bunch of open source software, can actually fix things themselves, and those people are expensive. Getting external support for FOSS is also not easy unless it's for something extremely mainstream. The FOSS GIS stack is getting quite capable for example, but I think there are only a handful of companies world wide who offer support for the thing, and they're all pretty small and on the other side of the world from here. So ESRI and Oracle Spatial it is.
So, which the initiative is great, and all sovereign governments should be using Free software on general principle, I'm afraid that this is not going to change much in France.
That's because Visual Studio isn't a C compiler it's a C++ compiler
Visual Studio isn't a compiler.
This is so awesome. Imagine if all governments did this. Since they all use the same applications (like LibreOffice) there will be tons of development $$$ per application!!
"He also wants them to reinvest between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save through not paying for proprietary software licenses, spending it instead on contributing to the development of the free software."
a text edditor should not be able to play chess it should edit text
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
The PDF is made from scans of printed text.
Visual Studio has the weakest support for C++ of the whole mainstream scene. They have a *single*, albeit very bright, guy working on STL, and probably not many more people working on the language.
That's because what?
My guess would be that that's because Visual Studio is not a C++ compiler either. Microsoft is trying to do the same thing to C++ they failed to do with Java. Look at the scorn their C++ users gave them after the most recent release when it turned out that whenever they talked about C++ (MS bragged quite a bit before the release) they meant another language, that "managed" thing.
Compare Visual Studio's support for C++: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh567368.aspx with GCC's: http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx0x.html and Clang's: http://clang.llvm.org/cxx_status.html
Have you ever considered using Eclim? It's Eclipse with Vim as the interface (or Vim with Eclipse tools if you prefer).
There's nothing like $HOME
That's mainly due to their release cycle and anyone actually informed about the current situation knows this. With VS2012, they are changing the update cycle so that smaller updates to parts of VS can be done without waiting a long time for a service pack or a new release.
C++1x support is going to be implemented incrementally that way.
You can't even compare C to this because Microsoft doesn't promote VS at all for C development, it's more of an afterthought.
It isn't a Studio either.
In case you'd missed it, socialists now are the government in France. So it's true, socialists support F/OSS.
We can't have that here in the US! Quick, run out and buy Windows, and install it over all versions of Linux! And Macs, too, since they now use the same hardware!
mark "more profits for M$!" (Note the separated http and //. w/ no colon).
nano ... I just want basic editing either way... If I need more, I'll fire up sublimetext 2 or an actual IDE.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
The most famous French example of FOSS is Mandriva, which has free forks of Mageia and PCLinuxOS, but the French government could nationalize Mandriva, which has been struggling to survive, and then use that as the basis of all its FOSS. They can write/port all software to that platform, and make it as major a deal as Munich and Extremadura - both dealt w/ in /. pages in the past.
Create a web project in Eclipse... getting a hello world web-app running with integrated debugging. Now, imagine doing that with little/no experience. It's absolutely painful... Do the same in VS... There's no comparison.
I've never been more productive in Eclipse than VS... That includes related developments such as Flex/Flash Builder... It's cumbersome, and there's a ton of crap to get the simplest of projects running, let alone deployed. I'd rather use a straight text editor with Ruby, Python, Perl or Node.js than touch Eclipse if I don't have to.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
"Too much of FOSS is based on emulating existing desktop software"
And that's why Microsoft is licensing Android to Googles OEMs.
"Where FOSS shines is in areas of technical interest that are not driven by the needs of the consumer"
Ubuntu 12.04 vs. Windows 8:
Xbmc + adalight + cinema experience
Duke Nukem 3D - Gameplay (Linux)
AccountKiller
I can "create a C application project (from a built in template) and run it as a "hello world" in under a minute (after install) with no prior experience with the tool" with kdevelop.
I can do the same with PHP, nedit and three commands.
And where is the integrates tools for developing against an ACTUAL SQL database?
A slower fry to cook it to a slight gold tint first, then take them out (and, best of all, if you're doing several loads, put them in a caserole dish in a prewarmed oven while doing the next lot), heat the fat more and put them back in for the second fry to crisp it up.
If you crisp it first, you end up slowing down the rate at which you can cook the potatoe, ruining fat cut chips.
