Don't worry about the budget, education is the second most funded government feature in France after healthcare/social security, and before Defence [1] (in French)
(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
> 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.
See, this kind of misunderstanding (that doesn't happen in French, BTW) is why calling it «free software» instead of «libre software» is IMHO a bad idea...
(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...