[Scottish] The Future of the LUG

[Gordon JC Pearce]

On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 20:10, Ian Ruffell wrote:

> 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).  

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 ...

Well, using an openly published document format (really, even using .RTF
would be a start) would benefit everyone, in all parties.
 
> 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!

Cheers,
  Gordon.