LINUX - More Cities and Nations Ditch Microsoft

"Turin to Be First Italian City to Adopt Ubuntu, Unshackle from the 'Tyranny of Proprietary Software'" by Silviu Stahie, SoftPedia 8/8/2014

Turin wants to be the first city in Italy to switch completely to open source and Ubuntu and entirely ditch all the Microsoft products.

The number of local authorities that decide to switch to open source to match the IT needs of a city is slowly increasing and now it looks like the city of Turin in Italy is also doing the same thing.

One of the main tools that are available for the local governments to decrease the public spending is to make some changes when it comes to upgrading the proprietary software.  Usually, this procedure costs a lot of money and the only way that you can save funds is to adopt open source solutions.

In the case of Turin, that can be done by adopting Ubuntu, which is a Linux distribution developed by Canonical and which has complete support for the Italian language.  Ubuntu is a free operating system and it's supported for a period of five years.  Even when the support ends, the IT department only has to upgrade to the next release.

According to a report on repubblica.it, Turin wants to become the first city in Italy to move completely to open source for its 8,300 PCs used by the local authorities.

“The transition will begin this fall and it will take a year and a half to complete.  It will become the first Italian open source city and we'll to get a saving on expenses for the computers that will go 20-40 percent compared to today,” says one of the managers of the project, Gianmarco Montanari.

“If we abandon proprietary software we will save €6 million ($8 million) in five years.  The initial investment is low but, once installed programs and taught employees how to use them, the system will go ahead on its own feet, allowing the city to lower the cost even more,” notes the director of Information Systems, Sandro Golzio.

The complete price of migrating the PCs from a version of Windows to another, together with the Office suite, would cost the city €22 million ($29.5 million) over a five-year span, but with the adoption of Ubuntu, that price will go down to €16 million ($21,4 million).

A flurry of cities in Europe are doing similar things.  In Germany, the city of Munich has already finished the transition to their own Linux distribution, and in Toulouse, France, the process is ongoing and it will be over in a couple of years.