Just to clarify, they are only banning the usage of the free offerings of Office and Workspace which do not provide the data governance / compliance features. The higher tiers of Workspace/Office provide this functionality.
First, Google Docs is out of window either way. Then a specific budget needs to be approved to use Office, which will reduce its use to only people actually needing it (just reading docs produced elsewhere won't be enough)
Why? They can still use it, but under the non-free version which is under the necessary compliance.
I've heard of Microsoft education deals that involved paying 500 to 5000. With your choice of a macbook for every 500, or a lenovo laptop for every 200 paid.
Which FOSS alternatives provide similar functionality to Offices 365/Docs, and don't cost somewhere around ~$10/seat in IT time to set up and administer?
A git repository and an installation of LibreOffice don't meet that bar. Collaborative editing, good-enough default access control and security, and document sharing that doesn't consist of emailing "March Report_Version_6 (Copy 2)--actually final--.doc" around.
2. You don't need computers at all until uni, and yet...
And generally speaking, the alternative to this stuff in schools isn't FOSS, it's proprietary shit that costs $XY(Z)/seat and steals student data for use in its anti-plagiarism feature.
The court's ruling is fine and reasonable, but the conclusions people are drawing from it are not.
So computers are pretty much a necessity yes.
You have great faith in bureaucracy. The reality is anybody who was using a free version before will probably be given a paid version afterwards, and if not then the cost of administration and the creation of new fiefdoms around this process would be a net burden on efficiency anyway.
(103 billions EUR for education in 2020 by the central government only, 67 for Defence, and surprisingly little resources about how much social security actually costs, on an extensive scale) (local governments allocate more resources, mostly for the maintenance or buildings and supplies)
Teachers have had free licenses for MS Office since forever, even for personal computers) Computers can be pretty new in most schools. But network and host administration is more than patchy in most schools, due to a lack of qualified and dedicated employees, so they're ok with purchasing SW that works out of the box. (We used to maintain the school computers with a small group of students when we were in HS)
Actually, free software advocates have been complaining by the price of MS products, compared to the subventions to make free software.
And anyway, MS Office is the only software consistently used in ANY branch of government. It's a staple. Some Defence ppl have even been complaining that you might not want to run NSA-approved American SW for everything, especially as it often came on Chinese Lenovo HW. (While top government officials reminded that the USA is friendly, and that you can't go to the extent of making chips out of the sand from Brittany, a region with cold beaches in the west of France)
So the budget and the usage for Office already exist, for everyone
[1] https://www.economie.gouv.fr/facileco/comptes-publics/budget...
> education is the second most funded government feature in France after healthcare/social security
Both of which are under heavy pressure to reduce costs, which also leads to the waves of strikes (I know, France, strikes, name a more iconic duo. But their conditions are actually super shitty). They don't have enough money to cover salary raises among the inflation, that money going to US monopolies doesn't look go under any light you put it.
> Teachers have had free licenses for MS Office since forever
Local licenses might stay, 365 ones are going away (here the free tier is targeted, and Education minister targeted Microsoft in particular to freeze new licenses)
> Actually, free software advocates have been complaining by the price of MS products, compared to the subventions to make free software.
These decisions are actually not bound to bring fully free software in the mix. Proprietary solutions seem to be eyed at (those could be based on free software of course, but money will be exchanged at the end of the day)
My general take is that up until now "nobody is fired for choosing MS" was the basic principle, but that doesn't mean it stays that way forever. Switch to linux was a step in that direction already, and they committed to it up to a point. Stopping Office 365 propagation goes in that same direction.
In 2019, MSFT claimed re: Teams that it was keeping all data in country.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190331102643if_/https://techco...
In 2021, Office365 was banned from all ministries.
https://cloud-computing.developpez.com/actu/318885/La-DINUM-...
To the unavoidable question of “what to use then?”, I think the answers are “tough luck” and “the gov has a new service for that”. It’s set a case where GDPR has priority over costs and efficiency.
[0] https://siecledigital.fr/2021/09/24/etat-francais-micorost-3... [1] https://questions.assemblee-nationale.fr/q16/16-971QE.htm
> S'agissant de l'emploi de la solution Microsoft Office 365, le ministère de l'éducation nationale et de la jeunesse a informé en octobre 2021 les recteurs de région académique et d'académie de la doctrine « cloud au centre » (circulaire du Premier ministre précitée), de la position de la Dinum (note du 15 septembre 2021 précitée) et de l'avis de la CNIL sur ce sujet. Le ministère a ainsi demandé d'arrêter tout déploiement ou extension de cette solution ainsi que celle de Google, qui seraient contraires au RGPD.