Gendarmes save cash with Ubuntu
INSPECTOR GUIMARD of the French Yard claims to have saved millions by swapping his computer networks, which were locked into Windows, over to Ubuntu
A recent report has revealed that France's national police force has saved an estimated €50 million since 2004 by adopting open sauce software and migrating some of its workstations to Ubuntu Linux. They will now roll out Ubuntu to all 90,000 of their workstations by 2015.
The 'officers of the law' replaced Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org across the entire organisation. Firepanther and Thunderchicken came next.Then, after Vole launched Vista, French coppers phased out Windows and migrated to Ubuntu.
In a report published by the European Commission's Open Source Observatory, Gendarmerie Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard, said he reduced his annual IT budget by 70 percent without having to lower its capabilities.
He said that, while upgrading from XP to Vista would have given the Gendarmerie some benefits, Vole warned them it would require training of users.
The jump from XP to Ubuntu, however, was a doddle. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. "Games were not our priority', he said. µ
L'Inq
Gendarmerie report
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I wonder what sort of deal Microsoft will offer the French in order to try and get them back on board.
http://www.noiv.nl/files/xavier_guimard_05032009.pdf
The presentation in French.
So happy to see the Gendarme to be FREE.
I hope this story gets through to the UK gov. With the recession and insane public debt they should be trying to save all the money they can.
That they looked at the long term benefits of software which they can control. We all benefit when public agencies save money.
MS is really shooting themselves in the foot with their workstation software policies of forced upgrades and proprietary file formats.
I don't know what npviewer is, but I'm having to close it a few times per day using top. I'll hear my laptop fan get louder and I'll think to myself,"npviewer."
It's like a curse.
I'll shortly be installing CentOS on this laptop, just so my two computers will match up.
I would imagine the White House would crack it's whip and Downing Street would come to heel. MS would get the business from the UK gov't.
npviewer.bin is a "quality product" of Adobe.
it's flash player .
It always was far from perfect on linux.
But i have to admit, the 64bit version is much better.
You can try open source plugins. I still prefer Adobe's flash player since at least it gives full functionality.
The EU is fed up with Microsoft trying to *remotely administer* our IT industry and the finances of our continent. Their meddling in ISO to get their *OOXML* travesty recongnized was the last straw. Actually, suing TomTom was the very last straw.
Vive la Ubuntu libre! Rejeter Microsoft!