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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
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.
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.