για ενημέρωση σχετικά με τι γίνεται αλλού, αντιγράφω το report κάποιου φίλου σχετικά με μια εκδήλωση στη Γαλλία για προώθηση ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ. (κυκλοφόρησε σε μια λίστα που λειτουργεί με Chatham House Rule, ως εκ τούτου δεν αναφέρω το συγγραφέα) I attended a very interesting meeting yesterday. It was a meeting of Syntec numerique http://www.syntec-numerique.fr/ on FOSS (they are one or two every year on the FOSs topic). Syntec numerique is a union of French companies working on digital information. It is composed of more than 1000 companies including Alcatel-Lucent. It is sponsored by the French government (Minister of digital economy) and is providing recommendation to the government. Yesterday it was concentrating on FOSS issues and there was perhaps 100 to 150 people including a deputy (MP in English, congress person in US), some regional politics, companies like Linagora, RedHat, talend, Microsoft, ... The minister Fleur Pellerin was not able to attend but was sponsoring the meeting. The conclusion was done by the deputy who is pro-open source and was very interesting. The French prime minister has issued a note to all French administrations to promote the use of Open source in the administration one year ago but has very few effects. The major issue is the lack of information on FOSS by people and a very strong lobbying from Proprietary SW vendors using any kind of ridiculous arguments: lack of quality, lack of support, risk of increasing un-employment, ... One of the recommendation of the FOSS group of Syntec numerique was to impose that HW is sold separately from SW (I guess it is to avoid when you purchase a computer to end up with windows). She said that it is very far from reality, she tried to pass a law to have only the price of the HW and price of the SW clearly displayed when you purchase a computer. The law was rejected. She also requested us to better communicate on FOSS for non technical people and took an interesting example: Imagine that the government pays a company to build a school, do you find normal that the company does not want to provide the detail plan/map of the school, that they imposed that any reparation work in the school is done only by this company and no extension modification is done to the school without approval of the company. Another interesting intervention from somebody working for the French government was on Open Data. The idea is that all the information collected by the government which is not confidential (such as personal information) must be made available to the public. He took an example of the town of New York, in which information on restaurant control for sanitary reason where made available and somebody built an application on top of this: you click on a map for a restaurant and you see if there are rats, rotten food etc. It seems that this application really increase the alignment of restaurants on standard rather than the regulation system. Again a very interesting presentation was from the CEO of Talend. Talend is selling services on Open sources. Since 2006 they grow from 10 people to 500 and they plan to grow this year of 150 people (if I remind well the numbers). They are world wide, started in France and have a strong presence in Silicon Valley. All their R&D is still in France. There are two reason for that. First the education system is good and a lot of talent can be found, second the cost of people in France is much less expensive compared to silicon valley even if you pay them well. Second contrary to what people think it is not more difficult for a company to raise investisment fund in France that in US. -- -- zvr -- -- +---------------------------+ Alexios Zavras (-zvr-) | H eytyxia den exei enoxes | zvr [ at ] zvr [ dot ] gr +-----------------------zvr-+