It seems to me it's a good idea for the precise things mentioned in the article : quick prototyping, using software on an environment you don't fully control (like running some scientific simulation software on a cluster) and bug reports (although I'm more skeptical about that one). Not for managing and deploying software in general. So why so much scorn ? It's just a tool for an end. CDE won't kill good software development and deployment practices, no more than Wine killed GNU/Linux FOSS software.

As stated in the previous anonymous comment, the code was contributed by the gendarmerie (military police), which is quite tech savvy and has a long history of using and advocating open source solutions. They previously switched all their office software to OpenOffice.org in 2005, and are currently migrating most of their Windows workstations to Ubuntu. But this effort is not so widespread ; there are both successes (like the budget and public accounting administration recently migrating from Outlook and Notes to Thunderbird and OBM groupware) and failures, like the whole educational field, which is basically a mess. There are some isolated efforts to promote free software and open standards, but due to a lack of strong political willpower, huge lobbying from Microsoft, and general incompetence and disinterest about IT, teachers, students and administrative staff are usually stuck with proprietary (and often obsolete) solutions. There has been some recent effort to officially define open formats and standards and to enforce their use across the whole French administration (http://www.april.org/fr/rgi), but it was mostly thwarted by Microsoft using some FUD and promoting their pseudo-open OOXML format. I think we can say that more and more IT people in the French administration are aware than FOSS is a real and worthy alternative, but the battle is far from won.

I read the court ruling, and the issue is not exactly what it seems ; it's basically contract law. First, it appears that everybody (the AFPA and Edu4) was aware that VNC would be used from the beginning and that it used the GNU GPL license. Both the AFPA and Edu4 were initially fine with that, and Edu4 was supposed to keep the original copyright notice and licence and to distribute the source along with the binary. It seems that Edu4 somehow changed their mind and : 1) changed the copyright notice of VNC to replace the name of the legitimate VNC copyright holder by their name, and distributed it under their own terms with the rest of the software 2) did not distribute the modified source, although the AFPA asked 3) hardcoded a secret password in the modified VNC that allowed them to use it as a backdoor (!) What I understand of the ruling (I'm french, but I'm no lawyer) is that by changing the copyright notice of VNC and licensing it along with the bulk of their software under their terms, Edu4 basically sold the AFPA a counterfeit product, which breaks the contract. (And they didn't like the backdoor part either.) I think it makes more sense when you say it that way.

A "decision engine" that goes "beyond the traditional search engines" ? Doesn't it sound just like a cheap try to surf on the hype wave from Wolfram|Alpha ?

There is a quorum at the National Assembly, but a member of the parliament has to explicitely ask it to be checked in order to enforce it. And even if it happens, the session is just aborted and takes place again another day, where you can be bloody sure that the government will demand all of his member of parliament to be present. Anyway, Sarkozy's party and its allies have an absolute majority in the assembly, and Sarkozy and his government are known to be demand an extreme loyalty and servility to members of the parliament of his party. They can pass almost any law. The opposition made plenty of sensible comments and amendment proposals, but the government mostly ignored them, so they got pissed off and stopped wasting their time. I can definitely understand those people.

Think of all the information that was produced by men and women since they began drawing pictures on cave walls and carving symbols on clay tablets. Most of it is lost, because the physical media was lost, broken, erased, reused, burnt or somehow destroyed. We lost plays by Shakespeare and Moliere, most of the writings of the classical greek philosophers and writers, and countless other valuable works. Digitizing data has its own problems (all the openness and format stuff, sharing and related legal issues, ...), but it makes it a lot easier (and practically free) to quickly duplicate and share any piece of information between different persons in different places of the world. Even with the various problems that still have to be faced, I think current digital data is much safer than anything that was written or drawn a few centuries ago.