(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)

The Gendarmerie, France's largest administrative body, intends to change in the next years the operating system of 70 000 workstations presently running on Windows XP to Ubuntu.

This is a movement that continues the French Government's efforts to promote migration to open source for some years now. The Gendarmerie had already adopted OpenOffice.org and Firefox, the French National Assembly has also recently switched 1100 computers to Linux and the Ministry of Agriculture has started the migration from Windows at the end of 2006.

The French Government's plans to migrate to open source was based on a study by technology services company Atos Origin, that: "showed that open-source software will from now on offer functionality adapted to the needs of MPs and will allow us to make substantial savings despite the associated migration and training costs" as was the Parliament's statement in 2006.

The reasons for switching to open source software, besides the cost reductions, included a better control of security functions and a greater independence from the software vendors.

France's gendarmerie switches to Linux (31.01.2008)
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/102824

The French Gendarmerie throws Windows away (only in French, 31.01.2008)
http://www.lexpress.fr/info/economie/infojour/infos.asp?id=141908

EDRi-gram: France Parliament shifts to open source software (6.12.2006)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.23/oss_france