French National Assembly will use open source desktops

This will become more prevalent. I was emailing with a friend and he pointed out that his email is with Google, his cell phone is a prepaid national phone from Virgin, his sideline (web design) is completely remote, so in effect he has his office wherever he goes. This is going to become more and more true, and as applications move towards web interfaces, the OS becomes irrelevant. All you really need is a web browser and an internet connection. As the OS becomes irrelevant, GNU/Linux becomes MORE relevant because of the price. Microsoft is one of the few in the software industry not really poised to move into the next era of SAS. Pay Red Hat $$XX and you get a supported product and all the help you need, pay MS $$XX and you get an OS that the EULA excuses them from supporting or taking the blame for. I hope more governments have the wisdom to go the FOSS route.

There are many advances that are helping this to come true. 10Gbits networking, cluster and virtual server farms, Blade farms etc... on the hardware side. AJAX technology on the software side. But I doubt that the standalone PC is going away so soon. MS is aware of that but trying to dampen it until they catch up with others. MS signed agreement with Xen for virtualization, signed an agreement with PHP, they are supporting Python etc... and more importantly the latest deal with Novel to counter FOSS.