To help make kids aware of alternatives to proprietary software, the Ile-de-France, the political district of greater Paris, will give 175,000 school children and apprentices USB keys loaded with open-source software.
The keys, which will contain a "portable office" suite of software and other tools, will be given to 130,000 secondary-school pupils and 45,000 first-year apprentices at training centers at the start of the 2007 school year.
The portable office will include an office software suite, an Internet browser, an e-mail client, an instant messaging client, and audio and video player software, according to the Ile-de-France regional council. The open source software will run on Microsoft Windows.
The project will "represent for students a tool of freedom and mobility between their school, cybercafes and their home or friends' PCs," the council said. The operation will cost US$3.38 million (2.6 million euros).
The president of the regional council, Jean-Paul Huchon, is a self-confessed "partisan of the rebalancing of the supply of proprietary and open-source software" who previously welcomed the launch of the Firefox 2 browser and led the support for a creation of a competitiveness hub based on open source.
Staff writers of ZDNet France reported from Paris.
If they're going to get apps on a key fob, why not give them Puppy Linux at the same time? Free the world from the evil tyrant of Redmond!