French Gendarmerie: "Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%"

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/french-gendarmerie-open-source-desktop-lowers-tco-40

by Tsiolkovsky • 13 years ago

331 131 13 years ago

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perlgeek2• 13 years ago

It's a smart move to first introduce cross-platform applications. Then after switching to a different operating system, the users will be familiar with the applications, so "only" the desktop changes, not the whole experience. If you are used to firefox, thunderbird and libreoffice, to many users it doesn't matter much if it's windows or linux underneath.

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

That was exactly how I converted for my own personal use. I gradually replaced all my Windows applications with cross-platform FOSS applications and finally switched from Windows to Ubuntu.

takluyver• 13 years ago

Definitely. I'd say that improving the Libreoffice experience on Windows is probably one of the most effective things we can do at present to increase adoption of desktop Linux.

puller4• 13 years ago

The Libreoffice experience in Linux leaves something to be desired - particularly some parts like the pitifully slow spreadsheet app (Calc) and its charting facilities, or the desktop database app (Base) and its bizarre interface.

So even if you achieve parity across platforms, Office users are going to find a lot to complain about... with reason. Not because Office is great, but just because Libreoffice is lacking in polish, still, in so many ways.

I've evangelized Libreoffice to users for years, but some parts of the suite are just terrible no matter how you look at it, and meanwhile alternatives like Google Docs and Gnumeric have established themselves... Even if you improve Libreoffice across the board, this isn't really going to drive adoption so much as lubricate it slightly for people who want to replace Office. Things like Steam encouraging game development for Linux are going to have a much larger impact.

Steko2• 13 years ago

This was also true a decade ago. The fact is OpenOffice and Libreoffice in 2013 still suck compared to Excel. By most standards they even suck compared to Excel 2003. I'm not even sure they are closing the gap at all. And the outlook isn't very good because Google pays top people top dollar and Docs/Sheets/Drive has the exact same problem.

thomaslangston• 13 years ago

Not that they were excluded, but explicitly consider browser based applications as part of those cross-platform applications. I own a copy of MS Office, but rarely use it since Google Docs solves every problem I usually have.

chatman4• 13 years ago

Good to know adoption of so many GNU/Linux desktops. Though, Ubuntu is a bad choice because of the Amazon search bar spyware enabled by default which sends back search queries to Amazon. Perhaps they don't understand the underlying principles behind free software: something that gives the users complete freedom.

chatman4• 13 years ago

Fedora would have been a better choice.

weland3• 13 years ago

SLACKWARE IS ALL YOU SHOULD EVER NEED YOU NARROW-MINDED EVANGELIST!!1

melling• 13 years ago

That's why 20 years later Linux and open source are still struggling to gain mainstream traction. Gnome vs KDE, 200 varieties of Linux, Open Office vs Libre Office, etc.

Most people don't care in the least. They just want a good acceptable solution where they can get help if they ever have a problem. Why would most people choose the mess of open source? Gimp vs Photoshop? Time is money.

The Open Source community is its own worst enemy.

puller4• 13 years ago

That's debatable. Fedora is great, but it is not very stable and skews toward the power users (documentation for solving common problems has a tendency to exercise Linux power user skills, for example).

vacri4• 13 years ago

Fedora that stops supporting revisions after 13 months and doesn't have a long-term support option? That would be awful for an enterprise to roll out. It's a 'power user' distribution, not an 'office worker' one.

keithpeter3• 13 years ago

I take it you meant RHEL/CentOS?

Fedora is a rapidly changing distribution. RHEL/Clones have updates until 2020

byroot2• 13 years ago

They most probably tweaked it to remove that kind of things. The French Gendarmerie as a pretty good IT department. They even developed a big security plugin for thunderbird called "milimail" (may be abandoned now).

byroot2• 13 years ago

Self-reply: Milimail is not dead, it got renamed Trustedbird.

weland3• 13 years ago

I imagine their custom version removed that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu .

mseebach• 13 years ago

Freedom is always freedom from something. In this case, the main attraction wasn't freedom from non-complete user freedom (indeed, the end users are likely to experience a rather un-free computing environment), it was freedom from commercial software vendors.

