Print - Au Revoir: French Parliament Drops Microsoft

In June 2007, the French Parliament will switch from the comfortable confines of Windows and Microsoft Office to PCs running Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite. The French Parliament says the move will save money in the long run, although the transition could be relatively rocky. It's also trying to reduce its reliance on a single vendor.

The move will affect both the upper chamber, or Senate, and lower chamber, or National Assembly, of the French Parliament, and will include both desktop PCs and servers. This switch marks the first time that a major French government bureau will move desktops to Linux-based systems, although numerous French agencies are already using Linux and the open-source Apache Web Server on their servers. The French Parliament currently maintains more than 1100 desktop PCs.

One sticking point: The Parliament has yet to pick a Linux distribution. The distribution it picks will greatly affect the success of the migration. Some high-profile Linux migrations have fared better than others: After years of delays, the city of Munich, Germany, said it will complete 80 percent of its Linux migration in 2008. Meanwhile, Birmingham, England, cancelled a planned migration to Linux because of a lack of internal expertise with the new system. The city had converted just 200 of 1500 desktops to Linux before giving up.

Is it merely the Parliamentary offices themselves, or has the Parliament mandated that ALL government offices switch?

Moving to multiple vendors is a double-edged sword. In the long-term, multiple vendors makes better business sense allowing for easier migration to other applications and keeping a nimble enterprise portfolio of solutions. Being able to move more quickly to to other solutions would allow firms to embrace newer, more effective innovations. Over the years, Microsoft has increasingly only offered meager updates to features with only sparse ones that might be described as innovative.

"Birmingham, England has cancelled a planned migration to Linux because of a lack of expertise in the new system." Heh. "Is it merely the Parliamentary offices themselves, or has the Parliament mandated that ALL government offices switch?" I'd hope it would just be the Parlament... if the entire french government only has 1100 desktops, thats sad. Every major university in the US has double that easy.

Ah, France. How I marvel at your beauty, your food, your wine. Now I can marvel at the beauty of your OS decisions.

Now all they need to do is hire IT people who know Linux enough to choose a good distro, develop a system image with all the application dependencies, and may hire a few coders to customize some of the system to their needs. That can all be expensive, but cheaper in the long run versus Microsoft Licensing. Heck, the lack of being susceptible to viruses and spyware alone will make their parliament a helluva lot more secure than ever before.

Bah, its doomed to failure. The french give up way easier than the British. "Where is ze window key?" "I dun like zis 'red hat', I want bleu! Now!"

@lotsa: "Ah, France. How I marvel at your beauty, your food, your wine. Now I can marvel at the beauty of your OS decisions." Would that be an "anybody but Microsoft" sentiment there?

"Would that be an "anybody but Microsoft" sentiment there?" No, I'm just aping Paul. He expressed similar sentiments regarding France's actions re: iTunes. As much as he loves France, I figured he'd be all over this one. ----- Image refreshes: Five

"As much as he loves France..." Paul likes France? You'd figure he'd mention something like that from time to time. Maybe take a trip there. ;-)

Being completely off topic, this was just too funny NOT to post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXtXTqApyZk

This is just the beginning. As I've said before, Microsoft is dying. Engineers are leaving left and right (and posting mocking blog posts exposing Microsoft's broken development processes), their products are flopping in multiple markets, the stock price has been totally flat for five years (meanwhile, Apple is expected to break the hundred mark in the next few months), and Windows is an aging disaster of buggy code dating back to 1985.

vandil2 - "Now all they need to do is hire IT people who know Linux enough to choose a good distro, develop a system image with all the application dependencies, and may hire a few coders to customize some of the system to their needs. That can all be expensive, but cheaper in the long run versus Microsoft Licensing. Heck, the lack of being susceptible to viruses and spyware alone will make their parliament a helluva lot more secure than ever before." Excellent points. The key is finding IT pros that know the ins and outs of Linux and finding a lot of them, which may prove challenging considering the government mandated work week limitations placed upon the workforce. Cheers, TB

A wise choice by France actually and I only state this because Microsoft seems to be making so many mistakes throughout their business scope. What Microsoft has left will depend on those companies that include Vista with the new PC lines in the near future....HP, DELL, etcetera. Frankly, HP and DELL versus the consumer that realizes Linux will run fine on the old closet computer is probably no contest but over estimating the amount of Vista users in the near future is a lock if PCs don't do well during mid term of 2007. This whole thing may come down to education where the general user and consumer is concerned.