French Govt. Agency to Promote Free software

[phil hunt]

Has anyone else read this in Linux Today:

<http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-11-21-021-20-PR-LL>
"EuroLinux Alliance: French Govt. Agency to Enforce Open Standards 
and Promote Open Source/Free software"


Summary: the French govmt agency ATICA is going to enforce "open 
standards"(1) for all software the govmt uses, and is also going to
publish a Free Software License "based on existing open source / free 
licenses" which presumably(2) they will recommend for future free 
software development sponsored by the French govmt.

(1) not sure what they mean by this; to me a standared is only open
if there is a free software reference implemenation for it.

(2) this is my presumption; I don't know what they will do with
this licensae once they write it. Perhaps they will require that
all software used by the French state be licensed under terms
compatible with it -- in which case it'd better be GPL-compatible.


Does anyone know more about this?

-- 
*** Philip Hunt *** philh at comuno.freeserve.co.uk ***