This just in from Jacques Le Marois of MandrakeSoft, the French government has officially announced its plans to shift their escalating (and pointless) IT costs away from spiralling license costs and move to Linux and Open Source software where they can keep things under control.

Civil service minister Renaud Dutreil told Reuters France wanted to use "open-source" software providers to resupply part of the almost one million state computers under a government cost-cutting drive designed to trim a bulging public deficit.

Microsoft, of course, are masters of spin and immediately offered the following non-sequiteur:

"In fact, open-source software is not free. It is very expensive because it shifts the cost to maintenance, services, integration and training," Microsoft France chief Christophe Aulnette said.

To which, my dear Christophe, I'd say first that no one ever said the software would be magic pixie dust installed by midnight elves; free means free speech which means the government will control every aspect of their software, but yes, no doubt about it, no one denies you have to roll up your sleeves when you take responsibility for yourself -- in your case, they roll up their sleeves to fight with your software, with ours they roll them to be a part of it.

And second, dear sir, your's is a neat trick of rhetoric, but linguistically, even in French, 'shifts' does not imply 'increases' and thus, to the astute, your statement confesses only that all software is very expensive, only with yours the expense is downtime, virus damage, unrequested and unneccessary bloat and ever higher and eternally recurring licensing fees, but with our software that same budget is spent under our management, accountable to our shareholders and put into our intellectual assets.

Seems a no-brainer to me.

[ Source: Yahoo! News - France Challenges Microsoft in Software Re-Fit ]