French Parliament To Go Open Source 231
dhoyte writes, "Newsfactor.com reports that next June the French parliament will be switching from Microsoft to open source products such as Linux for desktops and servers and OpenOffice for day-to-day documents. They see it as a cost-cutting measure." The French have not settled on a Linux distribution yet. The article quotes an analyst voicing a note of caution: "'The evidence on the cost savings attributable to a switch to Linux has been mixed,' according to Chris Swenson, director of software industry analysis at research group NPD. 'There has been some evidence that companies have to spend a good deal on training and support after you deploy...'"
mandriva (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:mandriva (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Mandriva will be the best choice for Linux transitioning to desktops. It's easy to install (probably the quickest and most straightforward installation next to Ubuntu), pretty simple to maintain, and is in my opinion the most user-friendly operating system for home and small-business users. I think of it as the Red Hat of Home Linux; it has fully dedicated support channels, premium content that is pretty nifty to have, and a very solid online community for those that cannot afford support. Last time I checked, the only other two mainstream Linux distributions that have all of those advantages are SuSE Linux (Novell) and Red Hat Linux.
Every time I have used Linux, I land up turning to Mandriva or Fedora. Fedora is good for ultra bleeding edge stuff, while Mandriva is the Linux distribution that "Just Works" (save the casual Linux stuff, of course). I think that if they do not use the other two said distributions, Mandriva will be a very probably candidate. I would most certainly switch to this distribution if I had a project of this magnitude.
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This was around a year and a half ago, so perhaps things have changed.
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Same here. Not really a major problem if you're familiar with Linux but new users (which Mandriva more or less targets) certainly would have been at a loss to set things straight. I left them whet I moved to a 64 bit machine so I don't know what the current situation is either. It might have improved.
Although even back them, buggy releases certainly weren't exactly the norm. They did
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Re:mandriva, err, umm, PCLinuxOS (Score:2)
For, me PCLinuxOS, a Mandriva derivative, is my thing now that I can use Win4Lin kernel 2.6.8.1 without my system locking up....
Maybe. But, I recently hit the wall with tiring and trying to get Mdv 2005, 2006 *and* 2007 to run stably or at all the Win4Lin 2.6.8.1 kernel. I for what, now 2 years, was stuck on Mdk/Mdv 10.1. I couldn't even go to 10.2. At least n
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Re:mandriva (Score:5, Insightful)
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Many French companies were nationalised & the government effectively kept the businesses afloat with taxpayers money.
Here's one I know about for a fact (I used to work there) I believe the EU actually got on the case about the government propping up the company in the late 90's but seeing as how the French & Germans run Europe nothing much happened. d-:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupe_Bull [wikipedia.org]
You may also notice that French companies tend to s
Re:mandriva (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole EU will follow, as I hope. With regard to Germany, I am quite sure.
CC.
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As I perceive it, this is not the case, and the servers of the "Bundestag" (our parliament; about 100+) have been migrated to LINUX (from NT) already last year.
Besides, you should consider that history in Europe is more a matter of milleniums, not just decades or, even worse, years.
CC.
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This is actually historically wrong, France and Germany have only been at odds since the XIXth century (two centuries), if you want nations "spitting or shooting at one another", check France versus UK, we've been warring each other for more than a thousand years, mili
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Seriously - is anyone else bored of these "OMFG, Government X is switching to Linux!!!1!!one!" stories, inevitably followed by "Governm
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If the French actually make the switch...
Microsoft will begin lobbying the US government based on new information that:
making France a ripe target for mass invasion by the USA.
Oh wait... Never mind. This is all old news. We
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Hope it goes through (Score:5, Interesting)
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Being less dependent while saving costs can only be a good thing. Let's hope that they prove it's possible so others will make the step as well.
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At one of my previous jobs I had to install and setup a piece of specialised teaching software, and quite a number of large organisations were sitting on very old Windows installations.
But, I like I said, I hope it goes through and doesn't get shot down by some vocal mino
Re:Hope it goes through (Score:5, Interesting)
I can confirm that, worked for them at the time. Had a CIO poached from Sun around then, too. Bill Gates flew in to talk to Ziggy Switkowski (then CEO) and after that it was all roses between them. My opinion at the time was that it was all just a ploy to beat down Microsoft's prices, sort of the corporate version of talking to a vendor with their competitor's coffee mug on your desk.
