French Government Moving from Windows to Linux

The popular Linux distribution Ubuntu is making gains in some pretty important places, namely the French military police force National Gendarmerie. The government-run organization is planing to migrate all of its desktop PCs to Ubuntu by 2014, leaving the world of Microsoft behind it. The French National Assembly already switched all its PCs to Ubuntu in 2007, but its 1,200 desktops pales in comparison to the scope of the Gendarmerie's conversion of 70,000 machines.



The Gendarmerie has been moving towards open source slowly over the past few years, first ditching Microsoft Office in favor of the free Open Office as a replacement for Powerpoint, Excel, and Word. Then the organization left Internet Explorer and Outlook for Mozilla's Firefox browser and its lesser known sister application the Thunderbird E-mail client.

According to the Gendarmerie, moving to Linux will have 3 major benefits. One, it will allow it to diversify its suppliers instead of relying on one company. Two, the nature of open source puts the operating system in complete control of the police force, allowing it to tailor the software to its needs. And three, the cost. Ubuntu is free, as are most other Linux distributions. And that should make the tax payers happy.

Source: Switched