Ubuntu Takes Over French Assembly

      by Wyatt Walter

A blog entry at the NY Times site is reporting that the French National Assembly has switched its computers from Windows to Ubuntu and is urging other European countries to do the same. The VP of the Assembly, Rudy Salles has reported the reasons were fiscal and political. He says that they estimated the organization can save around 500,000 euros in straight licensing and support costs. On the political side of things, he tries to convince other governments that using the open source software allows local businesses to offer support for the products at a lower cost to increase their business. Plus, he says, Microsoft doesn’t even pay taxes in France so the tax money is never seen by the government anyway.

But how well is it actually working you might ask? Mr. Salles says:

“We’re quite happy because it’s all working very well now,” Mr. Salles said. “We see that many countries are interested in our experience, and so we’ll try to help the other parliaments around the world.”

According to an internal survey, 80% of the staff were please with their new open source software and just 14% wanted to go back. As long as it’s the right 14% of the members, all is well in France :)

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jan 22nd, 2009

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