French police switch from Windows to Linux
The French national police force has slashed its IT costs by 70 per cent by cutting Microsoft out of the equation.
There are many arguments for or against switching from Windows to Linux. Many times these arguments are based more in fanaticism than fact.
In a recent report, the French national police force, Gendarmerie Nationale, has provided some great facts supporting the switch from Windows to Linux.
In 2002, the Gendarmerie Nationale adopted a strictly open-standards IT policy in order to improve inter-organisation communications.
Until 2004, a large part of the IT budget was spent on software licences — between 12,000 and 15,000 licenses each year. In 2004, an accountant in the Gendarmerie Nationale tried OpenOffice and, after finding it a surprisingly competent replacement for its paid counterpart, started pushing for it to be adopted within the organization instead of Microsoft Office.
After a while, the police force completely switched over to OpenOffice for all their office needs along with adopting Thunderbird for email and Firefox for browsing. The switch was easy and required little to no training since the open source apps had a similar interface to the paid ones.
In 2007, they decided to go one step further and switch to an open operating system.
“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.”
Currently Gendarmerie has about 5,000 PCs running Ubuntu, with another 15,000 planned to be switched over this year. By 2015, they hope to have the entire organization with all 90,000 computers running Ubuntu and open-source software.
This year their IT budget will be cut by 70%, but they will be just as capable as in previous years. Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard of Gendarmerie estimates that the organization “Since 2004 has saved 50 million euro on licences for standard office applications, hardware and maintenance.”
Importantly, the Gendarmerie’s reduced IT budget contradicts Microsoft’s arguments that the ‘total cost of ownership’ of Windows is less than Linux, because Windows supposedly needs much less support and integration work than Linux does. The lower actual dollars being spent on IT in the French national police disproves Microsoft’s argument — in this organisation, at least.
If they want to keep their share of the PC market, Microsoft better make sure they offer an easy transition to Windows 7, along with some benefits of transitioning. Otherwise, we will likely be hearing about more and more organizations and businesses switching over to Linux this year and next.
This is so awesome. Adding pressure to Microsoft is exactly what we need these days
The Gendarmerie Nationale and Police Nationale are two separate entities in France. The Gendarmerie is a part of the military, and doesn’t have the same competences as the police. Also, they’re smaller than the Police Nationale (about 100.000 gendarmes versus some 150.000 policemen), so this type of article WILL be accused of distorting facts in favour of the Linux/FOSS/whatever movement.
Where you write “If they want to keep their share of the PC market, Microsoft better make sure they offer an easy transition to Windows 7…”
It really should say “”If they want to keep their share of the PC market, Microsoft HAD better make sure…”
Yeah but just wait until they do a Kernel update and half of their drivers have to be reconfigured.
Linux is great for servers hands down, but as far as a desktop computer goes, Linux isn’t your best bet.
The thing, that always amazed me about Microsoft is how all of their products are build around customer lock-in. Buy one item from them and you’ll sooner or later find yourself buying more and more, as their software really does not like to talk to software provided by competitors.
I never bought into the ROI argument from Microsoft, as their web of dependencies throws hidden costs at you left and right.
Your post is riddled with contradictions. You speak of the national police and then of the gendarmerie? Which slashed its cost? It can’t be both as their completely unrelated organizations. I don’t get it.
@Ryan Kearney
Just curious… How many times have you built a kernel and had to “reconfigure” drivers?
Not saying that it doesn’t happen. I use Slackware and regularly build my own kernel and have never had to “reconfigure” a driver. Typically (for me at least) the only configuration needed on my part is generating an initrd file, adding the necessary lilo entry, and running the lilo command to update my system to use the new kernel. Provided their IT department doesn’t do anything outside of the norm and they use whatever update mechanism that Ubuntu provides I feel safe in saying that this is a non-issue and that they should be fine updating their kernel.
Besides, it’s not like a new kernel comes out every Thursday or something.
Chief Inspector Clouseau and Dreyfuss will be delighted