Mikeb852• 13 years ago

You do realize that the Amazon shopping lens is:

a) GPL software, with the source code readily available and

b) Easy to disable - a single switch in settings

c) Easy to remove altogether...

chatman4• 13 years ago

a) GPL code doesn't justify submitting user queries to Amazon without seeking explicit user permission b) It should be opt-in service, not an opt-out. By default, this should be switched off. c) That doesn't mean this feature isn't a spyware.

nraynaud2• 13 years ago

I can't imaging the savings if they had fused them with the police first and used the same software for everybody (even non-open source).

a-priori• 13 years ago

It's not unusual for a nation to have multiple police forces with overlapping jurisdictions. And I don't see it as a problem in and of itself. In Ottawa, Canada, for example, because it is the national capital there are three police forces with jurisdiction within the city: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the federal gendarmerie force), the Ontario Provincial Police, and the Ottawa Police Service. As far as I know, and I live in Ottawa, it works out well.

But back to France. I imagine that IT costs are a small portion of the gendarmerie or police's budget. Most of it would be taken up by wages for the officers and staff and maintenance of equipment and facilities. Merging France's two police forces would do little to reduce those costs, since the combined organization would have the union of the two organizations' duties.

nraynaud2• 13 years ago

it would at least make only one set of procedures and one set of tools for everybody.

mddw• 13 years ago

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/11-apresenta...

Nice use of Comic Sans in the presentation. Wonder if he paid the licence or used Powerpoint.

Nice post though, I did not know about GendBuntu ! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

mavroprovato• 13 years ago

I don't think he needs to pay any license to use Comic Sans:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web

lrem• 13 years ago

I've attended to a course on presenting in a French university. The professor actually recommended Comic Sans as the most suitable font. With a straight face.

username42• 13 years ago

Comic Sans is freeware: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web

Installation is trivial (apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer). I think it is a default package.

devx2• 13 years ago

Governments should use as much open source software as possible, both because of cost reasons, but also in principle (especially now about the NSA scandals, instead of buying proprietary software from American companies).

masklinn• 13 years ago

Governments should use as much open source software as possible, both because of cost reasons, but also in principle

IIRC the latter is a major reason why France's PM released a circular strongly recommending the increased use of OSS in administrations last year.

The first activity in that direction turns out to be almost 15 years old: back in 1999, a french senator had proposed mandating OSS use across the board[0]

[0] http://slashdot.org/story/99/10/28/0820202/french-senator-pr...

mercurial• 13 years ago

They've also contributed to Trustedbird [1]. Personally, I think that's totally awesome.

1: http://adullact.net/plugins/mediawiki/wiki/milimail/index.ph...

LAXF40• 13 years ago

"[A] proprietary office suite". Hmmm... I wonder which one it's talking about? Haha

debacle2• 13 years ago

That's an impressive number, all things considered.

Many people rant about Open/LibreOffice not being comparable to MS Office, and while there probably is no good replacement for Outlook in Linux (simply from an ease of use standpoint), swriter and scalc provide 99.9% of the features that most people use MS Office for.

Overall, I'm eager for the time when a major US municipality switches over to Linux desktops. It just makes sense.

edelans• 13 years ago

It makes even more sense when your country isn't the home country of the NSA... !

puller4• 13 years ago

Is there some reason why the open source desktop is a worse idea in the US? I don't think so...

officemonkey• 13 years ago

What is the best email/calendar/contact manager on Linux?

debacle2• 13 years ago

I honestly don't know. I've tried Zimbra and Thunderbird and some other client I can't remember the name of, but in general even Thunderbird isn't great - I usually resort to webmail.

phaer• 13 years ago

In this combination i'd say evolution, but i do not know the kde universe too well.

fps• 13 years ago

gmail/google calendar/google contacts. I've been a desktop Linux user for 14 years, and while Evolution worked well enough for a while, it really stagnated about 8 years ago as all the users switched to webmail. I tell chrome to pretend it's on Windows and use Outlook Web Access when I need to interact with Exchange, and I actually like that better than outlook on windows anyway, but nothing beats gmail.

pbhjpbhj• 13 years ago

kontact/kmail (KDE mail ua) used to integrate all that stuff the only thing it lacked was an ability to handle HTML email. At the time the developers kept insisting that email should all be plaintext and they weren't going to allow HTML mailing in kmail.

