Penguin Power for French police
The French gendarme doesn't like Microsoft:
The French gendarme (paramilitary police force) is becoming one of the biggest administrations in the world to break with Microsoft products.
Starting this year, the gendarmerie's 70,000 desktops will change over from Microsoft's Windows XP operating system to Linux. Last year, Microsoft's Internet Explorer was ditched in favour of the Mozilla Foundation's browser Firefox and its email client Thunderbird. And the year before that, Microsoft Office was replaced with OpenOffice — a collection of applications such as a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program similar to Microsoft Powerpoint, all of which can be downloaded free.
There are three reasons behind the move. 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. The move away from licensed products is saving the gendarmerie about seven million euros (10.3 million dollars) a year for all its PCs.
