Gendarmerie saves millions with open desktop and web applications (OSOR)

[Posted March 12, 2009 by corbet]

The EU Open Source Observatory reports from a talk by Xavier Guimard of the French Gendarmerie which, he says, has saved millions of Euro by moving to Linux-based desktops. "According to Guimard the move to open source has also helped to reduce maintenance costs. Keeping GNU/Linux desktops up to date is much easier, he says. 'Previously, one of us would be travelling all year just to install a new version of some anti virus application on the desktops in the Gendarmerie's outposts on the islands in French Polynesia. A similar operation now is finished within two weeks and does not require travelling.'"

Gendarmerie saves millions with open desktop and web applications (OSOR)

Posted Mar 12, 2009 14:36 UTC (Thu) by welinder (guest, #4699) [Link] (1 responses)

Hmm... Getting to island hop in French Polynesia could be fun.
Maybe Windows is superior after all...

Gendarmerie saves millions with open desktop and web applications (OSOR)

Posted Mar 12, 2009 17:58 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Not to worry, they may get that plane ride after the next Ubuntu version comes out and the upgrade breaks something...

Gendarmerie saves millions with open desktop and web applications (OSOR)

Posted Mar 12, 2009 15:51 UTC (Thu) by herodiade (guest, #52755) [Link] (11 responses)

A few things of interest:

Gendarmerie is about half of the French police force
Their successful migration strategy was staggered: first move 90.000 desktops from MS Office to OpenOffice.org, then move to Firefox and Thunderbird, then move the OS (gradually) to Linux. No "single big jump".
They also plan to move all Gendarmerie's desktops to Linux (that's 70.000 of them) by 2015 (but just 15.000 of them this year, 2009).
Price was not the only motivation for those moves: they decided to mandate open and free protocols, standard compliance and independence from vendors; they found free software matched those requirement better than proprietary.
Beside the staggering approach (and probably the fact that top-down decisions may work better in such a military organisation, my take), they said Vista prices and gratuitous ui changes helped them to move to Linux :)
I loved reading this: "From an end-user perspective, the transition went unexpectedly smooth. Almost no additional training was required for the local police forces using the computers in their daily work." And this one to: "Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users. Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority."
Whenever they did encounter limitations or problems, they funded opensource development. For instance they funded 500.000 euros for improving Thunderbird's calendar component so that it could replace Outlook+Exchange. They also do fund Lemonldap::NG and OCS Inventory, and several LDAP and security extensions for Thunderbird (aka "Trustedbird", was Milimail). They do have a policy to try to get their changes accepted upstream (rather than maintaining forks on the long term).
They move desktops to Ubuntu (because, they say, this distribution is in "continuity" with Debian, their server distribution of choice); the French Parliament also moved to Ubuntu. So public sector apparently do not favor Mandriva, the (half-)"french" distribution.
They still have to solve a few migration issues, like problems with Samba (no details provided).

Sources:
http://www.trustedbird.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&setlang=en
http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/informatique/0,39040745,39377943,00.htm
http://www.noiv.nl/files/xavier_guimard_05032009.pdf
http://www.osor.eu/case_studies/towards-the-freedom-of-the-operating-system-the-french-gendarmerie-goes-for-ubuntu

Staggered strategy, botchered links :-)

Posted Mar 12, 2009 16:56 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] (9 responses)

I don't think "stagger" means what you think it does. It's hard to imagine how a "staggered strategy" can be successful.

Also, please close your links with </a>

Staggered strategy, botchered links :-)

Posted Mar 12, 2009 17:03 UTC (Thu) by nelljerram (subscriber, #12005) [Link] (2 responses)

It made sense to me. (I'm a native British English speaker.)

Staggered strategy, botchered links :-)

Posted Mar 12, 2009 17:16 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

made sense to me too (en_US; midwest)

Staggered strategy, botchered links :-)

Posted Mar 12, 2009 21:06 UTC (Thu) by cdarroch (subscriber, #26812) [Link]

Me too (en_CA), although "staggered approach" would have been more natural, I think. Staggered arrival times, for instance, are a technique to avoid traffic problems caused by large numbers of people arriving at some place (a school, an event, etc.) at the same time. (Sort of a real-world example of the thundering herd problem. :-)

I think what caught some people's attention here is not so much a problem with the root word "stagger" as it is that "staggering approach" is intended to mean "taking the approach of staggering certain events in time" but has the accidental connotation of "approaching while staggering around drunkenly". I'm not a grammarian, but I believe the difference is between a present participle ("staggering approach"), which has an amusingly active sense in this case, and a past participle ("staggered approach"). (See the Wikipedia entry on participles.)

