Thread: Windows XP

The Gendarmerie has arranged for an unexpected surprise to Microsoft, abandoning Windows XP in favor of Ubuntu - The Register reported.

The police are going to translate 70000 computers on Linux OS, two years after the switch to the Firefox browser, and after the three-year experience in the use of OpenOffice, replace office suite Microsoft Office.

Colonel Nicolas Jero, deputy director of the IT department agency, said that these changes will be implemented gradually. Five of the eight thousand machines will be transferred to a new operating system this year, on the other Linux implemented within 4 years.

Jero called the famous reasons for switching to a new operating system: the opportunity to work with various developers, reducing costs and obtaining control of the software. He said that switching to free software saved their unit 7 million euros a year.

So far, the gendarmerie is the largest state organization that adopted the use of open source. The French National Assembly adopted the use of Ubuntu in the past year.

In Britain, remember educational IT-agency Becta recommended that schools not to use Vista and Office and to train seriously open source.



For its part, the company Microsoft is trying to prevent them from all customers shift from the public sector to other operating systems, and has achieved some success in changing the views of some representatives of the public sector.

However, representatives of the company was painful convince users to switch to their best sample operating system, Vista.