Switching to open software saves governments millions in fees
By ditching proprietary software for a system born in a college dorm, the French government is reclaiming its digital borders and saving half a billion euros.
When Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel as a hobby project in 1991, he never imagined it would become a tool for national sovereignty. France is currently migrating 2.5 million government computers to Ubuntu, a version of Linux, to escape the 'vendor lock-in' that forces taxpayers to pay perpetual licensing fees. This shift follows a 2020 pilot program in Paris where 75,000 workstations achieved near-perfect uptime without the background data-tracking common in commercial software.
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