France's parliamentarians to choose Ubuntu ?

[newbie2]

April, a French advocacy group on free software, is approaching the members in the French Parliament to get them to select Ubuntu for their office PCs. French MPs are able to choose between using either this free and open source operating system or a proprietary operating system.

The group is asking its members and volunteers to contact French MPs and to explain them the importance of choosing Ubuntu over the proprietary system. "The main goal is to make them aware of the political and ethical consequences of their choice", explains Jeanne Tadeusz, April's Public Affairs Officer.

According to Tadeusz, support for Ubuntu is not on par with the support for the proprietary alternative. "There are a few issues. Most importantly, there is no support at the moment for using a regular email client, so MPs using Ubuntu are forced to use webmail."

At least one MP has already made known to choose Ubuntu, Henri Emmanuelli, member of the Socialist Party, says mrs Tadeusz

The action is a follow-up to April's campaign to get candidates participating in the French parliamentary elections to pledge support for free software. This year, April managed to get 466 candidates to sign the 'Free Software Pact'. Of these candidates, 42 are now Members of Parliament.

Ubuntu was the default operating system on all the PCs in the French Parliament between 2007 and 2012. The option to choose between open source and proprietary OS is for the current five year period.

http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/apri...cs-open-source

[mastablasta]

"There are a few issues. Most importantly, there is no support at the moment for using a regular email client, so MPs using Ubuntu are forced to use webmail."

huh? what?

Thunderbird is not only client but also has encription support. which if i was someone trnasmitting state secrets over email, would very much be using it.

[sanderj]

huh? what?

Thunderbird is not only client but also has encription support. which if i was someone trnasmitting state secrets over email, would very much be using it.

Maybe they use an Exchange Server as mail server? I'm absolutely not uptodate on this subject, but possibly Exchange Server does not provide all its features via open interfaces, but only via proprietary interface and via its webinterface?

[mr john]

Neither Thunderbird or Evolution work reliably with Exchange server. It's one of the reason I had to use Windows at work. There's no way I was going to use the Web Mail feature of exchange. If the French can get around that by having alternative servers than fair play to them... It's still a deal breaker for many potential users.

[Copper Bezel]

Yeah, that was my immediate assumption on reading that line, too; I have to use Outlook Web Access at work as well. OWA is usable, but it's not like using Outlook proper and it's not meant to be your home base for e-mail management. For instance, filtering rules can't be created through the web interface. It really seems meant for access away from your work machine. I don't have any problems with it myself, but my needs are simple.