By putting them in the oven to sit while you do the next load, the hot chip warms and starts cooking more fully without the fat soaking in as much and you can more easily end up with a fluffy cooked potatoe inside a crispy outer shell of fried potatoe.
Fat can get hotter than oil, hence makes crispier chips.
HOWEVER
Maybe unless you use dripping, the first few fries of chips in lard will taste pretty tasteless. After a few fries, the lard has picked up some of the starch and now contains some flavour and makes the chips taste far better than oil.
Those workers will spend their money on stuff.
This stuff bought then accrues VAT and, when given to the workers of the store, that is taxed. Those workers will buy stuff which accrues VAT and that goes to paying people's salaries, which are taxed.
Really, for a group of idiots harping on about how "the job creators" will make everything better "because of trickle-down economics" seem to feel that the government money somehow doesn't trickle down.
Exactly what should be happening!!!
I'm a big free software advocate. My job entails working with 100% free software and NOT just “open source” (for the most part- there is a slight discrepancy depending on what you mean when you say this as some of the distributions include non-free components-for which we don't support). The one thing that my company has been trying to do is contribute back a significant percentage of our profits to the free software movement and projects we rely on. We're not just doing this for ethical reasons. There is an economic incentive to it. There are technical and ethical benefits to avoiding non-free software. Eliminating non-free software dependencies makes the hardware easier to support (or even possible). We're the #1 company in the free software arena for GNU/Linux hardware and sticking to the FSF definition of free has really paid off.
A transition from MS Office 2003 to LibreOffice is ongoing; some administrations within MEF (Min. of Finance) have already switched for some time: Customs for instance (DGDDI). For the record, one of the major OpenOffice.org 3.0 launch parties was held within the premises of the Ile-de-France regional government.
In order to cope, MinFin and many other ministries have set-up significant software support contracts, which go, depending on the locations, from turnkey service to only level-three bugfix ability. Some companies do thrive on this business.
So yeah, Ayrault's not actually innovating, but he's mostly widening the policy to the whole national government. Good.
(Ministry of Work, by contrast, is a Microsoft stronghold, save for a few botched pure LAMP tools, which they regurlarly reimplement in SharePoint. Sometime's that's even the right thing to do...)
The bit of the British government I work for is similar. Officially, everything should be open source where possible. In practise, we still have MS Office, Windows etc, and some expensive databases.
However, we are fortunate that the head of IT is an open source fan (and so am I), so lots of "unseen" stuff is running on free software. We were audited last year, as the next-level-up in government was concerned that our "value for money" score for IT was an order of magnitude better than theirs, which was embarrassing for them -- especially as the government had announced they would reduce IT spending.
It turned out everything was cheaper because we use local companies for what we don't do in-house, rather than the money-sucking multinationals like Accenture etc. I haven't heard anything more for a while, I suspect the next-level-up is wishing they never asked, and trying to forget about it. A nice meal from the Accenture CEO will probably help with that.
I think the main reason is that they simply don't employ any real IT staff, just a few technicians who know how to swap out a machine and which phone number to call the supplier on when something breaks. It's difficult to find people who, given a bunch of open source software, can actually fix things themselves, and those people are expensive. Getting external support for FOSS is also not easy unless it's for something extremely mainstream. The FOSS GIS stack is getting quite capable for example, but I think there are only a handful of companies world wide who offer support for the thing, and they're all pretty small and on the other side of the world from here. So ESRI and Oracle Spatial it is.
this...
You didn't mention the really annoying thing about that phone number to call is often attached to large 6+ figure support contracts.
And that to get the system in place to have a reason to use that phone number required a team on expensive consultants which disappear after just barely implementing the requested feature set.
That fact is, for the cost of this 'off the shelf' enterprise package, you could employ a small team of dedicated technical types whose sole job it is to make it work AND have the bonus of a dedicated team of people who know what the fuck they are doing and don't need to pick up that phone in the first place.
This may be true but it is a matter of critical mass and investment in alternatives.
The French make a lot of sense, the US however... I haven't seen much sense coming from that country in a long while!
We're all "socialists" in Europe, there's only a difference in degrees, even within the various Centre-Right parties of Europe.
I should know being both European and member of the local Conservatives.