France's Ministry for Economy and Finance recently awarded a support contract for open source, worth between 15 to 19 million euro. The four-year contract was won by a consortium comprising 25 companies, including many small and medium sized enterprises. "It is the biggest such contract so far", announces the company heading the consortium, French open source IT service provider, Linagora.
The contract is meant to support use of open source by the General Directorate of Public Finance, which employs over 116,000 civil servants. The consortium will offer the DG support for over two hundred open source applications. According to the French IT news site Journal du Net, the list of applications include Drupal, Open LDAP, Lemonldap, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, OBM, Tomcat, Postgresql, Apache, Nagios, Cacti, LibreOffice, PHP, Firefox and Thunderbird.
Announcing the deal on 10 October, Linagora compliments the directorate for being at the forefront of the use of open source in public administration. "The DG confirms today it trusts the market to support free and open source software."
The company adds that the contract also shows that SMEs can participate in large public procurement procedures. Referring to guidelines on the use of free software, signed by France's Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault on 19 September: "We hope that other public organisations will follow, taking into account the recent recommendations in the Ayrault memorandum."
Earlier this year, the French government awarded a similar open source-support contract to a consortium involving open source specialist Alter Way, system integrator Capgemini and Java specialist Zenika. That contract represents a value of 2 million euro.
More information:
Linagora press release (in French)
Le Monde Informatique news item (in French)
Journal du Net news item (in French)
Joinup news item