French Police Migrating To Linux

kernel_dan writes "According to heise online, la Gendarmerie Nationale française (French police) will be changing all their computers to Linux. The numbers: 35,000 computers by the end of this month and 80,000 by the end of the summer will be running Linux."

RTFA

[madaxe42]

It'd be great if the moderators bothered to read the article. They are NOT switching to Linux, they are switching to OPENOFFICE.

Re:RTFA

[madaxe42]

Ok... Replying to my own comment - how sad!

According to the linked article (in French) they have been evaluating open source solutions, however want to wait and see how things pan out for Munich before moving to Linux altogether, as it is, there have been worries about compatibility with openoffice of XML documents which they apparently generate with MSOffice. Also, 35,000 machines in a month is one hell of a quick rollout.

Ballmer or Gates on the way

[SgtChaireBourne]

OpenOffice.org is a big step and allows the Frensh police to decide what platform they will use. If they stay with MSO, then they are stuck on MS-Windows. If they start producing documents in the DRM'd MSO 2003 format, then migration to *any* competing product will be virtually impossible.

Just talk of dropping MSO will get Ballmer or Gates on the way soon. Right now Gates is running around the yard in Brazil [tietokone.fi] trying to get President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silvan back on the leash.

Re:RTFA

[RyoSaeba]

+5 insightful.

Re:RTFA

[rjkimble]

The problem is that the linked article was written in English.

Re:RTFA

[I_Love_Pocky!]

Damn, I was really hoping they were switching, because I had this great French bashing joke:

They aren't switching because of the performance/reliability/security/price of Linux, but rather because of the cute penguin.

Oh well...

Re:RTFA

[I_Love_Pocky!]

1.) The joke is shit.

Admittedly

2.) Do you mind if i joke about the average american now, like with their average iq, ignorance, etc?

I would suspect our IQs are more likely below average. Still, go right ahead.

Re:RTFA

[yuri benjamin]

touché

Re:RTFA

[schmaltz]

Huh. Still... I half expect to see a followup to this, 6 mos down the road... "Secret Negotiations Revealed! French Police Exchange Putain et Fromage for Office and XP"

Title WRONG! - to OpenOffice, not Linux

[jamsho]

"French police to switch to OpenOffice
The French police are planning to switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice, the French industry news service Toolinux reports. By the end of January some 35,000 PCs and workstations are to be equipped with the open source office suite; by this summer the number is to reach 80,000. The French police expect to be able to cut costs amounting to more than two million euros by this move. (Robert W. Smith) /
(jk/c't)"

Re:Title WRONG! - to OpenOffice, not Linux

[imr]

Mod up the parent poster, as he was right, and remove moderation rights to the one who moderated him as a troll, thx.

Another inaccuracy

[LeninZhiv]

La gendarmerie nationale [defense.gouv.fr] is not the same thing as la police nationale [interieur.gouv.fr]--the latter of whom I would call "the French police". The gendarmerie would be better described as "the French military police", since they are considered part of the armed forces whereas the police are civilian--although they do also take on roles analagous to those of US State troopers.

Re:Another inaccuracy

[LeninZhiv]

The gendarmes also act as "State troopers" (and military police, Secret Service, etc.), that is. I just realised that the "they" in parent was a little ambiguous.

Re:Another inaccuracy

[imr]

They are not "considered part of", they ARE military.

Re:Another inaccuracy

[WaZiX]

Well Actually, the Gendarmerie Nationale is the French counter-part of the FBI and the State troopers combined. And no they are not the Military police, since france has their own MP corp. The fact that they are part of the military is really just a historical tradition.

Not Linux, OpenOffice

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Did the submitter not read the article himself? It clearly says that the French Police will be migrating to OpenOffice from MS Office; nothing is said of Linux.

You realize there's a difference, right? And while this is an important change, it's not the same.

Re:Still considering?

[imr]

Linux has been being used for quite some years in various part of the french administration, but always in a quite silent way.
Lately the socialist administration of Paris made a study to follow Munich, but since the study actually showed that they first would have had to grow balls in order to have the courage to do it, they finally decided to continue to talk about it and do nothing. Behavior which can be accurately described as "the french way of life".
So it seems that only one of the 20 areas of Paris is doing a real switch (since they apparently had the only available pair of balls among the socialists), while the others will slowly change their park of machine, do a little linux danse whenever possible (which they were already doing - see 1st paragraph) and continue to give a little tongue job to microsoft once in a while in order to not infuriate our powerfull and friendly ally. (Behavior which can be accurately described as "the british way of life").
So this is how french life goes in french administrations: politics talks and do nothing, administration workers do the job and avoid at all cost to inform said politics about it.

