[Scottish] The Future of the LUG

[Willie]

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