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French Police To Switch 72,000 Desktop PCs To Linux
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."
technically, the Gendarmerie are the military police force, that is mostly managing the countryside.
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
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!
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.
On the contrary, I recently did support at a company migrating from Office to LibreOffice to save on transition costs. Standard issue was Office 2007, but 2010 was present and 2013 was announced, boasting yet another new interface to learn. The company switched to LibreOffice, with only a few key Office installations for things that had to be perfectly correct to leave the company.
There was no real training budget, but there was only one brief period of transition rather than several, no licensing costs, and everything just worked.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Pert of the problem is that the typical requirement for an office suite is described as "Work like Microsoft Office". Of course any competing office suite is going to be less good when compared to Microsoft Office using this criterion.
I know someone who is always talking up Windows. He knows that Windows has problems but assumes that Linux has these same problems (which it frequently does not), while highlighting issues with Linux. Put another way, he is blinded to problems in Windows while he exaggerates problems in Linux. I think that this is typical behaviour that has slowed down adoption of Linux.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The situation is a bit peculiar : - both the Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie report to the Ministère de l'Interieur. But Gendarmes retain a military status while Policiers are civilians: some differences in duties and in pay, but a strong difference on rights: les gendarmes are not allowed to go on strike or to publicly profess political preferences (as all soldiers here) while les policiers can do both. - both forces have elite counter-terrorism teams, altough the most renowed one belongs to the Gendarmerie (GIGN). And both forces are requested to work together if need be, and regularly train together. As for the police : Windows on the desktop, 80% Linux in the datacenters, with some AIX and windows.
I am not Remy Mouton, unfortunately: http://remy.mouton.free.fr/art/
They already switched to OpenOffice, I've used both and while there are some differences, if you know one, you can use the other without too many problems.
Most folks don't even use more than a small percentage of the features of a word processor anyways. I have friends who work with lawyers who say Word is no good for them, and that they have to use WordPerfect for their legal documents.
I agree that formats are very important. This organization is large enough to be able to mandate the formats they will use. But a quick check of LibreOffice Writer (4.0.2.2) shows it can handle the fol formats: odt, ott, sxw, stw, fodt, uot, doxc(MS Word 2007/2010 XML) , doc, xml(ms Word 2003 and Doc Book), html, rtf, txt, and docx (OpenOffice XML Text)
It appears that they won't have many problems accepting any common format.
I work in a very large organization. We use MS Office, and we provide training for many of our staff in Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Outlook. If we were to swtich, it would involve creating new lesson plans, but the savings in licensing would more than pay for that.
Actually the Gendarmerie Nationale is part of the Military. It is not a civilian institution.
So Police in the USA = Police in France.
Gendarmerie in France is something in between military police and the FBI in the USA.
And Microsoft will now unleash the flying monkeys to try to refute any claims about lower TCO.
I'm sure there will be studies trotted out, and all sorts of attempts to discredit this.
they tried that with the "Get The Facts" campaign and it backfired so badly that they took down the page.
There's no way in hell they'll take this lying down, or without trying to get the government to intervene on their behalf -- perhaps as a trade issue and claim they're being unfairly excluded.
nah, in the EU, it's not so easy to manipulate governments and really this is small beans to get worked up about. far smaller than say, having the london stock exchange switch to linux.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Why Gnome? KDE is perfectly stable, have more features, looks great and functions in the same way then Windows 7.
In my opinions KDE is much more user friendly and have more features then Gnome, and have a round-up experience (the KDE applications are integrate very well). I run for 2 years now Fedora with KDE and it's extremely well experience.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
In the new France Windows surrenders!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
This, exactly.
I once put a Knoppix live CD in the family computer because of some potential virus issue. After my wife asked something like "Why does this look different" and I explained, she found Firefox, got on Facebook, and soon forgot all about not being in Windows.
You do need to be more adaptable, which cops notoriously are NOT. I can hear right now the complaint of every (L)user getting a new Linux desktop, "It doesn't look right. The icons are in the wrong place. I can't use this. Give me my Windows machine back."
What do you think is going to happen when you switch them to Windows 8? Put a Win8 machine next to a Linux machine and they'll chose the Linux machine, surely.
I didn't know there was enough crack in Redmond to make the Win8 GUI look like a good idea. Ballmer should have been fired for that alone.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Asterix
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.