Vive la Ubuntu libre!

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Jan. 30, 2008

The Linux desktop may be moving forward slowly in the United States, but it's a vastly different story in Europe. Today, Jan. 30, Chris Kenyon, Canonical's director of business development, announced on a Canonical blog that "the Gendarmerie Nationale [the French national police force] announced the migration of up to 70,000 computers to Ubuntu over the next three years."

This move is part of a steady progression that the Gendarmerie Nationale has been making from proprietary to open-source programs.

The Gendarmerie, which approximates the U.S.'s FBI, had already moved from Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office to Firefox and OpenOffice.

The Gendarmerie's PCs are currently running Windows XP. The French government, however, has decided that Linux, rather than Vista, is the more affordable upgrade path. France's National Assembly is already running desktop Linux.

In an AFP (Agence France-Presse) report, Col. Nicolas Geraud, deputy director of the Gendarmerie's IT department, said, "We will introduce Linux every time we have to replace a desktop computer, so this year we expect to change 5,000 to 8,000 to Ubuntu and then 12,000 to 15,000 over the next four years so that every desktop uses the Linux operating system by 2013-2014."

There are three specific reasons why the Gendarmerie is making the Linux switch. These are: to free the agency from being locked in to one vendor: Microsoft; enable the force's IT department to have complete control of the operating system, and, last, but never least, cut down costs.

According to the AFP story, Geraud said that France will save more than 7 million Euros, approximately $10.3 million, a year by using Ubuntu instead of Windows.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

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