French Police Save Millions Switching To Ubuntu

Ynot_82 writes "The French national police force, the Gendarmerie Nationale, has spoken about their migration away from the Windows platform to Linux. Estimated to have already saved the force 50 Million Euros, the migration is due to be completed on all 90,000 workstations by 2015. Of the move, Lt. Col. Guimard had this comment: '"Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users. Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority."'"

Comments

Re:Games are not our priority

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

... but solitaire and minesweeper are great training for stakeouts ;-)

Doesn't the default version of Ubuntu have both? Mine does along with Chess, Othello, Tetris, Sudoku, Mahjongg, Blackjack, and a few others.

Re:Applications already migrated

[Anonymous Coward]

They migrated their applications first, as part of a phased rollout, aimed at being a first step before the migration to Linux.

So the users did migrate applications, it just wasn't at the same time as changing operating system.

For information

[godrik]

The Gendarmerie Nationale already used free software daily such as open office. The migration would have been more complicated is they were using MS Office.

No, that's not what they did

[kenh]

They saved millions by migrating 90,000 desktops to OpenOffice, they have migrated only 5,000 desktops to Ubuntu, they plan for 15,000 by the end of 2009, and 90,000 by 2015. (IIRC).

The title of the article, and the title of the slashdot posting is inaccurate - the savings are real, but the reason was not Ubuntu - it was OpenOffice.

There are 2 separate national police force

[thirty-seven]

The French national police force, the Gendarmerie Nationale...

Actually, there are two separate national police forces in France.

The Gendarmerie Nationale is, (adapted from Wikipedia):

the national gendarmerie (a military body charged with police duties among civilian populations) and military police force. Its missions include:

• The policing of the countryside, rivers and coastal areas, and small towns with populations under 10,000. About half the French population is under the direct jurisdiction of the Gendarmerie.
• Criminal investigations under judiciary supervision.
• Crowd control and other security activities.
• The security of airports and military installations, as well as all investigations relating to the military, including in foreign interventions.
• Participations in ceremonies involving foreign heads of states or heads of governments.
• Provision of Military police services to the Military of France.

The Police Nationale is, (adapted from Wikipedia):

the main civil law enforcement agency of France, with primary jurisdiction in cities and large towns. In those larger cities and towns, its mission includes:

• Conducting security operations (patrols, traffic control, identity checks...).
• Conducting criminal enquiries, serving search warrants, etc under the orders and supervision of the Investigating magistrates of the judiciary. It maintains specific services ("judicial police") for criminal enquiries.

Re:Mandriva snubbed?

[basiles]

First, a small precision: The Gendarmerie Nationale is not exactly the French national police (called Police Nationale in French), but an armed force (the fourth french armed force, after infantery Armée de Terre, navy = Marine Nationale, air force = Armée de l'Air). The small difference between Gendarmerie & Police is that Gendarmerie members are exactly soldiers (with strict military discipline).

In practice, Gendarmerie tend to work in rural or semi-rural areas, while Police tend to work in urban zones (actually, there exist some kind of competition between Gendarmerie and Police, which gives interesting french thriller films and books) And they have different legal abilities. For example, in some limited cases, a Gendarme can legally shoot his gun first, while in principle a Policier (policeman) can use his gun (policemen and gendarmes are armed with guns) only for self defense (but IANAL so I may be wrong).

Gendarmerie is centralized and military, so it was easy to order them to switch at once to Linux [no training needed; just an official order from a high-rank official]. And I hear their IT department was strong enough to customize (without subcontractors) some Ubuntu distribution to the exact needs of Gendarmerie (which includes access to some peculiar databases). This could be an explanation of why Gendarmerie did not need any support from Mandriva.

But Mandriva still has several French state contracts, including even research contracts on collaborative projects.

Disclaimer: I do work sometimes with Mandriva on collaborative research projects (such as GGCC).

Re:Sadly, "thanks" is all those programmers will g

[initdeep]

no
they donated their code.

if they wanted to get paid for their code, they should have not donated their time.

Re:Games are not our priority

[SleepingWaterBear]

Come on, how much better can minesweeper or solitaire be?

Well, the minesweeper's basically identical, but Aisleriot solitaire (the default Gnome solitaire game) comes with 80 different solitaire variants, which beats the 3 or so that come with windows by a good ways. I personally like Hopscotch.

Gnome also comes with something like 17 games by default, and you can install hundreds more if you want them without even opening a web browser. I will grant that the networked hearts/spades games in XP are something I would like to see an equivalent to in Ubuntu.