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French Police Ditching Windows for Linux

Posted by samzenpus on from the viva-la-revolucion dept.

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."

3 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. How about some donations? by LingNoi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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?
    1. Re:How about some donations? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  2. Re:Free as in "Freedom Fries?" by rprins · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?