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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
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
Amusingly we (French people) think that what you call French Fries comes from Belgium :)
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
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? :)
Emacs
Fixed that for you :p
Come on! Everyone knows the first French fries were made in grease... ;-)
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
As someone living in the Netherlands, close to the border with Belgium, I can safely say that French and Belgium fries are very different.
French fries are generally long and thin and not too fat while Belgium fries are generally bigger and rougher and baked for longer so a bit fatter. I personally prefer the latter.
Fast food chains tend to take the french fry to extremes, making it very dry and adding an additional flavor similar to cardboard.
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.
In what ways is MS Word better than LibreOffice? are those specific things important to me? in what ways is LibreOffice better than MS Word? are those specific things important to me?
No mater how much "better" one may be than the other if you are not using the extra features they are not in any way important. The one that decided me was the long document advice from my university, don't use MS word for long documents if you can avoid it, the other features are worthless for my long document if it can not be made reliable.
Also, when you are late to the game and have limited resources due to a limited customer base catching up is hard. There is no need for special reasons or to think that FOSS or open source are in anyway inferior in the desktop market, customer number comparisons are as much a cause as an effect.
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.
I think you are reading too much into the original posting. But we can thank Jacques Derrida and poststructuralism (deconstruction) for giving us a rationale to entertain alternative readings like this even if the author did not intend any such thing.
Whatever the difference, put government money into development and boooom.
Catching up isn't hard, but markets are often winner-takes-it-all. That means even moderate competition prevents license extortion.
France, the Grand nation does not like to be a licensing slave to US software companies. And it has strong pressure groups for software freedom such as APRIL.
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.
What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual
What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual
What do you call a person who only speaks one language? American!
This is why.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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."
In the same way, there is no substitute for Visual Studio,
Please, make up your mind. First you complain OSS should go its own way, then you complain there's not direct clone of a poor, yet inexplicable popular IDE. There are plenty of substitutes for VisualStudio, many of which work much better. GCC is a better compiler with better optimizations, better C99 support, better C++11 support better list of supported targets and much more frequent updates. Vim is a vastly superior editor with better support for a vwey wide range of languages, better editing capabilities, better use of screenspace and many other more advanced features. And, well, jabbing a fork in your eye is better than the visual studio build system. Or use make.
The combination of whatever compiler, whatever editor, whatever shell and whatever build tool is very much superior and very much the unix way, but...
Instead of trying to essentially rip off successful software packages, ...what you actually want is a ripoff of visual studio.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Besides, Belgian fries are fried twice (at least once in beef tallow; Maybe they use vegetable oil for the other time).
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.
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
Aye on the repeal request.
But I'm a Belgian, living in France. If you love fries in France, then you have never been to Belgium.
Now get off my lawn.
Or maybe they authored the original using LibreOffice??? *ducks*
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
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 $HOME
In case you'd missed it, socialists now are the government in France. So it's true, socialists support F/OSS.
We can't have that here in the US! Quick, run out and buy Windows, and install it over all versions of Linux! And Macs, too, since they now use the same hardware!
mark "more profits for M$!" (Note the separated http and //. w/ no colon).
Decreasing the politicians salaries could help but where's the rest of the money going to come from for the other goodies?
Savings from using FOSS?
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
What Visual Studio offers, well and above other packages is a better out of the box experience. You can create a web 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 Eclipse getting a project going is like pulling teeth. With Ruby/Python environments, there are a lot of boilerplate choices to make and command-line tools you have to learn or look up the syntax for. With VS you get integrated tools for developing against an MS-SQL database, as well as source code control integration and project planning integration. These time savings are huge.
... again, everyone has their own choice of tools for the job.
.Net space the sheer volume of out of the box libraries, utilities, modules and tools in place to get a job done. Not everyone is building a sky scraper... some people are building lots of RVs and dog houses.
Don't get me wrong, it's a great electric screw drill, lots of bits, screw heads and attachments. You can even mount it to use as a router. On the flip side, sometimes you just need to put a nail in the wall to hang a picture up. Lately, my favorite hammer has been Node.js
Just because you've taken the time to learn how to put your compiler, editor and build system together does not mean there isn't value in an out of the box system that offers that and more. Not to mention in the
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
Unfortunately the fallout for government action, or inaction usually takes 5-20 years to actually know how the effects play out. Socialism's success can not be "proven" with a few politically popular moves. Ireland went through similar actions for a number of decades before the fallout became too bad to keep up with.
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
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.
Wow, that wasn't flamebait at all... There are plugins for working against SQLite, and iirc mySQL, not sure about PostgreSQL/EnterpriseDB though. MS-SQL is a pretty capable SQL database, I tend to avoid use of the more proprietary aspects of any database though.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
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.
My bad, I had it backwards then. I based my post on what I heard Hervé This (a physico-chemist who studies food and cooking) say on the matter some years ago on the radio. My recollection was fuzzy.
There's nothing like $HOME
Thanks gods. I actually worry about countries I'll flee to when America becomes too fucking dangerous and this makes me relived.
But... the future refused to change.
As a brit who the education system utterly failed in it's attempts to teach french I resent that comment ;)
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register