Published by Robert Pogson February 8th, 2013
in technology.
Recently the government of France committed to giving FLOSS a shot at being the default choice for IT. Despite that the Department of Defence entered a 4 year agreement with M$ and is apparently talking to M$ about an extension…
“The initial contract was concluded without any public call for tender, nor any open procedure within the rules of public procurement. It is unacceptable that the French Ministry of Defence clearly ignored the principles of public procurement, such as transparency and equal access, in a way that gives Microsoft control over the Ministry’s master strategic plan”
see April demands the negotiations between Microsoft and the French Ministry of Defence to be suspended and transparency to be made on this subject. | April.
Let’s hope reason prevails. The benefits of reliable IT and reduced costs by the national police, German city of Munich and Peugeot using GNU/Linux are obvious and Defence should want the same benefits.
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson February 8th, 2013
in technology.
I read that M$ is boasting of a billion documents in its cloud. Slackers! I have 17K documents on my PC and my server accumulated by me over a decade. Even if the typical user has just 1K documents, M$ is boasting about a million customers. Too bad for them. I guess when they are “all in” for the cloud and when it turns out that way they have to deny their cash-cows are drying up. It’s the first part of the grieving process.
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson February 8th, 2013
in technology.
The game as defined by M$ was to have a copy of M$’s OS on every hard drive. They came close but their lock-in was just too expensive in money and too costly in freedom.
Of course you can’t beat $free and/or FREE (free download conveys licence to run, examine, modify and distribute). We knew that a long time ago. The idea that Wintel had some unspeakable advantage in quality or something vague that prevented the possibility of */Linux succeeding was ludicrous. Exclusive dealing may have kept GNU/Linux from a lot of retail shelves for a lot of years but we went around that. More Android/Linux on ARM units shipped last year than Wintel by a large margin. Things keep improving for Linux this year.
“Linux now owns personal computing in a very real sense. That means it’s ours to lose if we don’t stay ahead of the curve.”
see Linux Won the Desktop Wars a Long Time Ago « FOSS Force.
Canonical is winning huge share with GNU/Linux on x86/amd64 this year and governments, schools and some businesses are lapping it up. GNU/Linux is the right way to do IT. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux, however, because it has fewer agendas about changing how I do IT. I like faster and more reliable and Ubuntu GNU/Linux does not do that for me.
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson February 8th, 2013
in technology.
I love the new LibreOffice 4 even though I’ve only kissed her once. Look at this:
That one feature saves me a click or two instead of doing a screen-capture to make an image for the blog. Here’s the result:
Besides my favourite feature, LibreOffice 4 has a long list of others. If that’s not interesting, check out their new homepage. It scrolls horizontally. Cool.
LibreOffice has come of age with 4.0.
“LibreOffice 4.0: a community on fire
In less than 30 months, LibreOffice has grown dramatically to become the largest independent free software project focused on end user desktop productivity. TDF inclusive governance and the copyleft license have been instrumental in attracting more than 500 developers – three quarters of them being independent volunteers – capable of contributing over 50,000 commits.”
Amazing.
- Robert Pogson
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