FLOSS in French government agencies

PrzemoF

"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."

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/09/26/1338226/prime-minister-to-french-government-favor-foss-wherever-possible?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29

Grudaire

Great news - hopefully this will lead to even better software...

And other governments joining the free software gig!

croo

I understood that they have been using FOSS for a number of years but I think in many countries it's individual departments adopting some FOSS solutions that fit rather than a fundamental decision to adopt FOSS across the board.

A BPM tool I use called Bonitasoft seems to have been used by a number of French departments.
http://www.bonitasoft.com/customers/customer-references?country=All&term_node_tid_depth_1=All&term_node_tid_depth_2=All&page=1

It is a great tool so I'm not surprised.

professore

I'm not a MS head before you attack ... but the fact is that Libre Office or any of the other open source office suites just don't cut it in corporate environments. Show it to the average marketing head and they will run screaming for the hills.

Look at how poor the uptake has been for Google Docs - and that offers collaboration not available in pretty much anything else.

It's all about formatting and styles .... style before substance.

PrzemoF

Can you explain link between Google-Docs and the open source? I'm missing something here..

Grudaire

professore wrote: »

I'm not a MS head before you attack ... but the fact is that Libre Office or any of the other open source office suites just don't cut it in corporate environments. Show it to the average marketing head and they will run screaming for the hills.

Look at how poor the uptake has been for Google Docs - and that offers collaboration not available in pretty much anything else.

It's all about formatting and styles .... style before substance.

Heads of Marketing may not know any better. I remember when I was dealing with one Marketing manager in my old job that they had a list of dates in an excel document. They took out a calculator and were carefully typing each one into the calculator to see how many years were between each date... and then typing the number back into excel.

You'd be amazed how much of an effect inertia has in a company...

Anyway to summarise - that's a load of baloney, show me something that is so very vital that Libre Office can't do?

PrzemoF

professore, that's for you:

http://decentralist.wordpress.com/2012/10/01/libreoffice-vs-openoffice-not-always-simple/

"The surprising part is that MS Excel fails my needs even with working with its own .xlsx spreadsheet format. I need to hide 130 columns and Excel 2010 warns me “Cannot shift objects off sheet.” Prior Excel versions had the same problem. I’ve spent some effort looking for a solution, but the only thing I found to work is opening in an open source office suite."