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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."
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.
Re: Open Office (actually Libre Office, but let's not be too picky): maybe to its full power it is a piece of crap compared to the full power of MS Office. However, my wife, who cannot be said to be a FOSS zealot in any way, uses Libre Office (and Ubuntu) daily on her home computer and so far has never complained about any shortcomings of LO. And the reason is, she does not use it to its full power, nor does she use MS Office to its full power, and when you compare the suites for daily mundane use, they perform just as well.
Re: Subversion: ever heard of Git? Again, maybe it doesn't fit everyone's bill. But for my OSS-related hobbies as well as my day job, Git has not exhibited any shortcoming so far -- quite the opposite in fact.
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.
For example, when creating a QA test plan, I take screen shots from the application I'm working with and directly paste them into table cells to show exactly what the system response should look like. When I do this in MS Word (2007), it resizes the image to the size of the cell. When I try this with OpenOffice Writer, the screen goes dark, and then it doesn't do paste the image. That might just be my bad luck or I don't have the latest, greatest patch that takes care of the problem. But I appreciate the relative lack of bugs in MS Word as compared with OO Writer.
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. But a point about proprietary software is that you have people spending the best part of their waking hours developing and perfecting these products whereas most open source initiatives are volunteer efforts. More time goes to the proprietary projects, so more attention to detail can be given to them.
Let's just say that both open source and proprietary software occupy their own important niches.