Neowin.net

i agree to, although open-source software is nice... the USB memory sticks would be the best part since it would be free hardware

I'm thinking along the same lines.... A lot of money and effort spent to do this, and most students are likely to erase the drive and put music or other files on them.

Having a "take one" stack of CDs would better get the applications out, and to people who want the apps, not just looking for a free USB stick.

The point is to give ALL kids a portable desktop they can use everywhere with all the apps they need at school or the town library as well as regional school information useful for their studies. These portable apps will be updated via a web service.

In the real world, even in richer countries not all kids have computers, a stack of CDs makes no sense for them and would be quickly outdated anyway.

We also have a different definition of "a lot of money", 2.6 million euros for an operation that will reach 175.000 pupils is very cheap, less than 15€ per pupil, especially since the education budget for the region is in the 1 billion range.

dude,

nice troll... open source is all about innovation...

how is it that the renaissance, the most creative period in human history flourished without intellectual property laws? The creation of innovation does not come from safeguarding expensive technologies against pirating and theft, it relies on sharing of these ideas with others....

What he actually means is that it kills off profit form greedy corporations....

Proprietary software companies have to work harder to release software worth paying for, hence open source actually *increases* innovation from them.

Just look how much MS have improved IE and Office since Firefox and OpenOffice.org have become popular.

"Improved" how so?

Without open source you wouldn't have been able to post this message.

QFT

because whatever else is true in the renaissance everything was funded by wealthy patrons and the church to promote themselves. thats why you have a lot of religious paintings and portraits of merchants.

dont simplify history.

i dont think intellectual property laws are everything people say they are, but that doesnt mean they dont have a role.

and no i think innovation in open source can be in some ways harder because of a lack of competition, lack of clear goals, lack of big money, because of fragmentation and lack of a coherent platform.

what innovation has open source done so far btw? for example, what did firefox actually accomplish being open source besides copying a lot of things from a lot of different other programs, to make something that was close enough to IE and standards compliant enough, that it could be attractive for political reasons.

At this point, programmers everywhere (whether open source, or closed source) are standing on the shoulders of giants. They have platforms and frameworks all laid out for them, and they build upon this existing code base, expanding it with smaller new ideas and implementations.

Where is "innovation"? All around us.
Who is "innovating"? Most all talented programmers, regardless of whether the code they are working on is public or kept secret and hidden away from public view.

You'd have to be seriously blind to believe Office 2007 wasn't that much of an improvement over its predecessor, or even Internet Explorer 7.

I just meant that in our current society, greed/money is the motivation that gets things done. Very few people work for "the greater good" without a thought on profits.

So, a programmer that makes a large salary writes better code than one who does it because he/she really loves it and wants to?

And a doctor who makes a lot of money is likewise doing a much better job at taking care of his patients than one who has a passion for his/her job?

I don't agree with that.

You can't be that blind. There are thousands of companies/individuals who make a living in the open source industry. You are confusing profits with intellectual property. The OS community *relies* on innovation to get by (sharing information is a necessity). Most closed source companies rely on patenting and hording away IP/software as a corporate asset to make money.... how does this help innovation? It doesn't, it stifles creativity and causes monopolistic markets.... and remember, one of the bigger innovation catalysts we have in our industry is competition.

Why would they have MSN? They most likely have Yahoo.

MSN, Yahoo, AIM, GTalk. Same difference

yahoo in europe? doubtfull

I think the keys just include the installers, not portable versions of the apps.

Huh?

Why would 15 and 16 year old kids in Paris, France have computers so vastly underpowered compared to 15 and 16 year old kids elsewhere in the world? Just look through the forums here, man! The gamers threads are filled with kids that age who consider anything under 3 GHz to be "junk".

I'd like to see some facts to back up your statement that kids in Paris are stuck with such old equipment.

I imagine he's talking about the PCs at the schools not at their homes. In many areas here in the US, it's the same problem. The governments aren't spending nearly enough $$ in our government schools to keep updating pcs to current levels. Sure, at home it's a much different story.

Then you have schools like mine. We got a bunch of Pentium IV 2.8GHz, 512MB DDR, 40GB etc last year. This year we got a bunch of Athlon 3200+, 1GB DDR, 40GB to replace it... make sense? no...

No, they will include portable apps.

Preston High for example has like 4 or 5 iMacs (guess 20" pretty much latest gen i think) and several P4's I think (about for the students in the tech room alone... not to mention every teacher has his own pc in his class room and those one are not low-end either
then again I wish our school had iMac's or at leadt mac mini's...
i'd use the public computing room way more often then

-fm

Sorry, but I was basing my observations off the equipment typical in our school board in Toronto. Yes, their home computers can be all fast and fancy, but school computers are sometimes the result of recycling programs. But yeah, in certain labs dedicated to computer studies, the new equipment schools occasionally get are placed for those uses.

One should also think, if their home computers are that powerful and these keys were meant as take-home devices, shouldn't their home PCs be powerful and capable enough for them to get these OSS apps themselves?

Slightly on that topic, but the OOo distribution from PortableApps.com did take a long time to load off the USB on this PC with a USB 2.0 port. Guess it could be just a result of it being on a USB key with all the bandwidth bottlenecks and whatnot.

Hmmm... You could very well be right, when it comes to schools. I don't think that they would have hugely outdated equipment barely able to handle using these keys, judging from what I see at elementary and middle-school levels here in Tennessee, but I don't have any evidence or documentation that shows what is currently in-use in Paris, either. I am extrapolating from personal experience as well. :unsure:

Why ?

More options, and there are a lot of freeware apps that are better than their OS counterparts.

And this shows the students that they can only get public recognition by goign OS, wich is wrong, personally if I wrote a program I probably wouldn't realease the source, certainly not under any of the OS lincenes available wich prettymuch removes my right to the code. Then I'd ratehr release it with a license where I can say "yeah you can use it for commercial projects, but only with permission and/or a fee".

If you don't release your code, what assurance have they that it is spyware free ? How can they customize it to use their webservices like autoupdating for instance ? What support will you give to it in two years from now ? Will it run on anything else but windows ? The whole French administration is progressively switching to Open Source, which also means Linux. As stated in their press release, this action is not only for kids but also a commitment to Open Source software by the regional government. It doesn't mean that "free" software is bad, it just means that closed source software is not what French (and many European) public services are going to use in the future.

From the list of software they include, I honestly doubt you can as a single freeware creator write software as complete and complex as Firefox, Thunderbird or openOffice which are created by hundreds of developpers with well-established organizations behind and lots of local companies able to customize these applications to the customer needs precisely because they have access to the source code and APIs.

This purpose is not to say to kids that they should develop Open Source software (yes, kids, not students, the Neowin summary is overly simplified...), the purpose is to improve public services and allow all pupils to have access to their own private digital environment, even the poorest.

Only about a million things. Where do you want to start?

Lol, where do these nutters come from.

Ok, maybe not pose a as an official (as they would be distributed by the school heads..). Did you read about the 'security researcher' who spread infected usb sticks (or CDs) in inconspicuous locations all around a bank, and reported that most of them 'reported home' (run by someone who took them).

With this new scheme, people would be less guarded about free usbs. I'd simply put a box full of sticks saying "Leftovers from Free USB Program", or whatever the french name is. And because people know there IS a program with that name, they'd be less hesitant in picking one up.

So, is this idea still too far-fetched?

I'm in the age span, but not the geographical one... darn.

What is your point?

So what? They will be only distributed to French Lycéens... In which way does it concern you?

Not the schools around here. Most of them use iMacs.

Something like this?
http://portableapps.com/