Paris Accelerates Move to Open Source 225
* * Beatles-Beatles writes to tell us that the city of Paris is moving to open-source software a little faster than originally intended. As a part of the strategy to 'reduce its dependence on suppliers' they anticipate replacing both server and desktop applications with free and open-source software. From the article: "Earlier this year, volunteers among the city's 46,000 staff were invited to download and install open-source software to their desktops, including the Firefox browser and the Open Office.org productivity suite. Now, the city is planning to migrate all the users of one city department or all of those in one of the city's 20 districts, not just the volunteers, to test a larger migration. The city has 17,000 workstations, up from 12,000 in 2001"
Employees don't see cost savings (Score:1, Interesting)
Itchy and Scratchy. (Score:1, Interesting)
So basically they moved from the whims of closed-source suppliers, to the itches of open-source suppliers.
Re:Changing one monopoly for the other (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Employees don't see cost savings (Score:2, Interesting)
If they were using Office XP and switched to OO.o 2 I know well from personal experience that the employees will see the benefits, especially in Word vs. Writer. Writer can export a document as a pdf without needing a 3rd-party macro or a program you use as a printer, plus it's FAR more stable. Writer's UI is better organized as well, IMO.
FF vs. IE? You gotta kidding me. More stable, more features, blocks pop-ups by default, etc.
One problem, though and I've mentioned this before; there's no open souce alternative to Acrobat Pro. Not even plans for one that I know of. That really sucks; we need Adobe-free computers, what with their exorbitant costs, product activation, and so on.
Re:Employees don't see cost savings (Score:2, Interesting)
Why not do what we did: make your office PDF free? I hate PDF's with every fiber of my being. The files are enormous, the readers are bloated (and at 56+ Meg just to open a fucking file, I'd call "bloated" generous), and they're a pain in the ass to alter.
Could somebody please tell me why people use PDF's in the first place?
I feel like if at this stage, enough people said "NO" to PDF's, then it would just die on the vine. Right now, if any of our vendors send a PDF, I bounce it back with a message that we don't use PDF's, and it has yet to be a problem.
France is evil (Score:4, Interesting)
The French Scapegoat http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/10/19/193648/4
(Score 5: Offtopic.)
Not only that (Score:5, Interesting)
She'll be a teacher in primary school next year. They have computer courses to be able to teach children how to use a word processor, web browser or graphic editor. What's interesting is that they learn everything on free software, are given a cd full of OSS (for Windows), and encouraged to distribute it around them.
They're told not to use commercial software with children, simply because their parents are not necessary wealthy enough to pay for the stuff at home so it would create ineqalities among the children. Very good idea if you ask me. Now if they could make a program to build very cheap computers and give one to each child it would be even better. But that's a start.
France's use of Open Source (Score:2, Interesting)
The Gendarmerie say it is not just a simple question of money. Managing Microsofts complicated license structure was becoming a nightmare for the Gendarmerie - reason alone for the migration.
The Gendarmerie is also redevloping in Java a number of standard VB macros written for word to automate form filling. The idea is to leave open a possible future migration to Linux. XML will be used as a storage format along with PDF and open document formats. Stephane Kimmerlin for MS France says it is not a victory for OO, the Gendarmerie only used a fraction of MS Office's features so didn't really need the power offered by MS Office.
In France the interior ministry will move 50,000 workstations to Open Office, the finance ministry is moving 8,000 PCs to OO, the public works ministry is looking to move 60,000 PCs to OO and Customs have migrated 16,000 PCs to OO and its use is mandatory since January 2005.
Hope that proves useful.
David
ps I've consulted for the French Education ministry for their Antares project - a Java based system for managing recruitment which used JBoss and also Weblogic.
Re:Poor kiddies (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:[grin] (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:[grin] (Score:3, Interesting)
The Belgians -- and quite a few French -- consider that Belgium is the source of the friet. [belgianfries.com]
(I was asked years ago to make sure people knew this...and I keep my word.)