The French National Gendarmerie has always been a champion of the ‘ open source .In 2004 he decided to elect the ODF as a standard format for your documents (installing OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office on all PCs), then imposed their employees to use other free software, such as Firefox for Web browsing and Thunderbird for electronic communication, and now, in view of the death of Windows XP, chose to convert to Linux its entire fleet of computers.
37,000 Desktop are already equipped with GendBuntu , a custom distro based on Ubuntu, and by the summer of 2014 will be 75,000 PCs that the force of the state police transalpine convert the system of the penguin. It is, in fact, one of the largest mass adoption of Linux in the European public sector.
The reasons for which the Gendarmerie Nationale chose open source software are many, primarily the savings. According to what is stated by the agency of French security, the use of operating systems and software open allows a cost reduction of 40% in terms of management and, obviously, of licenses. But there is also a practical advantage to emphasize the issue.
Having imposed the use of software such as OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird even on machines equipped with Windows (XP), now the employees of the Gendarmerie do not need to deal with courses specific updates to work on Linux, as the applications on which to operate are the same.
If proof were needed, here is a further demonstration of the fact that governments can – and must – painlessly reduce costs by adopting open source software on your computer park. Unfortunately there are still many people do not notice, or pretend not to.