Everything's negotiable, especially if you have 40,000 high-profile desktop licenses at stake.
Re:Hope it goes through (Score:4, Interesting)
Not that that would have stopped them. Every new project that Telstra attempts is a disaster, including the ones I've been involved in. You are quite right about the Sun-anti-Microsoft sentiment, of course. But Ziggy was not above using his execs as pawns to push his own agenda.
Insider joke -- Telstra projects have finally run out of acronyms -- you can't open a new project unless you prefix the acronym with the number "9".
Re:Hope it goes through (Score:4, Insightful)
People in glass houses (Score:3, Insightful)
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That's how i would feel about such an announcement in general. But it's now a couple years in France that the police switched to Open Office, and more recently, the tax office underwent the transition. There might be more administrations, but i don't know about them, having no insiders. The
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Think Linux juice. (Score:3, Funny)
Nonsense! Linux is so easy to use you can take it out of the box and plug it in. And be working that same day.
Dude (Score:2)
Re:Think Linux juice. (Score:5, Funny)
So don't tell me Unix is hard. 12 year old girls can use it.
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When he was two, left alone with a system prompt, he would be quite easily hit many random key combinations that *were* actually *nix commands!
Then it's much better than XP (Score:3, Funny)
OTOH Linux, as you say, can start working on the same day, unless, of course, you start the installation less than ten minutes before midnight, in which case it won't be working until the next day.
I think slashdot... (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:I think slashdot... (Score:5, Funny)
Retraining. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Retraining. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Web apps (Score:2)
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We could write our own GTK frontends; but the Mozilla people have alrea
RE-training? (Score:2)
Certainly none that I've ever worked for.
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You're right. What job actually provides training beyond "here's your computer, your login name is foo and your password is bar. Get to work."
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It's a mess I tell you !
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how is parent Insightful?! it's been ages since most desktop-geared Linux distributions shunned the CLI in favor of GUI integration and cleaniness, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Suse, you name it.
and BTW, French Parliament members don't touch a computer, they pay people to do data storage and retrieval for them.
Re:Retraining-Relearing how to breath. (Score:4, Insightful)
you have to remember that its the French Parliement. Parliement, not any kind of technical branch of the government. The people affected by this move will only surf the web, write reports and emails.
I dont think that a massive training will be needed to switch from IE to Firefox, etc. Nor will it be from scratch. From a strictly user view, for the computer illiterate, the only changes they will notice will be maybe fonts, or colors.
Re:Retraining-Relearing how to breath. (Score:5, Interesting)
I really doubt that. I don't have any experience with the French Parliament, but I did a lot of contracting with the Canadian Parliament for a few years, and I can tell you that they have a huge data management task. They were responsible for the timely publication of every single formal statement, document, report etc. from our politicians. And we all know that politicians do love to talk.
One of the services we offered the was daily Hansard (a record of everything spoken in Parliament during a session), which was fielded by and indexed, cross-linked in both official languages and searchable by language, Party affiliation, region, riding and protocol (e.g. Question Period, Votes, etc.). Every morning by 07:00, we had everything spoken the day before prepped and readied for our customers. This data was merged into the existing infobase, creating a tremendously powerful research tool. And that was only one aspect of the kind of data management services they offered.
I'm inclined to say that the French Parliament probably did a needs analysis and decided on FOSS for precisely the opposite reason you're suggesting. If my experience in Canada is any indication, their typical workstation needs would be quite advanced, and the ability to create special purpose data management tools in open, interchangeable formats for a reasonable cost would likely be the most compelling reasons to move to Linux.
I say that from experience. It was the work I did with these guys (and other clients at the time) that convinced me to move away from Windows entirely. I haven't ever regretted that decision.
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If you still have the source code, there is no need to rewrite from scratch. Porting is not *that* ha
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To turn this around, isn't this a reason to migrate as soon as possible? Before the problem gets worse, and you're even more locked in.
What happens ten years down the line, if microsoft go bust or raise their prices to even more ridiculous levels, or include even more obnoxious clauses in their license agreements... The costs of sticking with mic
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For 98% of people, 98% of their skills. As 98% of office workers just click to open a document, type, and click on a button to format, click on a button to print or email. The support techs are the ones who will have to actually learn anything new; and as they're already using Linux servers, that won't be a stretch for them.
The 2% who have VBA mactros and such will need more hand
Cost of Training (Score:5, Interesting)
Can anybody get some estimates of the cost of training and support for a recent majour MS Office update? I figure that that should be somewhere near the cost of a switch...
