Zut alors! French cops save millions with open source

OSOR reports that the French Gendarmerie‘s gradual migration to a completely open source desktop and web applications has saved millions of euro. “This year the IT budget will be reduced by 70 per cent. This will not affect our IT systems,” says Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard.

This Thursday, Guimard gave a presentation in Utrecht in the Netherlands on the move from a Microsoft-based to an Ubuntu GNU/Linux-based desktop. The Lieutenant-Colonel was one of the keynote speakers at an annual conference organised by NOiV, the Dutch national resource centre on open source and open standards.

Most of the savings are reported to have come from licensing costs and the full story can be read here.