Our experience with France's Gendarmerie may be limited to Pepé Le Pew cartoons, but that won't stop us from applauding their efforts at locking up proprietary software. That might just be because the fabled maréchaussée is trimming its IT spending by 70% this year -- without losing so much as a byte -- thanks to the wonders of Open Source software.
How did this near-miraculous trim-down come about? Apparently, somewhere around 2002, the service discovered that Open Source applications handle open standards -- which are a big deal, to say the least, in Europe -- better than their proprietary counterparts. When they moved to IMAP for email, it was Mozilla's Thunderbird client that found its way to Gendarmerie computers, followed by a roll-out of Firefox for web browsing. In 2004, one of the force's accountants, ever on the lookout for costs to cut, took exception to Microsoft requiring new licenses for the service's software and suggested that OpenOffice be deployed instead. In a brilliant stroke of irony, it was the response from Microsoft, not the accountant's proposal, that brought OpenOffice to the attention of the Gendarmerie's general manager, who ordered that it be installed on all of the force's 90,000 desktops.
Even bigger change was to come in 2007, when the maréchaussée opted to scrub Windows in favor of Ubuntu, after learning that Microsoft's Windows Vista would require additional training for staff with reduced benefits for the service. Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard, who presented a keynote on the Gendarmerie's success at an Open Source conference in Utrecht, said the biggest difference the service found between Windows XP and Ubuntu were its icons -- and games. Said Guimard: "Games are not our priority."
The Gendarmerie estimates that it has saved some