Summary: French Directorate General of Public Finance dumps Microsoft software; The French Gendarmerie should remove Mono from Ubuntu

FRANCE is said to be a leading country in Europe when it comes to Free software adoption. Here is the latest story on this subject:

All 130,000 desktop PCs at the Directorate General of Public Finance (DGPF) in Paris are to be switched to using the open source Mozilla Thunderbird email client, its Lightning calendar and the open source groupware application OBM, the French IT news site 01.net reports, citing a source familiar with the project.

This does not say whether GNU/Linux is/will be part of such a migration, but the French police has made a full transition to Ubuntu GNU/Linux and about 100,000 desktops are affected as well. They will hopefully use these new instructions to remove Mono, before Microsoft's police comes knocking.

How to remove Mono from Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

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I do wonder if Mono might just simply be losing some of its lustre. In August Blackduck reported how the amount of code being written for FOSS projects using C# was pretty negligible at just 1.33% and that growth in C# usage over a 12 month period was virtually zero.

Fedora and gNewSense [1, 2] have already trashed Mono as well as applications that depend on it, just like Jeremy Allison and others recently advised [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. ⬆