from the foss-busting-out-all-over-dept. dept.
Softpedia reports:
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 Google translation, 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 [City Manager], Gianmarco Montanari.
"If we abandon proprietary software we will save EUR6 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 EUR22 million ($29.5 million) over a five-year span, but with the adoption of Ubuntu, that price will go down to EUR16 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.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Wednesday August 13 2014, @06:28AM
Love it, Turin! Go, go, with that shroud of yours and free software! We await what great things Italia will do, after being cleared of the trauma of Il Duce, and Berlesconi, and the Vatican Bank, and the Rape of the Sabines, and the whole Spartucus thing. And Sicily.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday August 13 2014, @06:53AM
Wait, what? Rape of A linux Distro?
You misspelled Sabayon: http://www.sabayon.org/ [sabayon.org]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 13 2014, @07:18AM
but besides all that... what have the romans ever done for us?
(Score: 3, Funny) by mendax on Wednesday August 13 2014, @07:35AM
What have they done for us? Well, watch this [youtube.com].
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mendax on Wednesday August 13 2014, @09:40AM
It's great that most of the office wonks in government can ditch Windows in favor of Linux. Furthermore, they can ditch commercially available server software and database systems in favor of quality open-source alternatives. One wonders why anyone still uses Windows. But perhaps the answer is partially in my own attitudes.
I'd love to get away from Windows and MacOS, more Windows given that MacOS under the hood is not too different from Linux. Or office tasks and most programming things I do Linux is great. I use Tomcat as a development web server, Java is open source and there are a couple good Linux implementations available, most of the .NET world is available via Mono, Firefox and Opera are available for Linux, and the Xamarin, Netbeans, and Eclipse IDE's are all available on Linux. I can play my MP3's (although the player available to me is not as good as iTunes), watch DVD's, rip CD's, and so on. Yet, I am still using MacOS for most day-to-day things at home. Why?
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 13 2014, @02:16PM
I am curious, because as a Linux guy OSX or any Apple products are like kryptonite to me--they make me soft, weak, and powerless.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday August 13 2014, @05:18PM
If you want to get over that powerlessness feeling on a Mac, the following will let you flex your dominance. From the terminal app...
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by mendax on Wednesday August 13 2014, @08:42PM
Well, MacOSX has an elegance that is missing in the Linux world, or at least it did until recently. I've noticed that it's lost some of its charm since my upgrades to Mountain Lion and then Mavericks. It's gotten noticeably slower. Of course, this may be Apple's way of telling me to replace my nearly 6 year old iMac. But why? It's fast enough, 4 GB of memory is enough for my needs, and it works.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 13 2014, @02:42PM
Now do not take this the wrong way. But this may actually be a step backwards?
Think about it. This is basically a forced upgrade at this point. So they will get 'the shiney' new stuff. So its all roses and sunshine right now. They are forced to movie their IT infrastructure forward. So they get basically cool stuff for 1-3 years. Then after that point it stops. I have seen it many times with gov projects.
Now though think about it. They can let it stagnate and rot. There is no reason to upgrade (or even budget reasons to let it be). There is no impetus of 'we have this new version of X and the infrastructure can not handle it'. They can force people to use basically roting hardware and software.
I am all for open source solutions I use them every day. But in this case it may be an excuse to cut back even more drastically on infrastructure. So in 10 years they are on the linux equivalent of EOL os2 warp. Workable but none of the modern tools work anymore and no one dares patch it. There is no budget to fix it as that was long ago absorbed into some other project. It now costs more to get anyone to look at it as you have to hire people who are willing to work with a 10 year old version of linux.
Maybe I am getting too cynical? :(
Yet, I am still using MacOS for most day-to-day things at home. Why?
It is what you are used to. The macos shell is hands down better than most of the default shells for linux. I am in the same boat with windows. Its mostly inertia at this point.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Wednesday August 13 2014, @10:58PM
the point is , our taxes should not be spent on propping up massive corporations. If you have to hire an army of local IT people to manage it, by all means.
The problem is "baked" software solutions are nearly always synonymous with "lock in". Commercial vendors have no incentive to let you leave their products, and M$ and Oracle are some of the worst.
At least with FOSS you can GUARANTEE that a working system can be developed along side a replacement. This simply isn't possible with "binary blob" vendor patches.
It is not perfect, but what we have now is simply insanely non-optimal...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 13 2014, @02:29PM
There are ingrained conflicts of interest in government. Bureaucrats want job security above all else, and don't particularly care to solve any problems or help anyone because those things give them that job security. Also, should they actually wind up helping anyone or solving any problem, they will get no credit because the elected officials who are in the public eye will take credit, and they will see no material gain themselves in the form of a bonus or promotion. There is also a lot of risk in trying to help people or solve problems, because any issues along the way, real, perceived, or manufactured can be exploited by politicians and destroy the bureaucrats' careers. That is why no innovation comes from government.
There are also conflicts of interest when you try to circumvent the bureaucrats by bringing in for-profit corporations to do the job. The corporations know public money is a gravy train that they can almost never get thrown off of once they're on board. So they overbill, double-bill, under-perform, under-deliver, and so on because they can always count on the revolving door between industry and government to cover for them.
So FOSS is part of how we can start to unwind the dysfunction in government. Nobody owns it, but everyone has an interest in making sure it works well. Layer in Open Data, so that average citizens, interested citizens, can apply their skills to solving public problems, and you have focused, specific pressure on government to apply solutions that are coming from the public, not from self-interested bureaucrats or corporations.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @01:06AM
That is why no innovation comes from government.
LOL