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Two Interviews from Groklaw: Lapeyre and Quinn

PJ of Groklaw interviews the CTO of the French Tax Agency, IT Dept, Jean-Marie Lapeyre. It is an excellent article and clearly shows the real world business case for the use of FOSS.

PJ asks Lapeyre how he first learned about FOSS, and his response is powerful: “When in college, I discovered it and quickly became convinced that behind this philosophy, there is a strong model for mutualization of software costs (design, development and, more important, long-term maintainance), much better than the proprietary model. In fact, it is a realization of knowledge propagation and sharing (better to exchange than to hide).”

PJ also lands the first interview with Peter Quinn since he resigned from Massachusetts’ employ.

The article closes with this Quinn quotation, responding to several of PJ’s questions at once: “I think people are beginning to understand how desktops are being used in the Commonwealth which means that the vast majority of folks are content consumers. They require readers, a robust browser, email and maybe calendaring. Given that reality, it seems to be a blatant waste of the taxpayers’ money to continue to buy MS Office when in fact most people use a very small piece of its functionality. And, as a user of OpenOffice myself for both professional and personal use, it certainly does fulfill all my requirements. And I use more of a suite’s functionality than most folks in the Commonwealth.

So given ODF is the accepted standard and the changing face of desktop utilization, I think it has a real chance to prevail. And I would hope that ECMA would force one standard (not likely as noted above). That is not the Commonwealth’s fight but the world benefits with only one standard. And yes, the MS monoculture is and will continue to be a security risk.”

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