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. > > > 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! Vote SNP then. -- Best Regards Willie Fleming _______________________________________________ Scottish mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/scottish