Making extensive use of free and open source software solutions has been part of the technical strategy for over ten years at France's ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, the ministry writes in response to questions from MP Isabelle Attard. Such solutions are widespread on servers and desktops. The ministry also shares publicly its own geo-information systems tools.
Office productivity suite OpenOffice and the open document format ODF are the default since 2008, the ministry writes this week Tuesday. "It is the same for all software used for for email, web browsing and multimedia."
Core software
Free and open source is at the heart of the ministry's core software infrastructure. It is used for server operating systems, for IT management, for database management and for document management.
The ministry is the second to respond to questions by MP Attard. The parliamentarian wants to know how the ministries are implementing the government's free software guideline, known as the 'Circulaire Ayrault'.
The ministry makes available OrionGéo, components that it develops for its geographic information systems. The ministry participates in a larger GIS software development project, Geo-IDE, that also involves the Ministry of Sustainable Development and other governmental departments.
Support included
The ministry also lists how much it spends on proprietary and free and open source software. In 2012, for instance, it spent 174,000 euro on support for open source. This includes support for the Nuxeo content management system, for Red Hat Linux, for the Nagios tools used to monitor the IT infrastructure, the Centreon code repository and the OBM email and collaboration server.
More information:
Statement from the ministry of Agriculture (in French)
ZDnet news item (in French)
April statement (in French)