<< The French Government's public finance department will switch 130,000 desktop PC's to Mozilla's email and calendar applications. Mozilla's Thunderbird email service, Lightning Calendar and an open-source groupware will replace IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office.

The move signals how more government agencies from around the world are dropping enterprise accounts with major vendors to cut down on costs and get better license agreements.They are turning to open-source providers and companies like Google that can offer email and services such as Google Docs. >>

Source:http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/10/french-government-chooses-mozi.php

[Content snipped. Please don't copy and paste entire articles from other blogs and try to make it clear when you're quoting another source by using quotation marks like "" or << >> – Tony]

There's absolutely no mention of cloud computing (Apps, Docs, Gmail...) in the 01net article http://www.01net.com/editorial/507746/mozilla-thunderbird-installe-sur-130-000-postes-de-ladministration-fiscale.

From what the French government has said in the past, there's no chance the administration will ever use a private cloud computing solutions – especially from a US firm (see http://paidcontent.org/article/419-france-joins-germany-in-google-books-protest).

French gendarmerie (~police) already uses Ubuntu, it's a good news.