France: Liberté, égalité... open source?
Spotlight Project:
The French tax agency has migrated to the open source application server JBoss, which runs a number of mission-critical applications, including an online tax return application that was used by 3.8 million people last year. The agency is using a total of 150 open source applications at present and has mandated the use of open source in future projects, according to Jean-Marie Lapeyre, chief technical officer at the French tax agency.
Summary:
The French public sector has enthusiastically adopted open source, with three quarters of French local authorities using open source software, according to the MERIT survey. A number of ministries are also using open source, including the Defence, Culture, Agriculture, Equipment and Finance ministries.
"In the central government in France the open source phenomenon is very strong," says RedMonk's Governor.
For example, the police are migrating to OpenOffice.org on up to 80,000 PCs and the French military is planning to install a high-performance Linux cluster for technical and scientific work. The Ministry of Equipment has replaced Windows NT servers with Linux equivalents and have issued a tender for the replacement of 65,000 desktops with Linux, according to Mandriva's Bancilhon.
The French government does not have a policy that advises organisations to give preference to free and open source software, according to Gartner's DiMaio. But the Prime Minister's IT agency, ADAE, has issued guidelines for using free and open source software, which include information on how government authorities can issue tenders mandating open source without violating competition laws. Adullact, which is an association of French local authorities, aims to develop a community around open source in the public sector for example, allowing local authorities to share open source applications.
Gartner's DiMaio says the French government's enthusiasm for open source is partly driven by the desire to boost the local software industry. "The countries that are most vocal about open source are those who have had troubles with own software industries, such as France and Germany — they are trying to recreate their software industries," he said.
Another reason for using open source is cost-cutting. Last year, the French civil service minister Renaud Dutreil said the agency wanted to use open source software on some of its almost one million state computers to save money. "My estimate is that we can cut the state software bill at least in half," he said at the time.
But, part of the reason for the French government's interest in open source is anti-Americanism, according to RedMonk's Governor.
"There is a mistrust of American companies in the French government and they are doing what they can to support anything that's not American," says Governor.
Lapeyre, of the French tax agency, disagrees and claims the main reason for the difference in the French and British governments' enthusiasm for open source is cultural.
"It's not anti-American; it's a cultural difference — we think differently," says Lapeyre. "The English focus is on action, while we [the French] are more reflective. Open source needs a long term policy to be economically credible. In English countries this is not a natural way of doing things — they do things with short- or mid-term objectives. In France we are not focused on immediate action."
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Talkback
Good research.
Oh, yes the "Old Europe" countries above all France and Germany OF COURSE switch to Linux motivated by anti-Americanism. Oh, gee give me a break, will ya?
Did Dubya force you to write such a complete bullshit?
It's not Holland, but The Netherlands. :-)
The allegation that TCO is smaller in the case of proprietary software is absurd and completely false. It's based exclusively on Microsoft's so-called "ge the facts" campaign, nobody can take that as a fact without being ridiculous. In fact, independent studies show that TCO is less than half for Linux and open source than for Windows and Microsoft.
My my my. France using Opensource softwares because it's not American? Gimme a break!
Fact is, a few well-known Open-Source elements originated in a French speaking environment... Let's see: gzip, http, divx (ProjectMayo, anyone? Gej?), the decision for OOo to go multilingual (ok, so maybe that one can be discussed...)
Note: recently started, France's numeric television broadcasting uses MPEG-2 - for public channels. Private, paid-for channels use MPEG-4...
Although it's gotten out of fashion, France also was the first country to have a state-wide telematic client-server architecture open to anyone: Minitel.
So, is it so hard to understand that a country with a culture where one is supposed to think about the society's welfare in general at the same time he thinks about his own, that has gotten used to everyday use nation-wide communication systems 15 years before the rest of the world got something similar, where all credit cards carry advanced securised microchips (and have been doing so for a long time) and where software has traditionally been developed in large quantities of ideas but never easily sold, got enthusiastic in the use of F/OSS?
Actually, does anyone remember that the personal computer has been created in France, but never got past a few prototypes due to lack of funding?
So, why would France's decision to go with F/OSS, that matches its methods much more closely than pure US liberalism, just be a way to spite the Americans? Why would anybody want to do things just like the Americans do them?
As a matter of fact, has anyone tried a French-translated piece of proprietary software? Microsoft's have content mistakes, language abuses, can't spell-check worth a damn, don't consider layouts other than QWERTY... Others usually don't even bother.
So, yeah, why would French technicians (who can code quite well, but not sell it because they don't consider the financial aspect when developing something they need) endure such crappy softwares when they can just modify other softwares to suit their needs, or just make it themselves?
You can whine about it all you want, just consider one thing: French people are usually quite the 'do-it-yourself' type (systeme D is a French expression - D stands for débrouille); what better software development model than F/OSS for that?
As far as I remember, Americans started making fun of 'froggies' because France didn't agree with the war in Iraq - which was supposedly a matter of days, and should squish terrorism instantly. Now let's see...
Just a little correction:
Software libre = free software
open source = codigo abierto
The French use Pays-Bas and most English speaking people in Canada and the USA say Holland. If you want to be correct you should sat :Nederland!