70 000 Ubuntu workstation migration for French Police
The French paramilitary police will be migrating 70 000 desktops from Microsoft Windows to Ubuntu. They plan to change 5000-8000 desktops this year (all new machines will run Ubuntu), and 12 000 – 15 000 over the next 4 years, and completing the migration by 2014.
The reasons behind the migration is reduction in cost, diversifying their software suppliers and the advanced state that Linux systems are in today. In recent years, they have already started using OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird which should smooth out the transition for the users quite significantly.
They estimate that migrating from Microsoft’s products will save them about €7m a year. That’s a lot of money. It’s great to see that governments all over the world are deciding to spend their money better in their own country rather than spend it on licenses that will be worthless in less than a decade.
Actually it is not the Police but the Gendarmerie.
The police depends on the Interior Ministry whereas the Gendarmerie depends on the Army Ministry.
They do quite the same job, but Police deals exclusively with affairs that belongs and occurs to/in their city.
7 millions is not really much money. To put the things in correct perspective the last place I worked at had just spent 2 BILLION euros for one single information system. Big businesses barely bother to see the 7 millions at all as a cost, it all depends on the value provided.
Strange, I usually hear the big companies fight for every penny.
Actually, as a French citizen, I find it great. Even if the amount of not-spent money is not that huge, I’m glad they chose that way in such an important French administration.
Keep the good job
Jongleur, thanks for clearing that up, I didn’t quite understand the difference before.
Troll, I guess you’re right, in the big scheme of things, €7m is probably not much, but in 3rd world countries (like here in South Africa), we pay just as much for software licenses as our European counterparts, and saving €7m here can make a difference to many people.