France Says No To Office 365 and Google Workspace in School - Slashdot

Posted by msmash

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  The point of using the word "consideration" is so that one is not limited to financial payments. It's really any sort of quid pro quo, this for that. Is there some sort of translation error here, "consideration" the wrong English word to be using?

  • Re: Consideration is any quid pro quo, translation

    Negotiation maybe. Anyhoo, the standalone MS Office Home and Education, is available on Amazon.de for about 120 Euro.

    • Re:

      LibreOffice is available for free. It's also supported by the EU & the EU has made ODF the EU document standard. Want a "cloud" version that's GDPR compliant? Fine: https://www.collaboraoffice.co... [collaboraoffice.com]

      • Re: Consideration is any quid pro quo, translatio

        I live in the middle of the EU and have never encountered an ODF document.

        • Re:

          I occasionally work for the EU, the Council of Europe, & some other European govt agencies & I have encountered ODF. Most circulated documents are in PDF format though for maximum compatibility.

  • Re:

    "Consideration" is a word that's routinely used in contract law (in English).

    • Re:

      Yes, that is where the definition that I am applying comes from. That "consideration" is any quid pro quo a contract may specify, not necessarily a financial payment.

      • Re:

        Sure - but I don't think they're offering non-monetary compensation to use the software either. I'm not sure why that's relevant.

        • Re:

          I'm thinking we need to know precisely what French law requires, "payment" or "consideration", in order to craft a solution.

  • Re:

    Consideration is the word used in English contract law and means as you say.

    All he's really saying is that it doesn't fall under "public procurement contracts" because it's free and you don't need one. What's not being said is that it is probably still fine to use it - you just can't have a public procurement contract for the free service (and why would you).

    • Re:

      That would have been fine, but that was not the actual written reply, which was: "a written reply to confirm that French public procurement contracts require "consideration" -- payment"
      
      I am merely pointing out that "consideration" vs "payment" means that there could be a translation error here that is distorting the details. "Free" is not the same as no "payment". I think we need to precisely understand the conflict with French law to develop a solution.

      • Re:

        And I think that this statement is intentionally evasive by framing it around procurement contracts. They're not interpreting that statement, just putting it out there and letting the reader come to their own conclusion.

  • Re:

    "Graft" is the word that comes to mind.

• Those cheese-eating surrender monkeys are doing something right.

  • 2 hidden comments

  • France does strikes right too. Shuts the whole damn country down whenever the working class comes up short on paying their bills. The rich ought to be happy that it's only strikes and infrastructure shutdowns instead of repeating the Reign of Terror. The working class there is hardcore when it comes to budgets for wine and cheese (and general partying). Even the unemployed hold protests when they don't get a Christmas bonus. It's fantastic and weird compare to the US.

    • Re:

      Yeah, bloody French with their fun & culture, cinema, flying machines, art movements, music, cuisine, universal healthcare, low child poverty rates, etc.. How dare they provide their citizens with a decent standard of living & dignity! Who do they think they are?
• Any proof of his words?

• Eh, probably not. France has famously gone to great lengths to defend their culture from Anglo "imperialism". They restrict English language stuff all the time, movies included, from both America and British Commonwealth country. They promote domestic French language alternatives. They similarly have a distrust of products from English speaking countries. They'll probably end up doing a home-grown, Francophone clone of American cloud services. It'll be really expensive, but they don't care about that, as lo

  • Re: Not really a "European" concern

    It's actually a rapidly growing EU concern. And the Dutch government has the same problems with the Cloud as the French: the so-called 'patriot' act (better named the fuck-everyone-we-own-you act, or possibly the US-First act) didn't do much for cloud acceptance. Privacy Shield turned out to be not worth the paper it was written on and we basically assume by now that the US is a potentially hostile nation where most of our national interests are concerned. That's fairly new.

    We're still going into the Cloud

  • Re:

    They already did, but it's not expensive - it's free and open source: https://framasoft.org/ [framasoft.org]

• The biggest problem for the French isn't data security, or "consideration," or any of that crap. It's that these are American products from American companies.

  • Re:

    So, you are complaining they are acting just like the USA is then ?
    
