
French police: we saved millions of euros by adopting Ubuntu - terpua
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/03/french-police-saves-millions-of-euros-by-adopting-ubuntu.ars
======
EliAndrewC
The most interesting passage to me was: "Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista
would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require
training of users," said Lt. Col. Guimard.

One of the main barriers to Linux adoption is the fact and/or perception that
it requires a lot of retraining. So now that we have the fact and/or
perception that moving to Vista requires retraining as well, then Ubuntu
becomes just another alternative.

I've dealt with plenty of situations where Windows is the sensible choice and
plenty where Linux would be. And I have no problem with someone considering
the options and choosing Windows even if I'd personally have chosen Linux. But
often Windows is mandated by some executive who seems to consider a computer
using Windows to be as necessary as a computer using electricity; that's just
what computers use. In most places it would still be a major coup for Linux to
even be CONSIDERED as an alternative to Windows, even if it was rejected.

I actually don't believe that moving from XP to Vista would have required much
retraining. But I'm happy to see that Vista's perceived problems have led to
large organizations at least looking at Ubuntu as an alternative, whether they
use it or not.

~~~
jibiki
I've never understood the retraining argument. Surely going from computer-
illiterate to windows-trained takes orders of magnitude more effort than going
from windows-trained to linux-trained. Setting linux up takes a bit of work
(solving driver issues and such,) but actually using it seems like it just
can't be that hard to learn.

What I heard, from a guy at IBM, is that companies don't switch to linux
because installing 3rd party software is difficult. That's not an issue of
retraining though, that's an OS problem.

~~~
cstejerean
Most large companies do not allow end-users to install software themselves so
I'm imagining they're referring to their IT departments having difficulty
installing software.

IME of having had to manage several hundred Windows XP workstations installing
3rd party software was a pretty big issue on Windows as well. From having to
verify if works with restricted permissions, to processes to automatically
detect machines with out of date software to finding ways to create automated
silent installs, it was a good amount of work. Now I'm curious to see how the
required effort would compare on a Linux network.

~~~
thwarted
In my experience, it's almost no effort. If you want standalone machines or
laptops, you make your own package repo, point all the machines at that and
let them run updates. You can install a cron job that lists packages and
emails them out when the machine is connected so you can keep track of if and
how packages actually are updated. It's even easier with machines that are
hardwired/non-portable, because you can NFS boot and do a read-only root setup
and remove all the harddrives from the local machines. Updates in this
environment come from having them boot from a different root directory,
allowing you to test new applications and upgrades without effecting everyone.
The NFS root one was for a callcenter (obviously a limited application set,
but if you're deploying a large number of machines, many of them will have
overlapping usage profiles). Now a-days, I could see storing all the different
configurations in git making rolling back, creating new versions, and
deploying new versions easy (but you could use git for a windows install too).

I've deployed both setups, and support issues went way down compared to
Windows. The biggest recurring problem with the NFS root setup was hardware
failures, but the "fix" there is to swap out the machine, which takes 5
minutes, and the user continues to work. Without having to store files on the
local machine, by having NFS home directories, there's no need to copy files
over to give someone new hardware either. With standalone machines, the backup
strategy is even easier also, because you KNOW the user can only write to
their home directory.

The hardest part of the NFS root was going through and changing all the
configs to not require local write access (like for logging) or having it
mount a ramdisk scratch area, and if you're experienced with Linux, this
shouldn't be problem. I know there are projects out there that are supposed to
make this easier and do a lot of work, so it may be even easier now.

