French Police Ditching Windows for Linux 122
esocid writes "In another European blow to Microsoft the French paramilitary police force said Wednesday it is ditching Microsoft for the free Linux operating system, becoming one of the biggest administrations in the world to make the break. The gendarmerie began severing its ties with Microsoft in 2005 when it moved to open source office applications like word processing. It switched to open source Internet browsers in 2006."
Re:How about some donations? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or better yet, contribute code. With 10% of what you were paying for licenses, you can hire or pay developers to improve open source projects, you may even choose the features that you need. You contribute them so that others with the same needs may use them as well.
Open source economics is based on the fact that code is worth more than money. Code you may share as much as you want. Money you may only split.
Re:Better headline (Score:2, Interesting)
That's also what I learned. In the early 1800s, the French tapestry manufactures started to purchase the newfangled Jacquard mechanical looms [suspenders.com] that got their patterns from punched cards. The silk worker corporations didn't like it one bit. Fearing for their employment, they started a Luddite campaign against the devious machines, discreetly throwing wooden shoes (French "sabot") into the delicate mechanism while the foreman wasn't looking. Hence the word.
Of course, as is often the case, the machines actually increased employment in French manufactures by lowering the price of tapestries and increasing productivity . Fear of automation is nothing new.
Re:Linux does make sense. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Better headline (Score:4, Interesting)
The contrast with France and Italy is interesting: there were a lot of anti-Republicans in France in 1940 and they backed the armistice. They were then left utterly discredited (though obviously haven't gone away - see Le Pen), but the battle that was started on 14 July 1789 was settled forever on 20 August 1944. For Italy, though, because so many fascists got away with it (especially as some of them could say they were behind the capitualtion), the country has been described as being engaged in a low intensity civil war ever since.