Gendarmerie Guillotines Microsoft

The National French Police has started moving its desktop environment to Ubuntu after successfully moving to Sun Open Office, Firefox and Thunderbird over the last two years.

"We will introduce Linux every time we have to replace a desktop computer," he said, "so this year we expect to change 5,000-8,000 to Ubuntu and then 12,000-15,000 over the next four years so that every desktop uses the Linux operating system by 2013-2014."

The short take from this is that it possible for a large organization to move completely off Windows and move to open source.

The long take is that it is possible for a large organization to move off Windows if they prepare carefully and concentrate on what applications are needed and why and then focus on the exceptions. As a services organization it is heavily dependent on administration functions which to many organizations refer to the office software environment. This is why they moved over to Open Office first to identify any problems. The move to Firefox required that core applications are web based and are compliant (ie render correctly).

There are however systems that will not move or they are currently working with vendors on a transition phase. Examples of these are fingerprinting and other imaging systems that traditionally have been Windows (or earlier X-Windows based).

The move away from licenced products is saving the gendarmerie about seven million euros (10.3 million dollars) a year for all its PCs.

"In 2004 we had to buy 13,000 licences for office suites for our PCs," he said, "but in the three years since then we've only had to buy a total of 27 licences."

However migrations to Linux are not all straight forward. The US Army is in the process of moving it's Future Combat Systems project to Linux and away the Windows platform for a variety of reasons. The challenge is maintaining interoperability with the older Windows environment through the transition.