~~~
cstejerean
I agree with your points for the 90% of software that is pre-packaged and
ready to install on your choice of distro. I'm more curious about the
remaining 10% of apparently problematic 3rd party software that are 'hard' to
install on Linux, and how much work it would take someone knowledgeable to
create packages for and compare that with the time someone wastes on Windows
with more mundane deployment issues.

~~~
thwarted
Are these really comparable? The time it takes someone knowledgeable to do
something difficult vs the time spent on more mundane issues where amount of
knowledge doesn't really come into play?

But I see what you are saying. The Microsoft provided Windows software
maintenance environment is really far behind every Linux distribution. If you
have a network of non-mobile machines that mount root via NFS, the work of the
admin to install hard-to-install (because it's not available as a package)
software doesn't necessarily even require creating package -- you install it
on the root. I did this with some one-off stuff we needed that ended up in
/usr/local. Voila, everyone has it. And while we all know this kind of
software management (packageless) leads to a "messy" system, it's actually
easier to pay off that technical debt because you can spend time later to
provide a whole new, cleanly managed environment for your NFS root users
WITHOUT causing them any downtime at all to do the upgrade. In a properly
managed environment, the apparently problematic 3rd party software is just
that: apparently problematic. You do the hard stuff ONCE, and that scales out
to X number of machines (mobile or not). With Windows, you keep doing the
hardstuff over and over and over because each machine diverges and there are
so many things you need to touch during the install, and even things like
installation are not nearly as automate-able as they are in Linux.

What would be really interesting (and I care about this not very much since I
don't do even small Windows network deployments anymore, nor do I have plans
to do so in the future) is some kind of installwatch style system for Windows,
that re-packages installed software, installed with setup.exe, into, let's
say, RPMs, including {pre,post}-install scripts that modify the registry (this
is possible, I've used tools that do registry diffs). You'd have to have a
clean master Windows machine to do this properly (easily solvable with
virtualization), but it could be the difference between night and day when
managing Windows installations compared with Microsoft's massive updates and
each vendor's own installation method.

------
zcrar70
This lacks quite a lot of (interesting) detail. The differences between
Windows and Ubuntu are more than the icons and the games; what about Office
(OO is quite different, particularly for advanced uses of Excel), Outlook,
Active Directory, NTLM authentication for internal (web)apps, .Net for in-
house development, etc? These aren't all strictly speaking part of Windows,
but they are part of the Windows ecosystem, particularly at large sites, and
usually don't have Linux slot-in equivalents that are trivial to implement.

So, either the Gendarmerie Nationale didn't use any of those parts of the
Windows ecosystem (which seems unlikely), or they made savings in spite of
having to replace them (in which case the 'icons and games' remark is
disingenuous), or they haven't accounted properly (which, this being a
governmental entity, doesn't seem impossible.)

~~~
sangaya
I can't agree with you more. At least here in the States the law enforcement
agencies use specialized software that runs only on windows (Think report
writing, ticket tracking, officer tracking, booking systems, accident
reconstruction, computer forensics, etc). Do the French LEA use software
that's cross platform? Or did they already move to web-based software so that
the workstation OS is a non-issue?

As the parent stated there's a lot more to an IT eco-system than the icons and
games. Surely the French used special LEA software, and I'm wishing the
article included details about that.

~~~
mileszs
They switched to OOo in 2005, and to Firefox and Thunderbird a year later,
according to this article:
[http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iU4Lq7tOR_WVOJLZ3IeRaIH0...](http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iU4Lq7tOR_WVOJLZ3IeRaIH03x6w)

You were right. They moved their 'Human Resource' application to the browser
at some point, as well. See this article: [http://www.osor.eu/news/fr-
gendarmerie-saves-millions-with-o...](http://www.osor.eu/news/fr-gendarmerie-
saves-millions-with-open-desktop-and-web-applications)

~~~
sangaya
Thanks for the link to that article on osor.eu, on that page was a link to the
case study: [http://www.osor.eu/case_studies/towards-the-freedom-of-
the-o...](http://www.osor.eu/case_studies/towards-the-freedom-of-the-
operating-system-the-french-gendarmerie-goes-for-ubuntu)

"the project is one of several similar migrations of French public bodies. To
mention just a some examples: the French National Assembly in 2007 decided to
run Ubuntu on their 1145 workstations; the Ministry of Agriculture and Fishery
switched their servers to the Mandriva GNU/Linux distribution in 2005; the
Paris council will use several open souce applications on their laptops, as
decided in June, 2008. These developments thus clearly show how open source
software is used increasingly in the French public sector."

Apparently they aren't the first in France to move to OSS so the
interoperability is easier to handle.

------
omouse
I think they mean that adopting Free Software allowed them to be more aligned
with what their nation stands for: Liberté, égalité, fraternité:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libert%C3%A9,_%C3%A9galit%C3%A9...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libert%C3%A9,_%C3%A9galit%C3%A9,_fraternit%C3%A9)

------
timbowen
I think this is a very exciting development for the open source community.
More and more applications are going web based, and I can see a future where
the only application anyone will really need is a web browser. We already have
Google docs, once that functionality improves just a little bit there's your
office suite. Serve your ticket and lien database through a secure web
connection or VPN, and you're good to go. Total software cost: 0.

Surely it must be cheaper to employ a couple of Linux techs than to keep
bleeding money in license fees. Windows environments needs techs anyway, so
most of the cost is already budgeted.

There will be some cost and security concerns, but it seems clear to me that
over the long term open source is a better solution. This could even lead to
government sponsored developers who are paid to improve open source projects,
somewhere way down the line. Exciting stuff!