Apropos of word use, "botchered" strikes me as a funny neologism of "butchered" and "botched", either of which would have had roughly the same meaning, I think.

Staggered strategy, botchered links :-)

Posted Mar 12, 2009 17:56 UTC (Thu) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] (3 responses)

The Oxford English Dictionary lists one of the meanings of "staggered" as:

Arranged not to coincide in time; having starting and finishing times that overlap.

(The first cited usage with this meaning is a 1932 article from the Baltimore Sun. It stems from an earlier meaning, dating to at least 1875, referring to arrangements of parts at successively greater distances from a line, or on alternating sides.)

Staggered strategy, botchered links :-)

Posted Mar 12, 2009 19:10 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

Good, but it may lead to confusion. Once the poster even writes "staggering approach", which sure has a different meaning. I think "staged strategy" would sound more natural (to this non-native speaker, and everyone knows that we continental Europeans speak a superior variety of international English than those Blighty aborigins).

Staggered strategy, botchered links :-)

Posted Mar 12, 2009 20:07 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

It's a tough call.

Staggered implies overlap. Which, I take it to mean that over the organization you had groups of people that were at different stages of the migration... That is you didn't have a huge push were the entire organization had to upgrade in lock-step, but had a approach were different people were at different stages at different times.

Which can be a important distinction.

Staggered strategy, botchered links :-)

Posted Mar 13, 2009 13:28 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

"Staged" to me implies it was planned, and implemented in stages. I'm not at all sure it was.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if it was opportunistic, which most definitely wouldn't be staged.

Cheers,
Wol
(a native speaker of English, not American) (or is that a native speaker of Saxon, seeing as the Angles speak Scots :-)

Staggered strategy, botchered links :-)

Posted Mar 12, 2009 17:58 UTC (Thu) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]

marvin[~]> dict stagger
4 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

Stagger \Stag"ger\, v. t.
[...]

3. To arrange (a series of parts) on each side of a median
line alternately, as the spokes of a wheel or the rivets
of a boiler seam.
[1913 Webster]

[...]

From WordNet (r) 2.1 (2005) [wn]:

stagger

[...]

3: to arrange in a systematic order; "stagger the chairs in the
lecture hall" [syn: {stagger}, {distribute}]

It's not even an uncommon usage of the word.

Staggered strategy, botchered links :-)

Posted Mar 12, 2009 23:15 UTC (Thu) by herodiade (guest, #52755) [Link]

> I don't think "stagger" means what you think it does.

Ahhh, my bad. I meant "progressively", step by step.

> Also, please close your links with </a>

I plead non guilty there ;). The LWN preview kept asking me to remove the </a> until they were all gone. I thought the software did love to add those sort of things by itself...

Gendarmerie saves millions with open desktop and web applications (OSOR)

Posted Mar 14, 2009 8:33 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Here is what I find interesting. Canonical is offering support at no cost.

http://www.osor.eu/case_studies/towards-the-freedom-of-th...

That is very very interesting. Canonical's business is the selling of support services and yet they are giving away support in an effort to sweeten the adoption deal. Very interesting. How exactly does Canonical plan to make money in the long term and be a sustainable business if they have to give away their own support services as part of large scale Ubuntu desktop deployments? This certainly can't be a sustainable business model...giving away support services. It certainly makes sense as a short term measure to undercut your competition's ability to make deployments happen.

Obviously Canonical is interested in getting Ubuntu deployed as widely as possible as quickly as possible..even it means shorting its own support services revenue in the process. At some point they start charging those deployments for services, and as long as the services are less expensive than migrating to a different linux venddor..they will win contracts. Bravo.

-jef

Not sure how I feel about this discussion.

Posted Mar 13, 2009 2:15 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link] (2 responses)

The vast majority of the discussion here is about "staggered/staggering" instead of the topic at hand... Maybe the novelty of groups saving staggering amounts of cash by switching from Windows to Linux is no longer news? :)

Not a first, but well done

Posted Mar 13, 2009 10:03 UTC (Fri) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, it's true that there have been quite a few migration story, but I find this one very impressive (maybe it's because I'm French and not used to an administration doing smart thing) as they do it 'the right way' even investing when it's necessary to develop/fix current software and pushing the change upstream to minimize their long term investment.

Imagine if there were more migration done this way..

Not a first, but well done

Posted Mar 13, 2009 13:14 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

I agree. The staggered approach and especially the "if you find yourself in a hole, first stop digging" approach is very nice IMHO. Plus, it shouldn't cost them anything to maintain the status quo. Of course, if you have a volume license, you'll have to roll back to your OEM or retail license (and ask yourself why you paid for Windows *twice*), so it's not perfect in that scenario.