If the 40% figure is accurate, this is a BIG win for the Linux desktop (and Canonical in particular), because the TCO (total cost of ownership) of an enterprise desktop can be as much as four to five times greater than the cost of its hardware and software licenses.[1] At most corporations, training, support, maintenance, security, and other ongoing costs together vastly exceed the cost of just hardware and software.

For example, the hardware+software-only costs of a run-of-the-mill Windows+Office enterprise desktop, for a large corporation, might be $1,200 over three years, but the TCO could easily top $4,000 or even $5,000 a year. (If these figures seem high to you, think about the cost of training thousands of individuals about as computer savvy as your Aunt Tillie, and then having to troubleshoot all their virus infections, messed up files, one-off application bugs, unrepeatable weird crashes, etc. so they can do their work every day.)

The Gendarmerie, in other words, is claiming that the switch to Ubuntu Linux on the desktop is saving them somewhere between one and two thousand dollars a year per seat. With 72,000 desktops, the aggregate savings are probably in the mid-to-high tens of millions of dollars a year.

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[1] http://www.gartner.com/id=2371417