examples of free software in the public administration

Laurent GUERBY laurent at guerby.net
Wed Feb 14 11:53:42 UTC 2007


On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 04:40 +0000, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
> Just for a source of ideas, I'm trying to build a list of examples of
> governments using free software on a large scale.  Does anyone know of list,
> and/or a list of articles about big public sector installations?

- Many french administration are now using OpenOffice,
one of the first was the "gendarmerie nationale" with 70 000 desktops:

http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/informatique/0,39040745,39203431,00.htm

They're talking about some desktop full Linux in gendarmerie. Many other
administrations now use openoffice, I doubt many new Microsoft Office
are currently being bought.

- A plan is rolling to do the same openoffice roll-out for all the
central administration, 400 000 desktops:

http://www.lefigaro.fr/eco/20060905.WWW000000348_ladministration_francaise_se_met_au_logiciel_libre.html

- Small scale but symbolic, the french national assembly PC should all
migrate to full free software:

http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/informatique/0,39040745,39364970,00.htm

- Agriculture ministry, 500 servers migrated from NT4 to Linux:

http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/informatique/0,39040745,39243613,00.htm

- All the web and back-end work for the tax administration is running
on free software with support purchased to external companies (and
contributions done under contract must be returned to the community).
4000 servers, 33 000 000 tax receipts (DB is Oracle though).

PDFs linked here (Jean-Marie Lapeyre work):

http://guerby.org/blog/index.php/2007/01/30/144-politique-fiscale-et-transparence
http://synergies.modernisation.gouv.fr/article.php3?id_article=160

- The tax administration project "copernic" was a huge project, everyone
was expecting failure but in the end it ran extraordinally well so
within the french administration (more than "just" tax :) there is now
established confidence that free software can work great on a large
scale and this is very important for the future.

- I believe many local/city administrations have migrated partially
or totally too, but I don't have links handy.

Hope this helps,

Laurent
http://guerby.org/blog/





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