French Police Ditching Windows for Linux

esocid writes "In another European blow to Microsoft the French paramilitary police force said Wednesday it is ditching Microsoft for the free Linux operating system, becoming one of the biggest administrations in the world to make the break. The gendarmerie began severing its ties with Microsoft in 2005 when it moved to open source office applications like word processing. It switched to open source Internet browsers in 2006."

Comments

How about some donations?

[LingNoi]

"In 2004 we had to buy 13,000 licences for office suites for our PCs," he said, "but in the three years since then we've only had to buy a total of 27 licences."

That's great, but maybe you could appreciate what you have gotten for free and give maybe 10% of what you were paying before back to those open source projects?

Re:How about some donations?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I fell for it, it's Slashdot. But the French didnt switch to pay money... They switched to SAVE money. The faster Linux geeks figure out that a very large percentage of you will never see thin red cent for the work they put in the faster Linux will evolve. Linux is used by people because they either love it or two they got something for free. It's developed by big business because it's a free pool of talent that is more then willing to work for free, and it's used by big business because some other big bushiness takes all your free work and slaps a support price tag on it. Nothing more nothing less. It's not a life style for companies like it is for some of us, it's way of saving a few dollars. Everyone please get over yourselves, and we can move forward.

Re:Better headline

[Anonymous Coward]

Enough with the French bashing. Those who bash the French do so at their own peril. We read tons of responses about people here on Slashdot complaining about American bashing. Both are forms of bigotry cleverly masked as a joke. Hopefully, someday people won't have to play dicksize wars over how their nation is greater than another or demean the nationality of another to feel more confident in their own. But until then we should mod crypto-nationalistic comments like this down.

Do me a favor. Travel through Europe and tell some of your French bashing jokes (outside the UK). Will the people you tell them to laugh with you at your cleverness or look at you in disgust like the bigot you are? Then travel through the US and tell some American bashing jokes. I think you'll find that you will get the same response.

Re:Free as in "Freedom Fries?"

[flyingfsck]

It is the language support. MS language support is a lacking, unless you happen to speak some flavour of English...

Re:Better headline

[Anonymous Coward]

The art and architecture will last for millennia, but if destroyed, these valuable pieces of history are gone for good. I think it's safe to say that they are more important to mankind in large to preserve than than any single human, or any group of humans.

That pretty much sums up Nazi and fascist ideology: the state and its achievements are more important than the individuals.

As you demonstrate: fascist ideology is alive and well today.

Re:Free as in "Freedom Fries?"

[rprins]

Utter nonsense. If language support was lacking Windows would never have been embraced at all. Microsoft publishes all it's programs in every European language imaginable. And if not, French would be the first they'd support, they're not stupid when it comes to marketing.

Anyway, maybe they're switching because it just makes sense financially?
A more interesting question is, what is keeping the US government from switching? Are they more deeply locked-in or are they more willing to throw some money towards a good friend?