Prime Minister to French Government: Favor FOSS Wherever Possible 112
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."
One sterp forwards... (Score:1)
Now could you please repeal that 3-strikes law? It makes you a bunch corporate lapdog douche bags.
Thanks. Love your fries.
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Amusingly we (French people) think that what you call French Fries comes from Belgium :)
Re:One sterp forwards... (Score:5, Funny)
Come on! Everyone knows the first French fries were made in grease... ;-)
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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.
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Besides, Belgian fries are fried twice (at least once in beef tallow; Maybe they use vegetable oil for the other time).
Re:One sterp forwards... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:One sterp forwards... (Score:5, Informative)
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? :)
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Savings from using FOSS?
It comes from the salaries being spent. (Score:1)
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.
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Thanks gods. I actually worry about countries I'll flee to when America becomes too fucking dangerous and this makes me relived.
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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.
oh my some sense... from the french (Score:5, Funny)
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
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Nationalize Mandriva (Score:3)
A motto for FOSS (Score:2)
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Too bad Slashdot is stuck in 1995 and still doesn't support UTF-8.
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Pas si sûr. Ça dépend...
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Liberté, égalité, fraternité
Did you mean; "Liberté, égalité, fraternité"?
What was the point you were trying to make?
I was able to type this in MS Office 2007, LibreOffice and OpenOffice . I then cut and pasted this into Slashdot.
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I haven't bothered to check recently, but I don't think Slashdot respects the character encoding sent by the web browser, so different browsers (or different configurations of them) give bad results.
(That I hardly ever see this on any other site suggests it's /. that's got the problem.)
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It is actually provide avec more choice:
"Liberté, égalité, fraternité ou mort"
fixed that for you.
France could take a little public money bazooka and kill a foreign software monopoly which treatens their citizens liberties. Let's do that.
Actually, it was originally "Liberté, égalité, fraternité ou la mort".
There fixed that for ya.
The "ou la mort" part was dropped shortly thereafter as it was felt to be to strongly associated with the Reign of Terror.
This is what I have been saying for years... (Score:5, Informative)
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:This is what I have been saying for years... (Score:5, Funny)
From a society point of view Open Source software within the government (or government services) makes a lot of sense.
Which is why this will never happen in the US.
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> Which is why this will never happen in the US.
SELinux (developed by the NSA)
GRASS GIS (developed by the US Army Core of Engineers) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRASS_GIS#History [wikipedia.org]
VistA (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture developed by the VA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA [wikipedia.org]
You can even try out the DOD's flavor of Linux - http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm [dod.mil]
We can of course do even better.. and we should.
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The trick is to promote open source everywhere and trigger more institutional migration debates than Microsoft can clamp down with their 30 Mio $ special lobby cashbox. Get open source into party programs and all. By the way, the Greens are looking for ideas [greens-efa.eu].
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Je l'approuve! (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:Je l'approuve! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Je l'approuve! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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learn to use LO:
Paragraphs and heading levels
Ctrl + Alt + Up Arrow or Ctrl + Up Arrow : Moves the active paragraph or selected paragraphs up one paragraph
http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/332
Maybe you can read the doc before telling that LO is a piece of crap or miss your essential function (and if it definitely don't do it, ask them to add it, I'm pretty sure if it's a minor feature and you paid a dev the price of MSO to add it, you will have it done really fast) ?
Re:Je l'approuve! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Like what in version control systems. You made the claim that closed ones were better (well better than SVN). You keep insinuating as such, but make no real claims.
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.
LMGTFY. Answer: ctrl+shift+up moves paragraphs. And "not sure it could be implemented"? That's a really weird thing to say.
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Personally, using Ubuntu 12.04, Gnome 3.something, and LibreOffice 3.5.4.2, I can copy from a screenshot directly into a LibreOffice table cell. I can also go to the file system and copy an image (ctrl-c) and paste (ctrl-v) that same image into a table cell.
It just works for me.
As for shift and the arrow keys, for me, it has the much more useful function of selecting text. And it works in every application that I use (well, GUI applications with text areas anyway).
Also, I suspect you don't understand how ma
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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.
Really? A piece of crap? If I ignore the 'prettiness' of MS Office and concentrate on what 90% of my co-workers need, LO wins hands down.
With one big, glaring exception; an Outlook-like replacement.
LO needs something that has a fully integrated email client, a pre-built contact list ( internal listing ) and a scheduler. Yes, I know there are other open source answers to these things, but I am talking abut it being an integrated component of LO.
