[Scottish] The Future of the LUG

[Tony Dyer]

TEST Sending to both Willie and list by means of auto reply
Tony D


In message <200312111455.12465.willie at itscotland.demon.co.uk>, Willie 
<willie at itscotland.demon.co.uk> writes
>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.
>

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