Open sourcing gets a boost
The gendarmerie’s 70,000 desktops were being converted to Firefox and its email client Thunderbird because of the navigator’s "reliability, security and inter-operability with other state services," said General Christian Brachet, IT director of the police force.
The move should be complete by the end of the year, he said, as enthusiasts of open sourcing wrapped up an annual meeting in Paris at the Solution Linux 2006 exhibition. Firefox had been chosen because it was based on the W3C standard, an international norm for the Internet, and because it works equally well under Microsoft, Mac or Linux.
Firefox has now taken over nearly 18 percent of the French Internet browser market approaching the European average of 20 percent, according to a survey carried out in January by XiTi Monitor, an Internet site quality management service. But it still has a way to go before matching the 38 percent market penetration the Mozilla navigator has achieved in Finland. The French gendarmerie is also thinking ahead to a future when citizens could, for example, directly report a theft to the police via the Internet.
"With Firefox as our default browser we are not imposing a specific browser on the citizen: hell be able to use any one as long as it respects the WC3 standard," Brachet told the monthly magazine Linux Pratique.
The switch to an open source navigator follows the police departments decision last year to migrate from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice for all of its desktops. OpenOffice is a collection of different applications, which can be downloaded free of charge, such as a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation programme similar to Microsoft Powerpoint, a vector graphics editor and a database programme similar to Microsoft Access.
Many of the components are designed to mirror those available in Microsoft Office. By the end of 2005, all the gendarmeries computers had made the switch to OpenOffice 1.4 and by March should have moved to version 2.0. The change should save the police more than two million euros (2.4 million dollars) a year, according to Colonel Nicolas Geraud, deputy director of the gendarmeries IT department.
Geraud, speaking at the Solution Linux 2006 exhibition, said this has been the annual cost of buying MSOffice licences for the gendarmerie since 2004. The move to open source also meant the department could better control its fixed costs as IT expenses were becoming independent of the number of desktops in use, he added. On the ground the move to OpenOffice.org had been accompanied with a system known as IC@RE, developed by eight non IT-specialist police officers, to help police officers write out their reports.
"This product corresponds exactly to their needs because it was developed by their colleagues," Geraud said. The gendarmeries initiative is not isolated in the French government. A certain number of French government administrations have also chosen to move to open source, including the interior ministry, customs, equipment ministry, culture ministry and above all the finance ministry.
The latter is planning to move its 80,000 desktops to open source starting in the second half of 2006, most notably for the tax department allowing citizens to file their tax returns by Internet. The finance ministrys newly created division for the modernisation of the French state is actively supporting this migration towards open source to maintain efficiency while cutting costs. No decision has yet been taken to move from Windows to Linux, said Geraud, "but we’re considering the option."
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