Impact

Since the beginning of the project in 2001, there have been many developments towards the present migration of the operating system. The migration process therefore has to be considered within the context of earlier developments. The careful planning of the Gendarmerie's every step in the migration to open source software was an essential ingredient for success in this project. To recall once more, these developments were as follows:

From 2002 to 2004 the Gendarmerie created a more centralized architecture by putting all applications on the Intranet, which also allowed for greater modularity

In 2005 the decision to replace Microsoft Office with Open Office was made

Not much later, Mozilla's web browser Firefox and email client Thunderbird were introduced

After the announcement of Windows Vista in late 2006, the decision was made to migrate to Ubuntu.

Compared to other projects, the IT team found that a "soft migration" towards an Open Source environment is much more beneficial than a "hard migration" (everything at once).

There is a lively exchange between the headquarters and the Départments, which enables them to react to problems rather effectively. A conference was held in Paris in early October 2008 where not only officials were invited to discuss the IT infrastructure, but also local officers had the chance to express their opinions. These hands-on experiences provided very important feedback, as this went beyond official assessments of the project. 

Migration costs are always higher than staying with the status quo. Nonetheless it is important to look at the costs in the long run, and  compare those to alternatives. Here, a migration to Windows Vista would by far have exceeded the costs of the Ubtuntu migration, as not only hardware updates would have been necessary, but future software updates involving costly licenses would further add to the bill. Since GNU/Linux has relatively low hardware requirements, can run even on older machines without problems, and can be obtained free of charge, the costs of such a solution can be lower. Moreover, the GNU/Linux command line interface has remained fairly stable for the last 10 years, letting administrators continue to use the knowledge they have acquired in the past..

 

Track record of sharing

While none of the people interviewed for this case study mentioned a cooperation with other public bodies on the migration to open source, 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.

The Gendarmerie is already cooperating with Canonical, even though there is no formal contract. Canonical sees the scale of the project as an ideal situation to get feedback about their product. This unofficial cooperation started only in June 2008. Canonical is currently not providing support to end users. The company will only work together closely with a small group of 10 to 20 people within the core IT team of the Gendarmerie. At the moment the contact is limited only to Pascal Danek and a few colleagues of his.

 

Lessons learnt

Achievements / Lessons learned

The migration of the first 5000 workstations has been accomplished successfully. Besides a few pending issues, "there is no big problem remaining in our IT system with regard to Linux" says IT officer Pascal Danek. The openness of the GNU/Linux platform offers the Gendarmerie the possibility to constantly adapt and improve their system according to their needs, which brings many advantages compared to other operating systems.

For Nick Barcet from Ubuntu, the project is a very important and unique source of feedback. As there are only very few ventures in these dimensions, the insights gained here can be essential for the further development of Ubuntu in the future. As one example of this, there was an issue the Gendarmerie had with Ubuntu's Update Manager that required administrator rights, which were not available to every user. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, was thus contacted by the Gendarmerie about this issue, and a solution was found. Especially for larger institutions and organisations this was important, as the occurrence of the same problem could be avoided in the future. The cooperation of Canonical and the Gendarmerie is therefore mutual beneficial.

Future plans

For the future the team will try to resolve the few remaining issues in the migration process, such as problems related to the Samba file server application.

The IT team is optimistic about migrating all of the Gendarmerie's desktops to Ubuntu by 2015. They believe that this will not only dramatically improve the force's IT systems, but save large sums of money that otherwise would have been spent on licenses.