TEST Sending to both Willie and list by means of auto reply Tony D
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Willie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
On Thursday 11 December 2003 10:03, Gordon JC Pearce wrote:On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 20:10, Ian Ruffell wrote:Did he now? I never got that msg which is kinda worrying......> Just for clarification: it's more a case of persuading folk like the > Scottish Executive and the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body to shift > off MS; not to mention encouraging similar moves in the public sector at > large. Pat talks about this (with text of parliamentary questions, etc.) > on his website (www.patrickharviemsp.com).
I'll have a look at that
It's not so much getting politicians away from using Microsoft's products (although it could save a substantial amount) as getting them away from closed, secret, non-free document formats. I can foresee problems ahead when all those documents written in Word 95 suddenly aren't readable when Office 2005 comes out and support for older formats is dropped (not that Microsoft would do such a thing, would they?)
> That's not to say that other parties are not interested: I also saw > Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP make positive noises abour open source > software recently. As Willie was saying, coalitions ...Ahemm, I may be able to claim a bit of credit there. One time last year was sitting across from Nichola and another of her SNP colleagues on the train. I bent their ears all the way back to Queen St on the benefits of Open Source.
Well, using an openly published document format (really, even using .RTF would be a start) would benefit everyone, in all parties.Well politcs is the art of the possible so lets tackle something that could make a difference and may be attainable. I havent thought this one through thoroughly yet,(thats what you guys are for!) but could we make a realistic costed case for keeping a copy of all Scottish Executive documents in a format other than .doc? Personally I'd go for Open Office formats but ,yes .RTF would be a start. Storage has never been cheaper and it should be reasonably(!) simple to implement.Vote SNP then.
> Internally, the Green machines in Glasgow are all on various flavours of > Debian at the moment (putting our technology where our mouth is). Can't > answer for the Edinburgh mob, though.
Argh! Not Slackware? I'm definitely not voting for you!
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