I moved to thunderbird.

The rest of KDE4 caught up to being release standard at about version 4.6 and Kontact looks good but I've become entrenched with TB now.

mbq• 13 years ago

Thunderbird+Lightning (for calendar and contacts). Or Claws mail for a "pro" (rough but very fast and functional) solution.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

The biggest problem comparing open/libreoffice is that compatibility is 99% of the focus here. Trying to implement Microsoft's horrible file-formats just sucks all the oxygen out of the room - the users obsess over compatibility (for good reasons), and that means the developers have to obsess over compatibility (also for good reasons) but this makes it really hard for LibreOffice to actually focus on real features.

Also, as an aside, my wife's learning LaTeX for some math courses... she was shocked at how well her OOO Draw files could be converted and opened up in Inkscape, which in turn played nice with LaTeX. Having good compatibility between various small applications actually was surprising to someone used to the closed-source software world.

pachydermic• 13 years ago

Do you know about LyX? I loved that program for my math classes (mostly proof writing). Personally, I liked the shortcuts it provided so that I didn't have to write raw LaTeX for everything.

slacka2• 13 years ago

As someone who was part of a failed LibreOffice roll-out, I have to agree in my experience compatibility is the issue holding LO back. But users don't obsess, they just require decent interoperability. If basic features like charts can't be imported[1], of course it's a showstopper.

I have to disagree with everyone here saying that basic MSO interoperability is some impossible goal. If that was the case how has TextMaker achieved such better results?[2] LibreOffice and OpenOffice both have a group of paid developers. While I understand that volunteer wouldn't want to work on this, why can't the paid developers put some effort into this?

[1] https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=96426

[2] http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/office-compatibility...

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

Overall, I'm eager for the time when a major US municipality switches over to Linux desktops. It just makes sense.

The problem is, it's been making sense for a decade now, at least for the office suite. But these wins against Microsoft remain one offs.

There are many reasons for this, but IT professionals are part of the "problem." Someone with a lifetime of MSFT certifications and training can come up with a dozen reasons why open source is bad. He needs to save his livelihood.

teddyh• 13 years ago

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

— Upton Sinclair

singold• 13 years ago

This made me remember the other day in my job (I'm the webmaster) when I asked the IT dept. to install Firefox or Chrome (at least) on my machine (I was developing the main site on winXP + IE8). They told me that they couldn't because of 'security concerns'

PeterisP• 13 years ago

The feature parity of libreoffice is much closer than the polish parity. There is still so much to do in terms of UI polishing in LibreOffice that I wouldn't know where to start.

Mikeb852• 13 years ago

Everyone who cares about control over their software should be using open-source. This is why pretty much any investment bank, hedge fund and proprietary trading firm runs Linux or BSD, uses open-source tools and rolls their own trading software...

cs702• 13 years ago

If the 40% figure is accurate, this is a BIG win for the Linux desktop (and Canonical in particular), because the TCO (total cost of ownership) of an enterprise desktop can be as much as four to five times greater than the cost of its hardware and software licenses.[1] At most corporations, training, support, maintenance, security, and other ongoing costs together vastly exceed the cost of just hardware and software.

For example, the hardware+software-only costs of a run-of-the-mill Windows+Office enterprise desktop, for a large corporation, might be $1,200 over three years, but the TCO could easily top $4,000 or even $5,000 a year. (If these figures seem high to you, think about the cost of training thousands of individuals about as computer savvy as your Aunt Tillie, and then having to troubleshoot all their virus infections, messed up files, one-off application bugs, unrepeatable weird crashes, etc. so they can do their work every day.)

