sheepeatingtaz

I’ve just read an article here about a report that has been done (Commissioned by the French PM, Dominique de Villepin.)

Basically, in a nutshell, the report by Bernard Carayon recommends that

1. Calls for a Law forcing french government to use OpenDocument Format for creating & distributing all it’s document.
2. Suggests that France ask the same from it’s European partners, when exchanging documents on a European level
3. Separate from this issue, Carayon has pushed for French National Assembly deputies to be given the choice of using proprietary or open source software on their workstations, starting from 2007.

Now, I think this is a good thing. There are a few local authorities in the UK who have commited to this sort of thing (Bristol and Bath spring to mind), and I believe Denmark (or was it Belgium) had similar recommendations go through, but (no offence to any Danish or Belgian readers) France is a big country, and often is vocal within the EC. In my head, this would make it seem more likely that other big countries will follow suit.

It would also be interesting to see some figures on the open source workstation route from the third point above.