The French ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries will migrate another four hundred servers from Windows NT to GNU/Linux, within two years.
The ministry, which has about 15,000 employees, again selected the French GNU/Linux distributor Mandriva to help with the migration. Apart from delivering the operating system, Mandriva will provide support and train two hundred administrators, the company announced earlier this week.
Ties between the Agricultural Ministry and Mandriva date from 2005, when the ministry migrated some five hundred Windows NT file servers to Mandriva GNU/Linux.
The new contract validates Mandriva's enterprise strategy and confirms the quality of its GNU/Linux server", the company said in a statement.
Mandriva in March was snubbed by the French parliament's decision to migrate its desktop PCs to Ubuntu, another GNU/Linux distribution. Mandriva CEO François Bancilhon wrote an open letter to parliament. "I do not understand why our French company, which can deliver local support and is built by engineers based in France, was not selected." The parliament's distribution of choice will be installed by two other French companies, Linagora and Unilog. Mandriva is a bad loser, they replied.
Priority
The Agricultural ministry is also planning to migrate to Open Office, an Open Source suite of office applications. This was announced in June in a publication by the human resources department, saying the migration, to take place this year and the next, has top priority.
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