France bids bienvenue to Linux

It's not just Munich that's embracing open source: Linux has also taken a giant step forward in France this week.

Renaud Dutreil, French Minister for the Public Office, said on Monday that he wanted to see more government IT spending split between open source vendors and Microsoft through increased competition.

Over the next three years some 900,000 desktops are due to be replaced within the French government. Dutreil said that he expects many of them to move to open source. At stake is €300m worth of business.

Officials from Paris are understood to have visited Munich to observe the progress of the German city council's implementation of open source across 14,000 clients.

The minister also said that he wanted to see government telecoms costs lowered by a quarter through increased use of IP telephony.

But Christophe Aulnette, boss of Microsoft France, told Reuters that the software giant is still good value.

"The cost of the software licences only counts at most for three to five per cent of the total data-processing budget. And in any case never more than 10 per cent," he said.

Additional reporting by Manfred Kohlen in Munich.