French government to test open source on the desktop

PARIS - The French government will install open source software on the desktop as part of Project ADELE, a plan to computerize much of the country's administration by 2007, a government official said Wednesday.

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The administration will migrate a significant number of its desktops to open source operating systems and application software, Jacques Sauret, director of the French Agency for the Development of the Electronic Administration, told a meeting of the French IT and Telecoms Press Club.

Whether that significant number will be 5 percent, 10 percent or 15 percent is still being debated, he said.

Today, almost all the government's desktop PCs run some version of Microsoft Windows, with just 1 percent or 2 percent running an operating system from another West Coast company, Sauret said. He declined to name the company.

Introducing open source software will give the government experience in managing competing suppliers, and allow it to better evaluate the interoperability and comparative lifecycle costs of the different systems, he said.

The government wants to spend a higher proportion of its IT budget on integration and innovation.

That means spending less on software licenses, so at the same time as introducing open source software to the desktop, the government hopes to reduce the cost of its proprietary systems by beating Microsoft down on price, he said. Currently, each department negotiates its own price with the company.

"Today, we're a captive market. We're going to engage in discussions with Microsoft to obtain a single tariff for the whole administration, to get economies of scale," Sauret said.