Okay, LO's version of PowerPoint needs a little help. Okay.
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For daily mundane use, if both are perfectly adequate then the price difference makes libreoffice the obvious choice.
Why pay extra for something which brings no benefits to you?
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As to Subversion - even a significant number of open-source communities consider it to be vastly substandard.
I think Linus' opinion on SVN was that its main design goal (a better CVS) was fundamentally flawed and guaranteed to create a crap product. SVN's crappiness was one of the main motivators for creating git. (The other being that the only non-crappy solution at the time was proprietary).
There's a reason most of the major projects have moved to git. For example, Google's code review system for Andro
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SVN is a centralized system. Its design philosophy is simply different from what you need for distributed development of any sort. That's all there's to it.
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Version control systems are designed in a certain way and you will use whatever fits your situation the best. That said, there's a multitude of open source offerings. For centralized VC, Subversion fits the bill. For distributed, Mercurial or Git are the two major choices.
What is it exactly about Subversion that makes it so much worse than another presumably centralized VCS? You can't compare it to a distributed system because it isn't one -- remember that.
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Never thought I'd see a positive comment for Merent PVCS Dimensions, let alone see it compared positively against subversion. We're right now migrating away from PVCS to Subversion in our corporate environment. Most developers plead or even try to bribe us with candy to get their project to the front of the migration queue. PVCS is stable as an upside down piramid, eats source code on a daily base, can't be upgraded even by its own vendor,randomly looses permissions as you grant them to other people, st
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"1) You still need to have above average skills to get your work done on Linux"
Above average or just different? I've been using Linux for so long that I almost can't have nothing done in Windows. I'd say it is Windows what requires above average skills, not Linux, it's only I can admit that maybe what needs is *different* knowledge, not less or more. But then, the more people using Linux, the less different it becomes.
"2) Some proprietary software is and always will be much better than anything comparabl
French economy (Score:4, Interesting)
Only 5-10% reinvestment? (Score:1)
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.
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(disclaimer: I am french, but I did not follow the story in details since I no longer live in france.)
There might be a significant cost in retraining some people. Also provided the amount of windows/office licenses owned by the government, 10% might already be a significant amount of money send to open source developers.
Economically that makes a lot of sense. You cut some money that was going to microsoft (so to an other country) and you redirect part of the money to local developers.
"in French, of course" comment????? (Score:1)
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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.
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As a brit who the education system utterly failed in it's attempts to teach french I resent that comment ;)
Comment removed (Score:3)
Overheard (Score:4, Funny)
Water/Sewer Utilities (Score:1)
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.
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Let me guess, WaterGems and co ?
Très Cool! (Score:4, Insightful)
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."
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Until 2010, the NHS had an "Enterprise Wide Agreement" [cloud2.co.uk] or bulk licensing deal with Microsoft, which covered Office.
A back-of-the-napkin calculation would indicate that the costs of this would run to the order of £100M or thereabouts each year. I think the Document Foundation would wet themselves with glee if you chipped in £5M worth of development effort, each year, to LibreOffice. And I think you'd have a lot of influence over which features got developed.
You could even lowball it for a few yea
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I work for a non-departmental public body ("quango"). In 2010, my team were asked what database we wanted to use for an upcoming project. We said we were fine with continuing with MySQL for the moment, were considering moving to Postgresql, but realised this would have a cost (hiring someone who knew Postgres, or training the existing admin).
The government department told us were were getting Oracle. We said we couldn't use Oracle, as we have to use an open source system to allow collaboration with certa
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Or maybe they authored the original using LibreOffice??? *ducks*
Socialists support F/OSS (Score:3)
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).
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vi
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Emacs
Fixed that for you :p
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iMac
Fixed that for you. :p
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a text edditor should not be able to play chess it should edit text
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Re:FOSS Visual Studio (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [microsoft.com]
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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
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Visual Studio isn't a compiler.
Re:FOSS Visual Studio (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:FOSS Visual Studio (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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 b
Re:FOSS Visual Studio (Score:4, Informative)
QtCreator
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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 b
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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.
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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
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Insert marketing waffle ... (Score:2)
And that's why Microsoft is licensing Android [itproportal.com] 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: [zdnet.com]
Xbmc + adalight + cinema experience [youtube.com]
Duke Nukem 3D - Gameplay (Linux) [youtube.com]
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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, Pe