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

Go France!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Now if only state and federal agencies in the US would do some of the same. Sadly, so long as corporations are allowed to lobby, the pork train will probably continue.

Re:Go France!

[Darkness404]

Honestly, not supporting a business that resides in your nation during the current state of the economy is a pretty bad thing for the government to do.

But which companies to support? Red Hat is based in the USA as are many other Linux-based companies. The thing is, when you keep buying things from a certain company just because its made in the USA, you help monopolies and deny justice. Why would the justice department pass a ruling on MS if everything they use is MS based and in the short term it would cost more money to switch?

The point is that the government should be helping to foster the development of it's own economy by investing into it.

But why support a company convicted of running an abusive monopoly? Sure, if it was cheaper to do it the MS way it might make some sense, but compared to Linux, MS is very expensive for little to no quality benefit. By buying MS products governments are helping MS build an even larger monopoly along with effectively tying the hands of judges in monopoly cases.

Re:Go France!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If your choice is between equivalent options, one foreign and one domestic, then perhaps that is true. However, if the options are not equivalent, that doesn't necessarily hold.

In this case, for instance, the contention is that a government agency can save millions of dollars by using Linux. Millions of dollars saved is millions you don't have to collect in taxes, or millions that you can do other things with(depending on whether you think the organization in question should focus on present level of service, controlling costs, or present level of cost, improving service).

If a government can actually save money by using linux, then their using Windows amounts to overtaxing their citizens for the benefit of a private corporation. That is bad.

Re:Applications already migrated

[Chris Burke]

What the summary doesn't mention, but is worth noting, is that they were already using open source programs where possible---Firefox, Thunderbird, OOo. Now I think their migration is wonderful, but I suspect it might have been somewhat more difficult if users were asked to adjust to new programs, as well.

Of course it would have been more difficult. That just means they did it right, switching to Free applications first then to the Free OS. They probably saved money in the first step as well as the second, and lowered the burden by doing it phased rather than dumping it all on the users at once.

Re:Duh

[Totenglocke]

Your anecdote further strengthens my view that American companies are all run by idiots. I swear, American companies sit down and figure out the most efficient way to run the company and then say "Ok, great -- lets do the exact opposite".