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Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

Besides OVH having pretty crappy support, it is worth noticing that Oles (the ovh ceo/owner) basically only tweets in French, despites having customers from all-over the world.

This is plain rude.

This time he tweeted in english just to make some noise.

But the truth is that OVH redistribuites a modified version of ubuntu, abusing of the Ubuntu trademark.

Canonical rightfully wants OVH to either stop using the Ubuntu trademark or pay canonical to certifiy that the OS ovh distribuites is an Ubuntu-grade ubuntu derivative. This is perfectly fine.

If OVH does not want to pay, OVH should just call their ubuntu-based OSes something like "OVH Linux".

BTW, 1-2 Eur/installatio is an insane price, I suspect that Oles is just lying about that pice.

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> Besides OVH having pretty crappy support, it is worth noticing that Oles (the ovh ceo/owner) basically only tweets in French, despites having customers from all-over the world. This is plain rude.

Many US-American companies have customers all-over the world and still only tweet in English.

>> Besides OVH having pretty crappy support, it is worth noticing that Oles (the ovh ceo/owner) basically only tweets in French, despites having customers from all-over the world. This is plain rude.

> Many US-American companies have customers all-over the world and still only tweet in English.

And this is right.

English is the de-facto standard language is business and science.

It doesn't matter if your company is french, american, italian, brazilian or something else: you really SHOULD write/tweet in english, at least to your customers/clients.

https://twitter.com/OVH is in English.

@olesovhcom is the founder's semi-personal account where he tweets a lot of company related stuff, but it's not their official channel.

> It doesn't matter if your company is french, american, italian, brazilian or something else: you really SHOULD write/tweet in english, at least to your customers/clients.

I know lots of companies (for example for mechanical engineering in Germany) where the customers strongly prefer it if they are written to in their native language (in this case German).

No, really: Some companies learnt it the really hard way why they shouldn't try to advertize in English in Germany, see for example this German article: http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/wunderbar/denglisch-in-der-... (TLDR: The uneducated classes misundertand the slogans in really funny ways).

The good old "speak white" argument..

It's a french thing. Once I literally was told that the cafe "is closed" because I dared to speak english. It was Carcasonne fortress, midday, middle of summer, with hundred other people being served. Don't hold your breath

The French are a proud people, especially concerning their language. If you try (and fail) to talk to people in French first, they'll generally be happy to switch to English. Just don't start out in English.

You say this like its a perfectly fine way of behaving?

You say this like it isn't? What makes English so special that everyone has to use it over their own language? How would you feel if someone were to approach you in French, not showing the slightest inclination to speak English, not even a "hello"?

So everyone should learn something of the language of every country they visit however shortly?

English is the 2nd language most people in the world knows so that's a natural language to use approaching people whose language you don't know.

English is not my native language. If someone visited my country I would expect them to speak to me in English, not learn my language unless they were going to settle here.

It really isn't a French thing to be mortified by people speaking English. Probably, you did something else to offend.

That said it doesn't hurt for bonjour to be the first word out of your mouth. It is France and they speak French after all. The same goes for hello in every other language in every other country on earth as well.

source: American who has lived in France.

Note that Octave Klaba is not French. His mother tongue is Polish. Also, he is not CEO of OVH anymore (he switched to a CTO position last year).

> BTW, 1-2 Eur/installatio is an insane price, I suspect that Oles is just lying about that pice.

Do you have anything to back that up? Has he publicly lied before, do you know what they charge other hosts, or do you just dislike the guy?

a large percentage of his customers are french and many french do not speak english, in the same manner that many americans do not speak french. you do not want to alienate your core base.

he could use a comm officer who communicates in english and other languages though.

French are well known for protecting their language use and jealously dismissing English popularity taking every opportunity to speak French where they can get away with it ;)

English are well known colonialist trying to assimilate everything that's different ;)

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