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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."
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
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... ;-)
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.
Too bad Slashdot is stuck in 1995 and still doesn't support UTF-8.
re: reinvestment, I have not seen indications or amounts in the letter. However, considering the economy in France, I suspect part of the move is to save money in order for the agencies to compensate whatever budget cut they might be hit with. That some of the saving be reinvested is rather positive in this light.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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).
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.