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French Police To Switch 72,000 Desktop PCs To Linux

Posted by timothy on from the year-of-the-linux-desktop dept.

jones_supa writes "France's National Gendarmerie — the national law enforcement agency — is now running 37,000 desktop PCs with a custom distribution of Linux, and by summer of 2014, the agency plans to switch over all 72,000 of its desktop machines. The agency claims that the TCO of open source software is about 40 percent less than proprietary software from Microsoft, referring to their article published by EU's Interoperability Solutions for Public Administrations. Initially Gendarmerie has moved to Windows versions of cross-platform OSS applications such as OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird. Now they are completing the process by changing the OS. This is one of the largest known government deployments of Linux on the desktop."

3 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Proud by TechNeilogy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There are days when you wake up proud to have French ancestry.

    --
    "The wisdom of the Patriarchs was that they *knew* they were fools." --Master Foo
  2. OSS - with 100% less big brother then commercial by schwep · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So not only do they get lower TCO, they also get 100% less built in spyware (literally) by the NSA.

    It's truely a win-win!

  3. All about the apps by Dega704 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Moving to said open source applications beforehand was a smart move. Large-scale deployments like this can fail spectacularly, mostly due to the shock of having all of their applications change, rather than the actual OS. When the end users are already using Firefox, Open Office, etc., I have found that the transition goes much more smoothly with very little resistance.