Hi guys,
In sept. 2012, The French Prime Minister sent a letter to every gov.
agencies urging them to use Free Software. Of course, this document was
not very specific on which open source project were recommended.
Although PostgreSQL was already quoted directly with a sentence saying:
« Promote the migration from proprietary databases to free databases,
especially PostgreSQL. »
See the message below for more details
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/505DA7CB.1070205@dalibo.info
Over the past 18 month we've seen that this letter had a great impact on
most of the public administration.
Last month, the French went one step further by issuing a "Free Software
Technical Platform" (Socle Logiciel Libre in French) which is basically
a big list of all the open source project that are recommended for every
specific usage an agency could have. Jenkins is recommended for CI,
LibreOffice for Spreadsheet, Bind for DNS, etc., etc., etc.
In the "production database" category, PostgreSQL is the one and only
recommendation. PostGIS is the recommendation for "GIS production
database". MariaDB is only recommended as a replacement for MySQL.
Here's the link to the complete list (it's in French but the list kinda
speaks for itself):
http://references.modernisation.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/SILL-2014-socle-interminist%C3%A9riel-logiciels-libres.pdf
More details here about the platform here (in French too)
http://references.modernisation.gouv.fr/socle-logiciels-libres
This is another great move from the French Gov toward free software in
general and PostgreSQL in particular. I don't know any other government
doing such a public effort to move from proprietary database (if you do
please share !) .
Anyway, what's not said directly in this Technical Platform is that some
gov. agencies are not only switching to PostgreSQL to reduce costs. They
fully embrace the open source philosophy and sometimes contribute to the
projects they use. Over the last months, at least 2 ministries have
contributed to two migration tools, namely :
-> An assessment/reporting feature for ora2pg 10.x in 2012
https://github.com/darold/ora2pg/blob/master/changelog#L306
-> A migration tool from SQL Server Database to PG in 2013
https://github.com/dalibo/sqlserver2pgsql
In a nutshell, we're in the middle of a nice and warm virtuous circle :)
I expect that more good news will come from France in the forthcoming
months and that other governments may follow this example !
If you need more details on the Free Software Technical Platform, please
let me know and I'll try to help as much as I can.
Regards,
--
damien clochard
