Linux s'il vous plaît: French Gendarmerie say oui to Ubuntu

By David M Williams
Wednesday, 11 March 2009 18:30

Opinion and Analysis

The Gendarmerie Nationale – France’s national police force – has been slowly introducing open source software to its 105,000+ policemen since 2005. In 2008 the decision was made to use only Ubuntu for all new workstations. A year on shows this has been a great success with happy users, a better network and cost savings of over seven million euro per year.

A while ago Microsoft ran an anti-Linux “get the facts” campaign. I critiqued some of their case studies and found them grossly lacking and many didn’t even have anything to do with Linux at all except for passing tangential remarks.

Well, let me tell you a “get the facts” story which is true and is not ambiguous. Get the facts: the French police have been running on Ubuntu for a year and love it. Here’s how it went down.

The Gendarmerie Nationale consists of the regular police forces and also the military police. The central bureaucracy is situated in Paris but has over 100,000 employees across France making it one of Europe’s largest public bodies.

French affair with free and open source software actually began in 2001. A core team of IT experts, headed by Pascal Danek, were appointed to architect an infrastructure platform that catered for such a volume of users and which could be maintained internally or, at the least, without stranglehold by specific vendors.

The group determined the IT system ought to be made modular so that it could be enhanced incrementally, and so new standards could be introduced with a minimum of fuss when they arose.
Early on this team recognised open source software would be a key component because it offers greater transparency and is easier to adapt and change than proprietary software.

In 2005 the first big step occurred and Microsoft Office was substituted for Open Office.

This resulted in an immediate decrease in licensing fees and offered precisely the modularity and transparency that the technical group were seeking. Danek says, “We didn’t want any of our software to force us to employ a special operating system.”

The following year, 2006, saw the next step as one-by-one Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook were replaced by Mozilla’s Firefox web browser and Thunderbird e-mail client.