FOI request anybody?
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Dunno, some of those new Catalyst switches from Cisco aren't that cheap...
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I have introduced quite a few people to openoffice, and for purposes of experimentation showed msoffice 2007 betas to a few people too... Most of these people had previously been using msoffice 2000 - 2003.
One person, who'd started out on wordperfect years ago greatly preferred openoffice...
Most people were simply indifferent, or didn't even notice any difference with openoffice.
One guy really loved the mouse based cut+paste (select, paste with middle button) on X11, and found it much faster
Spend money on education not 1's and 0's. (Score:5, Insightful)
My experience though is that if the tasks you need to do can be done using opensource you will save quite a bit of money. If there are rough spots you need fixed you can spend a little bit of money to hire, or sponsor, an existing developer of that project to make things work the way you need. For what you could spend to buy a few licenses of your average commercial app you could have the opensource equivilant customized to your needs. That is power over your own fate. How much is that worth over years or decades?
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Switching fom one platform to another entails pretty much the same 'trai
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You would seem to be confusing training and education. Training is what you give dogs and employees. Sit, speak, roll over, click File, click Save As, click RTF. Education is something you give tuition reimbursements for. There's precious little generalization you can get out of most corporate training.
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I suppose that depends on how much you're paying that person. If it's like a contribution as in "I would be working on it anyway, but sure I'll take some extra cash too" or "I want full compensation based on competative programmer rates to
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The nearest thing there is to a standard for the hardware is at the signalling level - it's generally all still RS-232, or if it's USB, it's USB set up as an RS-232 USB device (or if you're
Liberté would be a stronger ground to stand o (Score:5, Insightful)
As Stallman explained at WSIS [fsfe.org], if we argue based on cost, they can offer that too, but if we argue based on freedom, they're not even in the running.
Re:Liberté would be a stronger ground to stan (Score:2)
A strict subset cares about freedom, and they're probably already running Linux.
I think the real trick is convincing people that freedom itself is worth real money. Yes, switching will cost you, but then, next time Microsoft says "You will buy Vista.", you don't have to. When you have this software that does X but you need it to do X+1, you can make it happen by hiring people, and there is nobody to tell you no. Presumably if you care about X+1 it comes down to "because it will s
Re:Liberté would be a stronger ground to stan (Score:3, Insightful)
Or they're the kind of people used to looking at the bigger picture and beyond the next quarterly results, such as, say, governments?
freedom, in that sense, has no context to users (Score:2)
Depends what you mean by freedom. For a lot of people, it's the freedom to walk in to work on Monday morning knowing an upgraded desktop is waiting for you... and already knowing how to use it and the apps that run on it. Essentially, the freedom to dive right in a get your work done. The vast majority of people don't give a rat's ass about the freedom to modify their operating system and
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Those who run and/or own the company, who do have a vested interest in it's continued success, and do make decisions, really should care very much about freedom.
How many people complain they can't migrate away from windows because they're locked in to various proprietary technologies and freeing themselves of these proprietary bonds is too costly? How many more areas will they need to get locked in to, befo
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I don't know... probably about as often as a business gets on a multi-year track of parts/maintenance from the particular company from whom they buy their forklifts, or freight elevators, or fleet or vehicles. There are all sorts of arrangements like that which don't leave businesses feeling "screwed over," as long as they have half a negotiating bone in their bodies... and you seem to be
Re:Liberté would be a stronger ground to stan (Score:2)
and security.
I still find it a little surprising that any large non-US organization, particularly governments, run non-open software. It's basically just baring their throat to Uncle Sam and M$. A stupid thing to do, particularly when national security is involved.
Those billions that non-US organization might spend on military hardware and/or competing commercially could easily be hobbled if the US government or M$ decided to sniff, corrupt or shutdown the computers th
Re:Liberté would be a stronger ground to stan (Score:2)
No, it would not be fair. And no, I don't think it's at all far from reality.
What is basically happening, through the de facto requirement to use proprietary software, is that ability to do business with almost anyone is contingent upon the use of Microsoft software. That is already a sub-optimal situation with which we should think ser
translation (Score:4, Insightful)
The French have not settled on a Linux distribution yet.
