The French police have saved millions by switching to Ubuntu. Who knew?
France’s Gendarmerie Nationale, the country’s national police force, says it has saved millions of dollars by migrating its desktop software infrastructure away from Microsoft Windows and replacing it with the Ubuntu Linux distribution.
The Gendarmerie began its transition to open source software in 2005 when it replaced Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org across the entire organization. It gradually adopted other open source software applications, including Firefox and Thunderbird. After the launch of Windows Vista in 2006, it decided to phase out Windows and incrementally migrate to Ubuntu.