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France has always been proud to be different. In case of open source software the French are moving ahead of most other European Member States.

At the end of 2005, 70,000 PC workstations for the Gendarmerie Nationale (federal police) began using Open Office instead of Microsoft. During 2006, 45,000 workstations have also been switched from Microsoft Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird for doing e-mail.

La gendarmerie nationale adopte Firefox

Le petit plus : 2 mio euros savings each year (primarily license fees but also administrative costs).

But the French are far from being done at this stage. During Fall 2006 the government decided to launch a program to switch 400,000 workstations from the French ministries over to Open Office early in 2007 to be completed by summer:

2006-09 La plus grosse migration OpenOffice.org au monde : 400 000 postes dans l’administration française

Now the National Assembly has decided that the 1,154 PC workstations used by its staff will also be switched over using the Linux operating system, with Open Office and Firefox installed on top and probably another open source e-mail program (maybe Thunderbird, not decided at this stage):

2006-11-22 - Les postes micro-informatiques des députés seront dotés de logiciels libres à compter de la prochaine législature.

The above will be completed by June 2007. But in his report that triggered the above change, and to facilitate the sharing of documents Le rapport Carayon (summary) also recommends that:

- to save all documents using the Open Document Format since such a French move would be supported with OFD having become an ISO standard (proposition 3.7 - p. 73 rapport Carayon)

- it also recommends that France should encourage other countries to use the Open Document Format (e.g., EU) (proposition 3.8 - p. 73 rapport Carayon)

2006-05-02 - The International Standards Organization (ISO) accepted the Open Document Format (ODF) as an international standard for saving and exchanging digital office documents - ISO/IEC 26300

But other countries are not standing still either. For instance, Denmark mandated the use of open standards in national IT projects and software by 2008 (link includes audio files about the debate in the Danish Parliament before law was passed). This required changes to the law that got passed through an unanimous decision by the Danish Parliament during June 2006. That ratification has opened the door for using also ODF. In fact, the Ministry of Science and Technology has just done that by beginning to offer its documents using ODF this September.

Similarly, Belgium’s Council of Ministers approved and mandated the use of Open Document Format June 2006, although a timetable for when ODF must be used for all accepted and published documents has not been published yet.

Other countries, such as Switzerland (not an EU member) are on the way to move into this direction with the proposed 2006-11-07 eCH-0063 OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) standard that, if approved, will require that all public institutions will have to produce and and be able to work with documents in ODF (STEP 1). With stage 2, public agencies will be required to exchange and work amongst themselves using the ODF only (STEP 2). This means that .doc or .xls are out and under the proposed Step 3, public institutions will issue and accept documents meeting ODF standard only.

_French Rationale for Open Source_

The argument used for switching over over to Open Source software in France is primarily based on two arguments:

1) it lower costs for software itself,

2) it reduces the currently huge administrative burden regarding the managing of all the licenses required to run MS Office etc. on those machines (too complex, costly in itself, time consuming, etc.)

3) CyTRAP Labs thinks that the French administration should also not ignore the fact that such a move will make it more acceptable and easier for cittizens to swith to ODF as well as open source software - if the government does it is easy to justify doing it oneself (e.g., one can submit such files to the government).

_National Assembly - cost savings drive adoption of Open Standard_

Le rapport Carayon (summary) documents that the:

- l’Assemblee nationale has 1.780 PC workstations,

- equiped with software valued at around 718 euros.

The report also points out that this adds up to around 1,3 million euros in total, however considering that all use so far the Windows Operating system it is difficult to arrive at an exact figure). So far of its 101 servers:

- 80 use a Windows license,

- 3 run under Novell,

- 10 under Unix, and

- 8 under Linux

For more details on the above facts and much more (see p. 74) of this extensive report that addresses the open source issues as well as :.

‘A armes egale’ les Rapport au Premier ministre par UMP Bernard Carayon, September 2006) (118 pages - pdf format).

_CONCLUSION

If public administrations continue to introduce and meet the ISO/IEC 26300 standard or national ones such as the Swiss eCH-0063 citizens will appreciate it. For starters, this will mean that they will no longer be forced to purchase a particular type of software to exchange files and documents with public organizations.

This will reduce software costs for private users since Open Source Software will do the trick. In fact, this trend in public administrations to use and work with ODF will force vendors such as Microsoft and others to meet the ISO/IEC 26300 standard as well.

However, how fast the adoption of the ISO/IEC 26300 standard will be across public agencies and private enterprises is still everybody’s guess. For instance, the three-stage proposal outlined on p. 3 of the eCH-0063 would suggest that it will take another 5 years minimum, until Switzerland’s public institutions will be ready to receive from, and issue to citizens documents meeting ODF standard.

In the meantime, some EU Member States will go ahead and push for adoption of open source software for most workstations used by their employees as France did during 2005 and continues to do in 2007.

_PS1.

As its title suggests to you, indeed the rapport Carayon (summary) does address many security issues including but not limited to national defense-related ones such as biometrics and RFID.

Belgium, biometrics, cost savings, Council of Ministers, Denmark, Dominique de Villepin, eCH 0063, faq, Firefox, France, gendarmerie nationale, information security, ISO, ISO 26300, ISO/IEC 26300, Le rapport Carayon, Le rapport Carayon summary, library, Linux, Ministry of Science and Technology, Novell, ODF, Open Document Format, Open Office, Open Standard, other, policy, regulation, research, RFID, security metrics, standards, trend, UMP Bernard Carayon, Unix

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