The Gendarmerie have pioneered the use of open source software on servers and personal computers since 2005 when it adopted the OpenOffice.org office suite, making the OpenDocument .odf format its nationwide standard.

This meant that the Gendarmerie would have incurred large expenses for staff retraining even if it had continued to use proprietary software.

[2] One of the main aims of the GendBuntu project was for the organisation to become independent from proprietary software distributors and editors, and achieve significant savings in software costs (estimated to be around two million euros per year).

A major technical problem encountered during the development of the project was keeping the existing computer system online while the update took place, not only in metropolitan France but also in overseas Departments and Regions.

It was solved partly by redistributing dedicated servers or workstations on local area networks (depending on the number of employees working on each LAN) and with the use of an ITIL-compliant qualifying process.