__/ [B Gruff] on Tuesday 03 January 2006 23:10 \__
> It looks like I'd better get my running-shoes on - the French police force
> is only a couple of years behind me in their thinking! They are now into
> OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird to come this year.
> (What odds that *they* will use MS XML???)
>
> Quite seriously, Munich, Norway, Paris, French Tax, French Police, and the
> E.U. courts v. Microsoft..... does anybody want to try their hand at
> conspiracy theory?
>
> http://standblog.org/blog/2006/01/03/93114583
>
> "Général Brachet : Thunderbird will be deployed as the only mail client on
> 45,000 seat in 2006. The idea is to provide every unit with a workstation
> and have it used daily. Every Gendarme will have four tools at his
> disposal: a bureautique suite, for writing documents and doing procedural
> work, a browser to access the Information Systems, a mail client to
> communicate and an antivirus. Our first goal is to migrate all the upper
> layers of the workstation to Open Source Software to be independent of the
> Operating System.(...)"
It's only a matter of time until (a certain propertion of) IT profession-
als yell for opposition. Open Source will ultimately rob some developers
from their cushy programming jobs. Then again, the situation we've come to
grips with is different. Every company was robbed of its customers by the
folks at Redmond, whether it was Netscape or any other company for that
matter. We're now getting them all back, but Open Source is the iron fist
rather than a profit-making, money-hogging body. The governments are not
driven by profit, so they should mind the least.
Roy
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