Enterprise open source Toolkit

French opt for laissez-faire Linux

Ingrid Marson ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 09 Nov 2005 11:30 GMT

"Think small, start small, scale up." The strategy ex-Wal-Mart executive Michael Bergdahl claims was responsible for creating one of the most successful businesses ever, is good advice for organisations looking to adopt open source.

Organisations that "think big" when deploying open source can run into problems. Take the City of Munich, which decided to migrate its 14,000 desktops to Linux two years ago, but is not actually going to start the migration until 2006, claiming that an "additional pilot" is necessary. Paris City Council was planning a migration to open source software on its servers and desktops, but later nixed its plans claiming "the scenario of a near-term massive migration to open source... appeared incompatible with the original state of the technology and systems".

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In contrast, and possibly in reaction to the previous examples, the French tax agency (Direction Générale des Impôts) has opted for slowly, slowly approach. The agency, which manages the taxes of all states and cities in France, has been investigating open source for more than five years. As early as 2000, the agency was running a mission-critical application on open source systems. It then decided to standardise on the open source application server JBoss in 2004 and is now planning to migrate 80,000 PCs to the open source productivity suite OpenOffice.org.

Slow and steady
The agency is currently using 150 open source products across its offices and has mandated the use of open source for all new projects, according to Jean-Marie Lapeyre, chief technical officer at the French tax agency. Open source software is attractive for a number of reasons, says Lapeyre. In his view it cuts costs, reduces vendor lock-in, improves standards compliance and increases flexibility.

The cost savings realised by the agency are considerable, with support and maintenance now budgeted at systems. The agency is now saving around €20m per year, says Lapeyre — a considerable chunk of the agency's €200m (£140m) yearly IT budget.

Ten times less than proprietary
Three companies — Capgemini, Linagora and Bull — are due to provide support for the 150 open source products used in the company, which already uses ATOS Origin to provide support for its JBoss systems. Each of the services companies in turn uses a number of subcontractors to provide support for the individual products, for example, JBoss is a subcontractor to ATOS Origin.

But despite the double-layer of consultants involved in supporting open source, the savings are still considerable. "If I add the costs of supporting JBoss and the costs of the new contracts I will sign, the total corresponds to ten times less than what I would pay for proprietary software," says Lapeyre.

The avoidance of vendor lock-in, associated traditionally with proprietary software, is also an important consideration for the agency. With proprietary software only the company that made it can provide comprehensive support as only it has access to the source code, but any company can support software from an open source project as the source code is freely available, says Lapeyre.

"We can have a contract with any player to support open source products. At the moment JBoss is providing support for its product, but in the future this could change. We are not...

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