Microsoft Got Hit By The French Police
Published by: Codrut Nistor, in News
January30th2008
I would give a penny to see Steve Ballmer's face when he received the news, but only a single penny, because it's easy to imagine its reaction. After all, it's not some tiny police force from Africa or some tiny island in the Pacific that owns 2 computers, and they are ditching Windows because their old computers can't run Windows Vista, and upgrading them is not an option... No, sir! This is serious business, because the French paramilitary police force just became one of the largest administrations in the world to have the curage to take this step...so far.
This is not something that happened over night, because the French gendarmerie moved to open source office applications back in 2005, and open source Web browsers, the next year, so what happened today was somehow expected to occur. It was simply a matter of time...
Anyway, to get an idea on the size of today's event, it's enough to say that the French gendarmerie currently has Windows XP running on no less than 70,000 desktop computers. According to Nicolas Geraud, deputy director of the gendarmerie's IT department, these systems will be gradually switched to Ubuntu, so they won't simply install Linux on 70,000 computers at once."We will introduce Linux every time we have to replace a desktop computer,so this year we expect to change 5,000-8,000 to Ubuntu and then 12,000-15,000 over the next four years so that every desktop uses the Linux operating system by 2013-2014.", he said.
According to same source, moving away from licensed software helps the French gendarmerie save about 10.3 million dollars every year, which looks simply great. Obviously, this is only one of the reasons, and if you want to know more about the rest of them, you could try using some open source office software, for the start...
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3 Comments on Microsoft Got Hit By The French Police
On 02/01/2008 at 7:02 pm Mark said:
No. In fact the french police is not swithing from Windows platform to Linux because it's free or because it works better then Microsoft's product. Actually it does because as a socialist country France has a natural dislike for everything that ultimately shows the success of capitalism (vide agri-activist Jose Bové that some years ago led a riot against Mac Donalds). This switch won't cause a single scratch on Microsoft image because its product is good in what it does. And although like in any free market it is good having more than one option to choose from, people (for the sake of their own pockets) will keep buying products from the stand point of usefullness and not for political reasons - ehr.. whilst they are free to do so..
On 02/01/2008 at 7:03 pm Mark said:
No. In fact the french police is not swithing from Windows platform to Linux because it\'s free or because it works better then Microsoft\'s product. Actually it does because as a socialist country France has a natural dislike for everything that ultimately shows the success of capitalism (vide agri-activist Jose Bové that some years ago led a riot against Mac Donalds). This switch won\'t cause a single scratch on Microsoft image because its product is good in what it does. And although like in any competitive market it is good having more than one option to choose from, people will keep as ever buying products from the stand point of usefullness and not for political reasons - at least whilst they are free to do so...
On 02/01/2008 at 8:21 pm Codrut Nistor said:
It would be great if success of capitalism would be made of healthy and great things entirely, but the truth is a bit different. Well, the idea is that, if they make the switch and it proves to be a good move, others may follow.
After all, better have more patrols on the road and be able to answer calls faster, rather than spending of software licenses, capitalist ones or not...
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