Re:Still considering?

[DuncMan]

I'm off-topic here, but how did this litany of offensive xenophobic caricatures get modded as "interesting"? It shouldn't even qualify as "funny".

The moderation of these comments is unusually poor (see various "troll" and "redundant" moderations elsewhere). What's going on?

Re:Still considering?

[Scarblac]

From the amount of detail, I'm quite sure he's from Paris or at least from France himself. It's a bit cynical, but not necessarily xenophobic...

(for the record: I'm Dutch)

Re:Still considering?

[imr]

Actually.

First, i'm french so there cant be anything xenophobic when I badmouth french people.

Second, it is a national hobby to badmouth our administration. It is considered very "french" to do so; only foreigners wouldnt. [The problem is that it is working better every year, so it's getting more and more difficult; for instance try to read the comments where I say that some services have been switched to linux for years. The ministry of culture being the first, and long before linux was hype].

Third, eve

Re:Still considering?

[DuncMan]

And I'm of French descent but consider myself English (admittedly, it was a couple of generations ago when the family left France for England and Canada).

I don't much like England, or the rest of Britain/ United Kingdom, and tend to agree slightly with your comments. But I still consider them xenophobic and insulting. Even if someone is part of group X doesn't make it automatically OK for them to insult group X...

Re:Still considering?

[imr]

It just exclude the word xenophobic, xeno being foreigner, you just can't be called a "foreigner hater" when you show hate of your own group, or as it is the case here, a small part of it.
And there wasnt much hate either, apart from the comments on the french politicians which I sincerely despise. Ant this despise is shared by the ones I was talking about since they really don't rely on them or wait for them to have a task done.

Time to replace Tux

[AtariAmarok]

Here's a new logo [internoodle.com] suggestion.

Re:Time to replace Tux

[xutopia]

oh my god you are really funny! I cannot believe I haven't thought about that joke hahaha!

Moron.

Re:Time to replace Tux

[AtariAmarok]

On a related subject, the French also said there were WMDs in Iraq. They were wrong, too. Ribbit!

I guess it was funny

[AtariAmarok]

"oh my god you are really funny!"

My friend Mr +1 Funny Modpoint seems to concur with you.

Mislabelled article?

[babbage]

The article reads, in full:

French police to switch to OpenOffice

The French police are planning to switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice, the French industry news service Toolinux reports. By the end of January some 35,000 PCs and workstations are to be equipped with the open source office suite; by this summer the number is to reach 80,000. The French police expect to be able to cut costs amounting to more than two million euros by this move. (Robert W. Smith) / (jk/c't)

While it's good to see

IN OTHER NEWS....

[madaxe42]

Microsoft move all internal support to linux - see their site [microsoft.com].

Oh no, I misread that, it say 'we hate linux'. Fuck it, let's post the article anyway.

The gendarmerie is not the police ...

[file-exists-p]

It may seem confusing, but the "gendarmerie" is not the police. It is an army force dedicated to civil troubles and criminal investigation.

And what exactly is the police

[hummassa]

if not an "army force dedicated to civil troubles and criminal investigation"?

Down here we do have a lot of different police forces:

Each city can have its "city guard"... they must only guard the City's property.

Each state has up to three police forces: "military police" (they do rounds and prevent crime... they are called "military" because they have a military-like organization), "civil (or judiciary) police" (they investigate crimes) and "military fire corps" (they fight fires and do other disaster re

Re:And what exactly is the police

[dunkelfalke]

military police is not called "military" because it has military-like organisation. it is called "military" because it is part of armed forces and is policing members of armed forces.

Re:And what exactly is the police

[hummassa]

Our military police is called military not because it is armed (civil police is armed too), not because it is an "armed force" (military polices are incorporated state-wide, not country-wide and they do not have armed force status, their heads do not make part of any Major State as the Army, Air Force and Navy do) but because of its command structure and the status of its men as military personell (some priviledges, low salaries, lots of things that are not criminalized to a civilian are to a military perso

Re:And what exactly is the police

[file-exists-p]

The difference between french "police" and "gendarmerie" is clear: the former is part of the "ministere de l'interieur" (minister of internal affairs ?) and the second is part of the "ministere de la defense" (minister of defence).

From a more practical perspective, there seem to be far more discipline and order in the gendarmerie than in the police.

But will Open Office be simple enough

[borkus]

for Inspector Clouseau? [imdb.com]

"Now then, what do we know? One, that Professor Fassbinder and his daughter have been kidnapped. Two, that someone has kidnapped them. Three, that my hand is on fire. "

"You fool! You have broken my pointing stick! Now I have nothing to point with! "