Chalk and fromage
CIO India has an interesting article about the different aims of the IT strategies from the two French police forces - one is aiming for an intergrated monoculture, the other for virus-proof heterogeneity - which intersect in their use of open source software.
The subheadline contains a curious assertion - “the Gendarmerie may eliminate Microsoft software entirely from the desktop next year” - backed up thusly…
This year, the goal is to roll out the Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird e-mail client to those same users, and to deploy a new version of Ic@re written in Java.
The Gendarmerie has replaced 15,000 of its computers since the migration began, installing only OOo on the new machines. In early 2007, the Gendarmerie plans to delete its remaining copies of Microsoft Office, completing the migration to OOo.
The workstations still run the Windows OS today, but the Gendarmerie is looking at the possibility of switching them all to Linux in 2007 or 2008.
See also, French fuzz fall for Firefox.