14 DAY TRIAL // The French Gendarmerie has reported that it has managed to cut costs by 40% by ditching Windows products and adopting Ubuntu and LibreOffice.
A lot of European organizations have been adopting open source solutions instead of upgrading their existing Windows installations, which proved to be very a sound financial decision.
The decision to replace some of the proprietary solutions was made back in 2006. OpenOffice has since been introduced on 90,000 PCs. In 2011, 20,000 Ubuntu desktops have been added, followed by another 10,000 the next year.
Between March and June of 2013, the police force also performed an update of Ubuntu, upgrading to version 12.04 from 10.04, over its network. "This January, the last constraints will disappear, and we will replace the last proprietary desktop PCs by Ubuntu," said Major Stéphane Dumond at the Evento Linux conference in Lisbon, Portugal.
According to the number presented at this conference, the Gendarmerie managed to cut costs by about 40% in just a few years.