The Gendarmerie, in other words, is claiming that the switch to Ubuntu Linux on the desktop is saving them somewhere between one and two thousand dollars a year per seat. With 72,000 desktops, the aggregate savings are probably in the mid-to-high tens of millions of dollars a year.

[1] http://www.gartner.com/id=2371417

S4M• 13 years ago

Nice estimations, and something that was missing in the original article.

mistermann2• 13 years ago

It's a bit "curious" those numbers were absent, it would certainly have made things more clear (not to mention convincing).

If they're able to calculate the TCO difference, they most certainly had the numbers, right? Or perhaps the story wouldn't have been quite as compelling if they published the specific numbers they used to calculate "TCO".

Also, are we to believe that the replacement apps are fully as good as the commercial alternative? MS Excel is not superior in any way to the open source alternative? There most certainly is a cost associated with productivity, far beyond desktop maintenance costs in many cases.

nols• 13 years ago

Keep in mind that a motivation to change was the end of Windows XP so they're probably assuming the training costs for each OS (GendBuntu vs Windows Vista) would be identical. So while it is a victory for Linux, it's not a rout like these numbers might make it seem.

Malstrond• 13 years ago

But also keep in mind that when using FOSS software, there is no controlling entity that can forcibly end something and force exit costs[1] and the subsequent training costs for a new product on you.

1: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/tco-should-include-exit-cos...

Spooky23• 13 years ago

The problem with the 40% savings figure is that tablet-based operating systems cost around $1k annually. And in the long run, your windows desktop will have an OS more like a tablet than a windows 7 desktop.

devx2• 13 years ago

Canonical has an OS for tablets that will be released soon, and they can support any tablet they want, if they order large amounts.

abraxasz• 13 years ago

I interned in a french company a couple years ago, and was surprised to discover what the company's computer setup was. You had the usual windows XP, but you couldn't install anything on it: they had this system where you had to call IT, tell them what software you wanted, then they would deploy it to your computer. They would also do nightly backups of your systems, and all that jazz. Half of the time, it didn't work, so you had to call IT and they'd come troubleshoot. All in all, I have no trouble believing that factoring in the IT support behemoth and, the TCO was vastly more that $1000.

baltcode3• 13 years ago

What I want to know is the PC that they are using. I love to use Linux on my computers but always have a hard time making sure that the hardware is completely compatible. I hope such adoptions lead to better hardware compatibility with cheaper commodity hardware. I've had a few weird experiences:

1. Previous laptop: wifi under Linux didn't connect to certain networks, wile the same machine connected to all networks under windows.

2. Current desktop: Under Linux, it will sometimes freeze with no errors reported (usually under heavy and sustained CPU and graphics usage) but nothing of the sort happens under windows.

And these issues are really hard to figure out for non systems programmers like me.

tlarkworthy• 13 years ago

presumably the police are not using a GPU, which seems to be a major source of issues in our lab. 64 bit ubuntu gives me more hardware headaches than 32 bit for things like wifi. Again this is for police desktops so probably they don;t use wifi.

baltcode3• 13 years ago

The less frills and peripherals the better, I guess. Although I've usually seen most cheap desktops come with some entry level video card, so I doubt they have none at all.

Iftheshoefits• 13 years ago

1) WiFi chipset manufacturers and the linux kernel are and have been at odds for some time. The issue is primarily that some (many?) of the chipset manufacturers that make the machinery that runs WiFi cards don't provide open source drivers for their chipsets. Some of these make proprietary kernel-compatible drivers (often inferior to their Windows offerings), and others have to make do with hackish workarounds (NDISwrapper). I'd argue this isn't a problem with Linux as much as it is the device manufacturers. I'd also argue from the end-user perspective that doesn't matter much.