Translation: We want to see what Microsoft's counteroffer will be; if it's too low, we'll state we're picking Ubuntu, and if Microsoft still hasn't given a huge keep-me deal, we'll say we probably want Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
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long term savings! (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh my god am I tired of this argument... some people seem to have very little grasp over "long term" and "short term" savings.
"It's different! It's hard to learn! Therefore it can't be good for us in the long run..."
Some
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Yes, but it compares to MS, I would think. MS is certainly not a deploy and forget solution.
You assume I was talking about initial costs.. I was not. I absolutely think that a properly administered *nix system will generally run better and be easier to maintain, given the appropriate training.
But I'm a programmer, not a network administrator, so be my guest to take it with a grain of salt.
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If your locked in to proprietary products like microsoft's, they can easily escalate the costs in future... The more difficult and expensive they make it to migrate away, the more they can charge... If it costs a million to move away, they can easily charge 800k to stay and most people will, because it's cheaper, but only because they have artificially raised the price of migration by locking you in.
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But being politicians, they can always play the patriotism card. Buy French. Remember those idiots in US Congress who wanted to boycott French wine and cheese (not to mention Freedom Fries). The French govt can also argue that they need a secure system without any NSA backdoors or remote deactivation f
Does anyone ever do this correctly? (Score:5, Informative)
On the desktops, deploy FOSS apps one at a time as dependencies allow. Even Office is tough if a lot of bespoke apps laying around use it as a development environment. Sneak up on that as long as you can too. Once the users are broken in on FOSS app replacements, begin switching the OS for those users you've managed to get using purely FOSS apps. Move up through the users from there. The last and most difficult cases can be handled with virtual machines and terminal servers.
If things are done this way rather than in one fell swoop then you avoid a user rebellions with great missing chunks of missing functionality amidst the kludges. You can also try things out first with the users who have a bit of clue and build up experience within the organization. Most of the negative Linux organization switch stories I've heard involved either the Fell Swoop approach or not having sufficient Linux/BSD/UNIX admin talent on hand.
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What color is the sky on your planet?
Cluebat time (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh hell yes it does, especially in an organization. If all of an organization's data is in Office format that organization will probably stay on Windows. Crossover Office ain't going to cut it (Office license + CX Office license and forget getting a sweet deal on the Office licensing) and neither will OO.o's import filters. First time a document doesn't work 100% in the initial testing a MS fanboy (MCSE type afraid of learning) will raise holy hell.
Get everyone off of Office and IE first and swapping out the underlying OS is a lot easier. Remember, people don't run an OS they run applications.
It's just for getting cheap windows (Score:2, Insightful)
"You have to pay linux licenses"? (Score:2)
Now if only a country... (Score:2)
Will it work ? (Score:2)
From my experience (and yes, it will reduce costs), if you don't have any other reason for it, you won't have enough force to breach the number of barriers on the way of such migration.
Unfortunately, "fixed mindset" is something very difficult to counter. And, like it or not, Microsoft is very good on the mindset terrain. People will complain, make a mess, and create overall havoc, up to a point
Uh Oh! (Score:2)
Really, have any of these government or large business entities ever actually followed through once they've announced that they're switching to Linux? The usual drill is that $government emits a "Switching to Linux" message which in turn leads to Microsoft descending upon them with tidings of huge discounts. Then $government quietly announces that they changed their mind and are sticking with Microsoft. Announcing t
Same Advice As Always (Score:2)
Well, same advice as always. Try them all for a few upgrade cycles, then decide.
and in the same breath outlaw Open Source .. (Score:2)
"What does the new French copyright [eucd.info] bill do ?"
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There's actually more chance of me buying a product if I haven't seen it advertised, so don't complain.
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Well, try and train some normal everyday office people and see for yourself how quickly people learn when they are already used to something else, and not even 100% comfortable with it either
You're hand waving. I've seen numerous non-computer people do standard office tasks in both Linux and M$Windows. Most hardly even notice the difference. Switching between the Linux and M$Windows is as easy as switching between many web interfaces.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes mark
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When I want to mount a USB stick in my Linux workstation (either the CentOS 4 one at work, the Ubuntu laptop or the Fedora Core machine at home), I just plug it in. It shows up on the desktop. I don't think that requires any training for a Windows user to get.
To burn a DVD or CD, I just put a blank in the drive. The CD burner just comes up. I drag the files I want into the burner window and hit burn. It's hardly rocket science. Works the same way in CentOS 4, FC5 or Ubuntu. Just stick a blank disk in
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Still... it had to be said.