    Trump proved how reliance on the USA was a foolish idea and now they like other nations are looking at spreading their risk
    
    They should throw money at French software developers to produce a "French" version of open office and Linux.
    
    The EU should also buy ARM, so they have a longe term alternative to US dominated IT.

  • You're wrong there. Don't underestimate the damage of the patriot act,or think that the mishandling of private data by US companies like Facebook, the treatment of EU citizens at your border, the espionage done by the CIA and NSA, etc. are just all ignored.

    It's not. And slowly but surely the EU is waking up to the fact that the USA is unreliable at best, hostile at worst. Or do you think we've forgotten the law that says you can invade The Hague at will? Or the way Palantir abused Facebook data to help the Brexit?

    Think what you like, but don't be surprised if the climate becomes very cold in the EU for US companies in the coming years.

    • Re:

      The alternatives are also controlled by jerks.

      • Re:

        It's called not putting all your eggs in one basket.
        
        The reliance on the USA by the rest of the world has become extremely problematic.
        
        It is time to move away from US corporations setting the tax systems, the trade systems, the copyright systems, the financial systems, etc

  • Re:

    Microsoft, by offering a product for free, does what it can to bypass the law. It allows the schools to immediately register without paying, meaning no bidding is required, no review is done, and nobody to check the laws are followed; in short, it makes impossible for the local governments to follow the principles of good administration that are stated in law.

    This is what the ministry invokes (here is the exact law in force in France, for reference https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr... [legifrance.gouv.fr] ). You cannot, in France,

• by denbesten ( 63853 ) on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @01:09PM (#63071694)

  ...French public procurement contracts require "consideration" -- payment. "Free service offers are therefore, in principle, excluded from the scope of public procurement,..

  By this line of reasoning, I presume that Free, Open-Source Software is also excluded from French public schools.

  • Re:

    If I started a consultant company that offers some number of years support for FOSS, that would likely be allowed. In principle it's fair as well, since anyone can put together such a company and bid on it.

  • Re:

    You're kind of missing the point. The term you should be focusing on isn't really "consideration" or "free," it's "illegal dumping." It's the idea that a company that normally charges for proprietary products will try to enter a market by saying that market can get the products for free -- the plan being that they will then be locked into using those products, to the exclusion of competitors. It's essentially, "your first hit is free." This practice is particularly insidious in education markets, because pe

  • Re:

    I don't think so. For one thing, FOSS isn't a service - whereas Office 365, with its reliance on a for-profit corporation's servers, is very much a service. For another, FOSS functionality and rights can't be "taken back" once it's in the hands of the user. The same is not true of Microsoft software.

  • Re:

    Nope. There's an EU directive that requires procurers to "prefer" FOSS solutions, for many of the same reasons that corporations like Google, Facebook, & Microsoft often prefer FOSS. By "free service offers" they more than likely mean paid for in personal data rather than money.

• So those are not allowed because they are not paid... then Free Software like LibreOffice is also not allowed if it doesn't cost money?

  • Re:

    Pretty sure it just means you don't need a public procurement contract to use it. But I think this was weasel phrasing to sound like he's supporting the idea without actually putting any legal weight on it.

• "So how much more than free would you like to pay?"

  Allowing govt run schools to name their own price seems pretty fair.

• this word means "the use of those things may be done, but a LOT of though must be put into it".
  payment is not even a consideration.
  obviously free software is preferred

• Down with public cloud systems. Other people, businesses and countries should be doing the same. There is nothing that you can do in a public cloud that you can't do in a private cloud where you control your data and the access to it. And YOU control it, not asking some server out of your control to control it per your specs on your behalf.... you actually control it. It gets even more stupid when it comes to IoT devices that require you to authenticate to someone elses servers and ask permission to control

  • Re:

    Which is why I still use X10 equipment to this day, but the prices for X10 controllers has never gone down, in 25 years, while the new smartplugs have been getting steadily cheaper. I understand there are ways to intercept the key exchange process when they set themselves up so they can be locally controlled.

• • Re:

    It's already used by the french national Gendarmerie, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Schools are probably heading towards the same direction, using a similar distribution.

  • Re:

    Because it's a different thing. It's an office suite that you install on your computer, not a cloud service.

• Someone told me years ago that "No one copies the French, and the French copy no one."