2. See (1)--there is a notorious hate-hate relationship between nVidia and Linux; I'd bet that what you've experienced is related to that, although happily will admit to being wrong (if you aren't engaged in accidental selective memory--that is, remembering times Linux froze but not Windows, even though the latter surely has frozen on you before, under similar circumstances).

baltcode3• 13 years ago

You're right, the Wifi chipsets have proprietary driver issues. My graphics card is one of those low end ATI models that come in cheap desktops. I've heard that graphics cards can be an issue. I wonder if I could just disable the graphics card in some Ubuntu setting. I just want to run things like vi, ssh, gcc and a browser most of the time anyway.

overgryphon• 13 years ago

It doesn't matter if it's NVidia's fault or the WiFi chipset manufacturer's fault that Linux doesn't work well out of box on OPs computer. I've had similar experiences with Linux, and all I cared about was that I didn't want to spend several hours figuring out why some graphics problem prevented my laptop from booting, or why I couldn't connect to WiFi.

Accusing OP of "accidental selective memory" when he points out that his computer freezes frequently running Linux doesn't help. Problems like this make Linux unusable compared to Windows for new-to-Linux users who are willing to try it out. That makes it a Linux problem, which Linux needs to figure out how to solve- whether that be improving their poor relationships with WiFi manufacturers or improving drivers.

mehwoot2• 13 years ago

I'd argue this isn't a problem with Linux as much as it is the device manufacturers.

It most certainly is a problem with Linux. It might not be fair because it isn't entirely their fault, but users want something that works, regardless of the politics behind it.

jeltz• 13 years ago

A government agency can always select hardware with good Linux compatibility.

wil4212• 13 years ago

This is the first public announcement (I have seen) of a large government agency using open source desktop OSs. I've seen articles about tech companies using Linux for Desktops, and other articles that mention large organizations using Linux Desktops but the couldn't specify the company specifically (dont know if it was US based or not). I have doubts about a large US non-tech organization actually using Linux for their desktops. The user training would have to momentous and cant imagine the IT support personnel/time needed to successfully implement this kind of change. To be honest I cant even imagine my company or others even switching to Open Office.

I am glad that this is working out for the French, I wonder if their are any US government agencies that would consider a switch like this.

seszett• 13 years ago

The National Assembly has been using Linux since 2007.

This article:

http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/linux-a-l-assemblee-nationale...

is in French, but it claims they have saveed 500 000 euros (over one year) from this switch, and that deputies are mostly pleased with the switch. It also features testimonies from both rightwing and leftwing deputies that agree with each other!

wil4212• 13 years ago

I can see why this would be a viable option in Europe. They seem to be more progressive in their decision making than the US. No way you could get the left and right to agree on something major in the US! Maybe if they saw how much money they would save doing something like this.

I wouldnt be pleased more if the strangle hold that windows has on "Work" computers was loosened in this decade. Even the multinational company I work for now has a BYOD program. They restrict us to using the "guest" throttled wifi as punishment though.

nolok• 13 years ago

It might actually be an even bigger achievement tech-wise, because the people working there have to share a lot of documents with all the other administrations that are still on windows.

perlgeek2• 13 years ago

Fwiw the city of Munich has been rolling out Linux since roughly 2006, and as of January 2013 had 13k linux workstations.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux for details.

jlgaddis2• 13 years ago

I have doubts about a large US non-tech organization actually using Linux for their desktops.

I could envision certain types of companies being able to do this -- those where the great majority (if not all) of the computing that an employee does is in the browser. (Call centers come to mind.)

Just out of high school, for example, I got a "data entry" job at Columbia House. Remember those "Get 12 CDs for a penny!" things that were in damn near every magazine imaginable ~15 years ago? My job consisted solely of typing into a custom (DOS-based) application whatever the customer had written on the card (e.g. their name, address, the ID numbers of the CDs they wanted to receive). That job could be done entirely on a Linux PC without issue (web-based application) although, on second thought, that job probably doesn't even exist anymore.

