The French were smart to keep all their military tech home-produced, and not rely on anything American. All of Europe (& Canada & S American countries, too) needs to do the same.

Didn't another country in Europe try this before and then realized the docx format behaved differently in Microsoft Word compared to LibreOffice despite being labeled as an open standard? I guess if a document doesn't open or work as expected they could always just open it in the web version.

What distro are they going with? Or are they going to roll their own?

My issue with Linux to weigh against its many benefits is, the distributions (distros) seem like a rat race. One moment, one is better, another, it's the next one. So I'm wondering which one a government is going to trust for long-term use. As someone who's dabbled in Linux off and on for 25 years (but never committing; I'm now a happy Mac user), I'd say Ubuntu is a great place to start. If you're a casual user, it should serve you well. But a government might want something a bit more hardened. You're not going to throw out-of-the-box Ubuntu on a bunch of government systems, lest the whole network get pwned by a disgruntled worker who knows her way around the command line. That's not going to work.

I imagine Microsoft's reaction is going to be similar to George W. Bush's administration in the 2000s when they started replacing every name with "French" in it (like toast and fries) with "Freedom." (And if you recall, France responded by saying simply "French Fries are Belgian" or something like that.) In other words, name calling.

Microslop also has a silver lining here. The French aren't saying Windows is not secure. They aren't even saying it's not good. They're saying they want to reduce reliance on US tech. They aren't saying a single bad thing about Microslop or Windows.

The more all of these tech giants are going to push AI and cloud based things the more people are going to switch to Linux. This is a huge thing to have a full gov do it through. It will push driver support as well for them.

Office 365 is too expensive for sub-par quality.

No more corporate telemetry on private documents.

Bookmarking this to see where they are in 10 years.

Good. Windows is all of bad, expensive, and untrustworthy

Looks like we have to delay the year of the linux desktop another year, until france is done.

Le boycott!

Go France!

They're following my fine example.