The French Ministry of Education is migrating away from proprietary Unix to the Open Source operating system GNU/Linux. This week the US software company Red Hat made public that the French ministry had migrated 2,500 servers to its distribution of GNU/Linux.
According to the Red Hat statement, the Ministry wishes to avoid "the growing costs associated with proprietary licenses and forced upgrade cycles". Switching to an open standards based system resolves this, says the company, as this ensures interoperability and vendor independence.
The ministry moved to GNU/Linux by first abandoning GECOS 7 and DPS 7, two mainframe operating systems developed originally in the early 60's and generally used for legacy application written in Algol, Cobol or Fortran. The education ministry is now in the process of abandoning AIX, IBM's version of Unix. "We determined that since 2000 it would drastically lower our costs by decoupling the operating system supplier from the hardware supplier" Red Hat quotes Michel Affre, IT systems manager at the Ministry.
Of the more than three thousand servers using GNU/Linux the ministry runs at its thirty departments, 80 per cent run on Red Hat's version.
Compatibility
The GNU/Linux servers are used for all of the ministry's applications, from financial applications to tools for managing exams, staff, students and everyday administrative activities. Affre: "Our applications suppliers, internal developers and external partners now develop on open standards to ensure compatibility with Linux."
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