Open Source Schools (UK) has a discussion thread on the recent announcement that 55,000 laptops pre-installed with OpenOffice.org will be distributed to students in Oise, just north of Paris.

France is no stranger to large deployments of open source software, as it has been adopted by the national police force, parts of the legislative branch of the government, and schools in other Departments:

After USB Key in Ile de France (220,000), and CDs in Auvergne (64,000), this is the third department to provide OOo to their students!

An announcement of the project in French can be found here.

A comment posted to the Open Source Schools discussion points out the efforts of Framasoft, a French non-profit focused on promoting open source software to schools and the public at large. (They also created the Framakey, a USB disk preloaded with portable open source applications, that has been distributed to hundreds of thousands of students in the Paris region and around France.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 10:52 am and is filed under Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.