02.12.07
Posted in Mandriva, English, Products at 6:02 pm by François Bancilhon
175,000 is a large number. It’s what you get when you add 130,000, the number of all high school fifth graders (seconde) to 45,000, the number of first year apprentices in Ile de France (the Paris region).
The “conseil général d’Ile de France”, i.e., the body that runs the Paris Region (10 million people) has decided to award a nice present to all of them: they will all receive a USB key with a bunch of open source applications. The news were officially announced …. The budget for the operation, i.e., what it will cost the tax payer is 2.6M€ ($3.38M). The official bid is not out yet, but we know enough to understand what the story is.
It’s a USB key, with a set of open source apps, that operates as a mobile desktop. This means you stick the key into a computer anywhere, you run OpenOffice from the key without actually installing it on the machine, you work on your files, you remove the key and you take the file with you to the next computer you will use. If you’re a student, you work at school in the lab, then you go back home or to a friend’s house or to the library and you keep working with the same environment on your data.
So this is good news: the region is investing in open source. It is doing something usefull for the kids.
The bad news is it all runs on Windows.
This was a great opportunity to get Linux in everybody’s hand. If you look at the problem the other way around: given 2.6M€ to spend, what should you do with it? they had the opportunity to issue bootable USB keys just like the Mandriva Flash, that was the perfect mobile desktop, the perfect opportunity to give a 3D desktop to every kid.
I hear the arguments, I’ve heard them already: “we should move people slowly, give them the opportunity to get use to the application first, then to the OS, not everybody is ready for Linux, we should be careful…”. In this case, I don’t agree, we are talking teenagers here, let us trust them, they are smart, they like technology, they like new stuff and they are versatile.
We need to work on the other regions, to see whether one of them will make a smarter move.
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02.09.07
Posted in Mandriva, English at 12:16 pm by François Bancilhon
The French “Assemblée Nationale” (the lower house of the French parliament) recently announced its intention to move to open source.
It started with some initial political annoucements. I am allways slightly suspicious of these. The beauty of open source for our political leaders is that you can make bold announcements without spending a penny. I won’t be nasty and won’t give any example.
Anyway in this case, they actually delivered: they are doing something serious, have a budget assigned to it and published an official call for proposals. The information is public and the actual call can be found here.
In this case they actually did a pretty good job. They did a proper analysis. They based their call on previous studies that had been done in the administration. They understand that there need to be a customization phase to actually design a desktop adapted to the needs of the user population, they understand they need tools to administer this and manage evolution over time and support.
They took risks and I am sure they had lots of pressure, but they went ahead and did a professional job.
It is not a very large deal: 1,000 desktop and the maximum budget allowed for a deal under such a process is about 130K€, which is not huge for the whole deployment, maintenance, support and administration. But it is a good show case and can be used as an example for the Administration and for other deployments.
In a forum where I am not exactly popular, there are regular questions on whether we answered that bid.
Of course, we answered: it’s the archetype of the deal we want to make. We followed the process, we found partners, we worked very hard and we submitted some very thourough answers. This meant a lot of work for us. Will we win? at this stage the decision is in the hands of the technical services of the assembly, I can only hope we will be rewarded for our hard work and for the quality of our answer.
I believe we have everything needed to provide a solid answer: we have a great distro, focused on the desktop, we provide professional support and we have a tool for deployment and administration, Pulse, which is 100% GPL. We also have the right partners answering with us.
Let us hope they will be more calls like this, let us hope other government agencies will understand that they need the help of enterprises to do this.
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