Linux vs Windows - Conquering a Windows Based World

The French paramilitary police force is switching 70,000 desktops to Linux OS.  In what appears to the safe and evolving migration path, it first ditched IE for Firefox, they then used OpenOffice instead of MS Office.  Finally, once the users are familiar with the applications, the OS migration is like stepping off of a curb rather than leaping across the Grand Canyon.  The reasons for switch are pretty much in line with everyone else.

• Reducing Costs
• Reducing single vendor lock-in
• More control

“The 100,000 strong force’s leap to open source software is thought to be one of the biggest yet by a public organisation. Apparently, the French national assembly made the switch to Ubuntu last year.”

To avoid vendor lock-in and avoid forced upgrade cycles of proprietary solutions the French Ministry has selected open source solutions to equip all of its local education authorities.  This would account for around 2,500 servers at 30 locations.

“In 2004, over 95 percent of the servers ran on Linux. Today we are close to 100 percent, since we withdrew the last AIX servers at the end of 2006,” said Affre.

Seems like a great success story to me, hope to hear about more of them!

The French Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries is migrating around 400 machines from Windows NT Server to Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0. Covered in Mandriva press release.

This migration comes with a complete range of personalized services (training and support). Mandriva was chosen to provide these services which will continue over a period of 18 months and will potentially involve more than 200 people in the ministry.

The French Parliament will have 1,154 workstations running Ubuntu Linux along with open source software by June 2007.
Reported from Ubuntu.