French Police Deal Blow to Microsoft Jan 30, 2008, 14 :30 UTC (5 Talkback[s]) (5111 reads)
"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 move completes the gendarmerie's severance from Microsoft which began in 2005 when it moved to open sourcing for office applications such as word processing. It switched to open source Internet browsers in 2006..."
Silly Boys! Haven't they been following the long and continuous string of Redmond diatribe that consigns such acts to a sign of gross folly? May be they don't read so good and lacking understanding, much like me. --- Linux is the only OS I need. Long since given up on others that offer less of everything, if it can't be done with Linux, it can't be done.
Somebody better tell the Open Document Foundation How can it be that a 70000-desktop organization managed a successful switch to OpenOffice? The Open Document Foundation must be alerted immediately that the space-time continuum has been inverted, or breached, or something.
Firefox - obvious. OOo - either it works for you or not - free to try.
And all the while, any proprietary odds and ends still work. Lots of time to find work-arounds before actually switching platforms. Almost all the savings are had right away, though.
Gendarmerie not paramiltary Paramilitary has ome sinister connotations of parallel army doing the dirty work. Gendarmerie is not paramilitary it is officially part of the French armed forces. Its main mission is law enforcement in rural areas. Urban areas are the realm of "Police nationale" ie regular cops. They are perform MP duties. They have antiriot and SWAT-types units (and these ones aren't restricted to urban areas). Finally and unlike the regular cops of police nationale they can and de facto have historaclly been required to enter action againat regular enemy army units. One feature of genadarmerie is that in its missions of law enforcement it is not allowed to operate in plain clothes, the reason is that its founder (Napoleon) didn't want the reputation of French Armed forces being soiled because one of its branches was involved in shady deals with informers.
