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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."
QtCreator
Now could you please repeal that 3-strikes law? It makes you a bunch corporate lapdog douche bags.
Actually, this law, or more precisely the HADOPI which the law has created, has come under criticism from the government for its costly inefficiency: so far, HADOPI managed only to bring a single case to court, and it was an textbook example of a non-voluntarily infringer who was found guilty mostly because he tried to prove his innocence and despite his obvious intent to comply with the law (details upon request) -- and was fined a gigantic EUR 150 (plus court fees I guess).
Besides, HADOPI did nothing regarding fostering legal music and video offers, which was the second half of its mission.
Analysts (usual caveats apply) here tend to think HADOPI as it stands will not survive.
Thanks. Love your fries.
Want some frogs with that? :)
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.
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.
I have heard of Git, and I know people who have recommended it instead of Subversion. I myself also use subversion for my own personal projects, because it's free and for the reason you mention: I don't use its full power on my own stuff. However, there are little conveniences in proprietary software that you appreciate, even when not using its full power.
Like what in version control systems. You made the claim that closed ones were better (well better than SVN). You keep insinuating as such, but make no real claims.
Another thing I like about MS Word is the ability to move paragraphs or table cells up and down using shift + arrow keys. Maybe that's a "power user" feature, and I'm sure it could be implemented in OO Writer.
LMGTFY. Answer: ctrl+shift+up moves paragraphs. And "not sure it could be implemented"? That's a really weird thing to say.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
All fries should be fried twice, at different temperatures. The first time is to caramelize the outside, the second is to cook the inside to the point it becomes a puree. Belgian cooks are just more strict on this than French cooks are.
As for beef tallow, yeah, it's seemingly a staple of the Belgian method.
There's nothing like $HOME