Two announcements were made recently in France, relayed by the European Commission Open Source Observatory. They are quite significant.

First, the Gendarmerie Nationale has announced at Solutions Linux that it was migrating its 70,000 workstations to Linux (more precisely Ubuntu), at the pace of 10,000 a year.  This move toward open source was initiated in 2005 when it decided to adopt the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird email client, both products from the Mozilla Foundation.  Following this logic, it will migrate this year toward an open operating system, for three major reasons: diversify its suppliers and reduce its dependency on a single vendor, regain control of its technical foundation, and reduce its costs.  Check out these interview snippets (in English) of the Gendarmerie’s vice-director of IT, on the blog of Tristan Nitot, Founder and President of the Mozilla Foundation in Europe.

As the Open Source Observatory indicated, the Gendarmerie joins the French Parliament, the City of Paris, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Defense, who have all chosen to favor Open Source for their new projects.

In parallel, the Attali report to “free the growth in France” encourages competition between Open Source and proprietary software.  It suggests setting a goal of 20% for new applications developed or installed in the government sector. The report goes even further, asking the French authorities to encourage the definition of European standards to guarantee interoperability between these types of solutions.

These two announcements illustrate well how the French government is positioned at the spear head of Open Source.  Beyond the symbol, it’s not by chance that French agencies pick these solutions.  They have analyzed the merits of such strategies, and the result was that they would benefit from technologies that would let them meet more efficiently the needs of their users.

The European Commission Open Source Observatory lists the latest announcements made in Europe.  You will find there - among others - that the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Macedonia is migrating its workstations and servers to Open Source, and so it the Tuscany Region in Italy, the BBC in the UK, the Russian schools or the Spanish Ministry of Finance.  There is a real dynamic for Open Source in Europe.  But would doubted this anyhow?

Bertrand