Apocryphon• 13 years ago

I find this somewhat cute. I didn't know what TCO was at first, so I had assumed from headline that France's national police was blowing FUD against open source, and this was another article about government agency malfeasance in tech.

trimbo• 13 years ago

I'd be interested to know about how much they have in the way of custom software. If they're just using Office, I agree, this should be fairly easy. The tough thing is when you have custom development that happened on Windows.

For example, the US deploys a large number of custom applications on Windows. One of the biggest is the VA's electronic medical records application, CPRS. CPRS is a massive application. Wine might do the trick, though I'm not sure how it works with AD and other Windows services the VA depends on.

neltnerb• 13 years ago

Isn't pretty much everyone moving to custom web applications for internal services? I doubt that in those cases it matters much what platform you're on since it's probably running on Apache on a linux server anyway.

I've seen this model even at tiny companies, and my impression is that it is also how the big ones do it. There are limitations, but the benefits are pretty substantial.

Zigurd• 13 years ago

I would not be surprised if many non-US government agencies are evaluating running their own security-oriented Linux distributions. Hopefully this will result in a critical mass of vendors and technologies for running networks that have at least some chance of keeping communications and data storage secure.

Sadly, I would also not be surprised if many governments continue to rely on US vendors for a lot of network and voice infrastructure that have already been compromised.

frank_boyd• 13 years ago

I always wonder how important people can take so long to understand so obvious stuff like that.

code_duck• 13 years ago

Sounds typical that society is figuring this out right about at the end of the era of desktop computers.

jlengrand3• 13 years ago

My father is a gendarme. One day, he found his computer changed, with an Ubuntu instead of XP.

A few years later, he still complains about it. I still haven't found any of his colleagues happy of the change.

The huge majority of those guys are not technical, and as pragmatic as the change may be; it is quite hard for the people impacted :).

In the end, every single guy I know now has bought a laptop with Win 7, brings it to work and works on it. Ubuntu is not used.

People don't want to change.

Intermernet• 13 years ago

This may be true, but it does raise some questions:

Did your father have to configure his access to the (probably) Samba based file shares, set up his own account on the network, map all of the printers, configure his own email client etc?

Part of a large enterprise roll-out is pre-configuration. I can't imagine the Gendarmerie IT dept. appreciating all of this extra configuration for "every single guy" with a Win 7 laptop.

jlengrand3• 13 years ago

Hum, once again you go too technical. (no offense)

How does it work? With a cracked version of Office and a USB key that is passed from hands to hands. The email client? A web based interface.

For gendarmerie based stuff that requires special software (taking depositions for example), of course it is handled on Ubuntu because they have no choice.

But a lot of their paperwark time is spent filling word documents and excel spreadsheets, something that can be done on any computer.

Gendarmerie IT dept, lawl? They changed the computer and gave them one phone number for support, of a guy that is located 200 km away :).

keithpeter3• 13 years ago

I'm the mirror image of your father. I take my CentOS laptop into work where we have a Windows 7 network. I use a remote desktop session to access all the 'business applications' and I can have my own 'stuff' running behind the remote desktop window.

IT support don't want to put LibreOffice on the desktops in case it confuses users being similar but different to MS Office.

jlengrand3• 13 years ago

Haha, I know the feeling.

Was doing exactly the same when I was working for the government as a student a while back. There was no internet access, for security reasons.

Good lesson on how to learn about debugging and reading manuals though

seewhat• 13 years ago

Did your father experience a cross-over period of using OpenOffice (rather than MS Office) on Windows?

kriro2• 13 years ago

As someone who has worked on Open Source in France I think this is big for another reason. It might lead to a nice push of Linux in Africa (specifically through the African Union). Many of the French speaking countries look at France for "tech trends" etc.

Microsoft is following an interesting strategy in Africa. basically the MS-whatever certificates are cheap and widespread (and nonauthorized copies of Windows are tolerated) which leads to IT guys wanting Windows. I always thought that was strange and Linux should be much stronger in Africa :)

SeppoErviala• 13 years ago

"About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." - Bill Gates @ 1998

French Gendarmerie: "Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%"

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