By gradually migrating to a complete open source desktop and web applications, Gendarmerie Nationale, the French national police force with 105,000 employees, has saved millions of euros. The move cuts Microsoft out of the equation, helping the French national police force slash its IT costs by 70 percent.

"Today the Gendarmerie Nationale (The French national police force) announced the migration of up to 70,000 computers to Ubuntu over the next 3 years..."

The French Gendarmerie Nationale police contributed to the code of the last version of Mozilla Thunderbird with security extensions named "TrustedBird".

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, now reports the police force has upgraded its 85,000 PCs to Ubuntu Desktop Edition, removing its reliance on the Microsoft operating system completely.

The French government has come up with a wizard wheeze which seems to be entirely designed to back the software giant Microsoft.

In a Franco-American alliance, the likes of which has not been seen since the French backed a campaign by anti-democratic terrorists against its lawful government, the French are going to tax every tablet which does not come out with Windows software on-board.

According to a Nabble post from an OpenStreetMap (OSM) community member the French Minister of the Economy, and the Direction Générale des Finances publiques (DGFiP) in charge of the French cadastre have allowed the OSM project access to vectorised geo-data from the French land registry.

A French laptop buyer has won a refund from Lenovo after a four-year legal battle over the cost of a Windows license he didn't want. The judgment could open the way for PC buyers elsewhere in Europe to obtain refunds for bundled software they don't want, French campaign group No More Racketware said.

The French paramilitary police force said Wednesday it is ditching Microsoft for the free Linux operating system, becoming one of the biggest administrations in the world to make the break.

All 130,000 desktop PCs at the Directorate General of Public Finance (DGPF) in Paris are to be switched to using the open source Mozilla Thunderbird email client, its Lightning calendar and the open source groupware application OBM, the French IT news site 01.net reports, citing a source familiar with the project.