France shifts to Linux

France’s digital office said on April 8 that it will move its own workstations from Windows to Linux and require every ministry to draft plans to cut non-European tech dependencies by autumn. (numerique.gouv.fr) The order came out of an interministerial seminar run by the Interministerial Digital Directorate, known as DINUM, with the National Cybersecurity Agency of France, the Directorate General for Enterprise, and the state purchasing office. The ministries’ plans must cover desktops, collaboration software, antivirus, artificial intelligence, databases, virtualization, and network equipment. (numerique.gouv.fr) Linux is an open-source operating system, which means governments can inspect, modify, and support the code without relying on a single vendor’s license terms or product roadmap. France is pairing that desktop shift with a wider push for “interoperability,” or software that can work together through shared standards instead of locking agencies into one supplier. (numerique.gouv.fr) The French government has spent the past three months widening that campaign beyond personal computers. In January, it said all departments would roll out the state-made video platform Visio by 2027 to replace Microsoft Teams and Zoom in government use. (euronews.com) Euronews reported that Visio had about 40,000 users when the January announcement was made and that officials estimated savings of as much as €1 million a year for every 100,000 users who switch off paid licenses. The service is hosted on sovereign cloud infrastructure run by Outscale, a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes. (euronews.com) DINUM said the National Health Insurance Fund, or Caisse nationale d’Assurance maladie, had already started moving 80,000 agents onto the state’s own toolset: Tchap for messaging, Visio for video meetings, and FranceTransfert for file sharing. Those are the first large user numbers the government has attached to the broader migration. (numerique.gouv.fr) France is also moving one of its most sensitive systems, the national health data platform known as the Plateforme des données de santé or Health Data Hub, off extra-European cloud services. The Health Ministry said on February 6 that the platform will migrate to a secure cloud offer not subject to non-European laws, chosen from providers with the SecNumCloud qualification. (sante.gouv.fr) On February 10, the ministry said the target system would host the main national health insurance reimbursement database on a sovereign infrastructure based on open technologies by the end of 2026. The same statement said the government had dropped an interim hosting plan and would build the final platform directly. (sante.gouv.fr) France is not starting from zero. The city of Lyon said last year that it was progressively replacing Microsoft software with open alternatives including Linux, OnlyOffice, and PostgreSQL as part of its own sovereignty policy. (lyon.fr) The next checkpoint is autumn 2026, when ministries must hand in their dependency maps and exit plans. After that, France will have to show that replacing Windows is not just a declaration from Paris, but a deployment that works across the state’s day-to-day systems. (numerique.gouv.fr)