French police find "Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!" in Ubuntu Linux
Au revoir, les enfants de Microsoft. C'est bien l'heure de Linux ici en France!
This was the French police's message to Microsoft today, putting the icing on the open source cake it started baking back in 2005 with a move of 70,000 Windows XP desktops to Ubuntu Linux.
The process and the motives are clear:
"We will introduce Linux every time we have to replace a desktop computer," [Colonel Nicolas Geraud, deputy director of the gendarmerie's IT department] said, "so this year we expect to change 5,000-8,000 to Ubuntu and then 12,000-15,000 over the next four years so that every desktop uses the Linux operating system by 2013-2014."
There are three reasons behind the move, Geraud said....The first is to diversify suppliers and reduce the force's reliance on one company, the second is to give the gendarmerie mastery of the operating system and the third is cost, he said.
Imagine if your IT department could say the same. More flexibility. Less dependence on vendors who don't have your best interest at heart. More control. More money to spend on whatever you want.
That's open source.
By the way, if you're an open-source vendor, get thee to France. Fast. That's Alfresco's second-largest market and I know from other open-source companies that it's also in their top-three, too. France is big on open source.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
