France Adoption of OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird and OSS

In Europe, movements towards open source software (OSS) have long been a silent battle. France is one of those that started to look into the benefits of OSS in the early 2000.

The French Gendarmerie Nationale (national police) is composed of the police forces and the military police with over 100,000 employees distributed across the country. In 2001, the decision to explore OSS implementation started and by 2005 OpenOffice.org (OOo) was implemented. Other OSS implementation like Firefox (web browser) and Thunderbird (email & calendaring client) soon followed. Since they have managed to developed their employees with OSS skills, their next plan is for the migration to Linux desktops.

See:
French Gendarmerie goes for Ubuntu

The French Ministry of Agriculture have migrated over 500 servers to Mandriva Linux since 2005. This is mainly to replace its MS Windows NT servers. A total of 15,000 employees is under this Ministry. Plans are underway to have an additional 400 servers on Linux.

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French Ministry of Agriculture

The French Parliment moves towards OpenOffice.org in 2007. Following that Ubuntu Linux will be used as the desktop operating system. This will be over 1,000 PCs running Ubuntu Linux. Which translate to even more opportunities to use the hundreds of OSS available to through the Ubuntu software repository.

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French Parliment