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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."'"
Except for most of the suits I've dealt with at my last two companies. We keep talking about the need to save money and cut costs, so we lay people off. When I show them articles how IBM saved over 100 million dollars last year migrating more Windows systems to Linux, they balk at the notion. We literally use everything from Office 97 to 2007 here, and we can't share documents internally. We had a big crisis when departments couldn't work together on a budget, because no one could open each other's files.
I suggested OpenOffice to several execs, and not a single one would consider moving away from Office. It is just unthinkable. They keep insisting they want everyone on the same version of Office (and we have Mac users with Mac Office) but they won't buy new Office 2007 licenses for everyone. They want a solution that is free, but they are terrified of free software.
Instead, they'll cave and buy more Office 2007 licenses, and fire more people to make up the difference.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Defense has additional and different concerns than other areas of government. They need to make sure that even if a war broke out with a country that you and I buy components from, the military can still source the components to build what they need. If that means keeping a less efficient industry in business in the States, consider it an expensive insurance policy.
It makes perfect sense, but it's also a bit funny when you consider that DOD itself is just an enormous insurance policy. Or at least, it should be...