[CS-FSLUG] French police switch from Windows to Linux

[Raphaël Pinson]

Yes, this is great.

It is not actually the French police that switched to open-source software,
but the "gendarmerie", which is slightly different. The gendarmerie is a
part of the French army which is close to the population. While the police
belong to the ministry of interior, while the gendarmerie belongs to the
ministry of defense, and I think this plays a big role in their choice
aswell, which I believe is not only motivated by money but also largely by
security concerns. I have read interviews of French generals who had really
understood the necessity of being able to access the source of every program
they used in the army, and to not use proprietary programs made by foreign
companies to manage important (and potentially secret) data.

The gendarmerie has become an example of a an administration using
open-source software in France. Not only do they use them increasingly, but
they also contribute to it. Quite a few times, they have revived dead
open-source projects that met their needs, and contributed back their
improvements to the community.

More than just a matter of money, the way the gendarmerie has been improving
their IT policy in the last 10 years is an example for all the French
administration services, and hopefully for other countries, too.



Raphaël



On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 1:04 AM, Fred A. Miller <fmiller at lightlink.com>wrote:

> http://apcmag.com/french-police-switch-from-windows-to-linux.htm
>
> We are in the worse economic disaster since 1929, and it may possibly
> get worse than that... God forbid.
>
> Wouldn't it be nice IF the state could save the money spent on
> proprietary licenses for the operating system, word processing,
> spreadsheets, Graphics, Databases, and software development tools,
> anti-virus subscriptions,  etc...?    For 13,000 state employees that
> could amount to more than 75,000 licenses, or possibly  between $1.5M to
> $5M dollars, if not more.  Some licenses are MORE than $60 per seat.
>
> And, think of the MILLIONS of money that would be saved by not having to
> use so many servers,  not having to "reboot, reinstall, rebuild" so many
> times,  just because of a simple virus or trojan, the cost of data
> recovery, etc., to say nothing of theft of personal and state info by
> bad guys.
>
> A LONG TIME fantasy of many, which will never happen as long as the
> money is viewed as "other people's money".
>
> --
> "The fundamental premise of liberalism is the moral and
> rational incapacity of the American people." ~ Fred Miller
>
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