{"id":547923,"date":"2006-02-06T10:40:41","date_gmt":"2006-02-06T10:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wordpress\/technology\/547923-open-sourcing-gets-a-boost.html"},"modified":"2006-02-06T10:40:41","modified_gmt":"2006-02-06T10:40:41","slug":"open-sourcing-gets-a-boost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/technology\/547923-open-sourcing-gets-a-boost.html","title":{"rendered":"Open sourcing gets a boost"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0 force. <\/font><\/p>\n

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\u00a0 standard, an international norm for the Internet, and because it\u00a0 works equally well under Microsoft, Mac or Linux. <\/font><\/p>\n

Firefox has now taken over nearly 18 percent of the French\u00a0 Internet browser market approaching the European average of 20\u00a0 percent, according to a survey carried out in January by XiTi\u00a0 Monitor, an Internet site quality management service. But it still has a way to go before matching the 38 percent\u00a0 market penetration the Mozilla navigator has achieved in Finland. The French gendarmerie is also thinking ahead to a future when\u00a0 citizens could, for example, directly report a theft to the police\u00a0 via the Internet. <\/font><\/p>\n

"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\u00a0 as it respects the WC3 standard," Brachet told the monthly magazine\u00a0 Linux Pratique. <\/font><\/p>\n

The switch to an open source navigator follows the police\u00a0 departments decision last year to migrate from Microsoft Office to\u00a0 OpenOffice for all of its desktops. OpenOffice is a collection of different applications, which can\u00a0 be downloaded free of charge, such as a word processor, a\u00a0 spreadsheet, a presentation programme similar to Microsoft\u00a0 Powerpoint, a vector graphics editor and a database programme\u00a0 similar to Microsoft Access. <\/font><\/p>\n

Many of the components are designed to\u00a0 mirror those available in Microsoft Office. By the end of 2005, all the gendarmeries computers had made the\u00a0 switch to OpenOffice 1.4 and by March should have moved to version\u00a0 2.0. The change should save the police more than two million euros\u00a0 (2.4 million dollars) a year, according to Colonel Nicolas Geraud,\u00a0 deputy director of the gendarmeries IT department. <\/font><\/p>\n

Geraud, speaking at the Solution Linux 2006 exhibition, said\u00a0 this has been the annual cost of buying MSOffice licences for the\u00a0 gendarmerie since 2004. The move to open source also meant the department could better\u00a0 control its fixed costs as IT expenses were becoming independent of\u00a0 the number of desktops in use, he added. On the ground the move to OpenOffice.org had been accompanied\u00a0 with a system known as IC@RE, developed by eight non IT-specialist\u00a0 police officers, to help police officers write out their reports. <\/font><\/p>\n

"This product corresponds exactly to their needs because it was\u00a0 developed by their colleagues," Geraud said. The gendarmeries initiative is not isolated in the French\u00a0 government. A certain number of French government administrations have also\u00a0 chosen to move to open source, including the interior ministry,\u00a0 customs, equipment ministry, culture ministry and above all the finance ministry. <\/font><\/p>\n

The latter is planning to move its 80,000 desktops to open\u00a0 source starting in the second half of 2006, most notably for the tax\u00a0 department allowing citizens to file their tax returns by Internet. The finance ministrys newly created division for the\u00a0 modernisation of the French state is actively supporting this\u00a0 migration towards open source to maintain efficiency while cutting\u00a0 costs. No decision has yet been taken to move from Windows to Linux,\u00a0 said Geraud, "but we’re considering the option." <\/font><\/p>\n

INet-Bridge<\/font><\/i> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Supporters of open sourcing for computers have been given a shot in the arm by news the French police is abandoning Microsofts Internet Explorer for the Mozilla Foundations browser Firefox. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547923"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}