The Document Foundation welcomes France’s MIMO in the Advisory Board
MIMO (Inter-Ministry Mutualisation for an Open Productivity Suite) represents several bodies of the French government, and fosters the diversity of TDF Advisory Board by adding the voice of 500,000 professional users
Berlin, June 17, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that MIMO – the working group of the French government including several ministries and administrations [1], for a total of 500,000 desktops – is now an official member of the foundation’s Advisory Board. MIMO primary goal is to give CIOs and their staff a way to share experience on office suites and operating systems, in order to speed up desktop modernisation.
MIMO is focused on the free desktop, and is one of a number of working groups focusing each one on a specific area of the information system under the guidance of the DISIC (French state CIO). Together, the working groups are creating an official set of free software for the ministries, with a specific application for each task.
MIMO has standardised on LibreOffice, developed by the Document Foundation, and is contributing to the development of the office suite through a commercial support agreement provided by certified developers. The role of MIMO is to validate successive versions of LibreOffice and make them compatible with the IT infrastructure and processes of member ministries. A single, standard LibreOffice version is validated and approved every year, according to the roadmap planned by MIMO members
To be approved, a version of LibreOffice is submitted to a qualification process: the software is tested to verify its compatibility with other business applications, and becomes a certified MIMO version only after all QA tests have been passed. The Ministry of Interior – for example – has a ten-step qualification process, with tests including compatibility with business applications, macros and deployment tools. The decision is taken by all the members representing the ministries.
MIMO is joining the current 8 members of TDF Advisory Board – Google, Intel, Lanedo, Red Hat, SUSE, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Software in the Public Interest (SPI) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) – and will be represented by Laure Patas d’Illiers, of the Department of Treasury and Finance of the French government.
[1] Ministries: Agriculture, Culture, Defense, Economy, Education, Environment, Finance, Interior, Justice. Administrations: CAF (Family Allocation Funds), DILA (Direction of Legal / Administrative Information), ENA (National Administration School), National Assembly.
About MIMO
The MIMO working group was created by the Agency for Digital Development in Administration (ADAE) in 2005, under the governance of the Prime Minister. Since 2011, MIMO has been controlled by DISIC (Direction Interministérielle des Systèmes d’Information et de Communication), whose mission is to coordinate IT policy in French administrations. DISIC has launched working groups on cloud computing, the organisation and planning of IT systems, and Open Source. MIMO and the Open Source working group are managed by the CIO of the Ministry of Culture (Ministère de la Culture).
Would love to see the Australian Federal, State, Territory, and Local Governments take note of this. But no, I guess my country wishes to continue it’s current path of becoming the most effective “DumbNation”, and also; the biggest champion obsequious lickspittle ever known; to the proprietary software moguls at our unnecessary expense. Come on Australia – wake up!!!
Taking note of this development, and acting accordingly, could well re-shape our nation into a more pluralistic beast, AND, be the beginning of the stemming of the tide of our much lamented “brain drain”.
It is good PR for TDF, but IMHO the problem is that MIMO still recommends LO in version 3.5.7 which was EOLed in November 8, 2012 (sic!). How to convince any organization to deploy abandoned version? Does this mean that newer versions are no good or the whole process is slow (3.6 will be EOLed in August, 4.0 in November this year)? I hope that such big new member will help to better quality of LibreOffice in general by active contributions to TDF QA processes of current and future releases. Also “contributing to the development of the office suite through a commercial support agreement provided by certified developers” is a catchy phrase, but I’d like to have a list of features or commits of those improvements to the code available somewhere instead.
MIMO has its own release plan, as specified in the press release, and is perfectly understandable that they still use LibreOffice 3.5.7 (and this has nothing to do with the quality of LibreOffice 3.6 and 4.0, which they will implement in the future according to their six month certification process). Features and commits are included in LibreOffice, as every feature and commit coming from a commercial support agreement provided by certified developers (so, you can find them in every new version of the suite). This is the beauty of the copyleft license.