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

Better headline

[osgeek]

French police surrender to Linux

Yes, yes, it's more of a cliche than a joke.

Re:Better headline

[Chris Mattern]

They only surrendered to the Germans for one real reason: their artwork and architecture.

They surrendered to the Germans because 1940s France was a bitterly divided nation with an ineffective government, and some political factions favored surrender over working with their political enemies (the Communists were strong in France at the time and operated as a fifth column, because of Stalin's alliance with Germany at the time--ironically, they would become some of the most effective of the Resistance later when Hitler invaded Russia), and also because of a strong strain of isolationism at the time--many Frenchmen in 1940 were actually convinced it was all Britain's fault, an opinion that was reinforced when the British bombed the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir to prevent it from falling into German hands. The catastrophic military loss they suffered--the result of poor training, poor organization, poor leadership, and most of all, horrid communications (the French supreme HQ's picture of events was routinely several days behind what the front lines were seeing)--may have been the proximate cause, but the kind of disaster France suffered in 1940 takes a political and moral collapse as well as a military one. Read Shirer's "Fall of the Third Republic" sometime, fascinating read.

I also keep in mind that they also made our current word: sabotage... that words origin comes from Nazi occupation of France, when the peoples would jam up factories and machines to help Germany.

Um, no, it doesn't. While the Resistance in France certainly practiced sabotage, they didn't invent the word. The word comes from the French railway strike of 1910, in which the workers destroyed the wooden shoes that held the rails in place. The shoes in French were called "sabots", hence "sabotage".

C'est évident:

[Pig Hogger]

Tous vos bureaux sont nous appartiennent!

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?

[filbranden]

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?

Or better yet, contribute code. With 10% of what you were paying for licenses, you can hire or pay developers to improve open source projects, you may even choose the features that you need. You contribute them so that others with the same needs may use them as well.

Open source economics is based on the fact that code is worth more than money. Code you may share as much as you want. Money you may only split.

Crap

[Nimey]

Now we'll have to rename Linux to FreedomOS.