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Prime Minister to French Government: Favor FOSS Wherever Possible

Posted by Unknown on from the this-is-what-happens-when-socialism dept.

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."

1 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. FOSS should go its own way by concealment · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    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.