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posted by n1 on Monday April 21 2014, @02:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the survival-of-the-fittest dept.

It seems likely that everyone here has heard the old saw "No one ever got fired for buying|using Microsoft". Well, times change.
The government of the Italian province of South Tyrol wants to save money and, noting Munich's savings of over 10 million euros, it sees Free Software as a solution. (The freedom thing isn't lost on them either.)

Governor Arno Kompatscher says "We've started to review our license costs. If there are free and open source alternatives, and where the costs and risks of changing are justified, we will switch to these." The new policy is meant to reduce IT costs. Should this fail, the region must resort to reduce its workforce, in order to balance the region's budget.

Did you catch the nuance? If you are a gov't employee and they can't change software because you aren't adaptable enough to use something other than Windows, you can plan on being the first one out the door. Hat tip to Robert Pogson for just the right spin on this story.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Monday April 21 2014, @03:39AM

    by evilviper (1760) on Monday April 21 2014, @03:39AM (#33835) Homepage Journal

    If people can't adapt to, say, going from MS Office to LibreOffice, they probably weren't all that productive to begin with.

    That doesn't follow at all. Only secretaries are hired for their document-writing skills. Everybody else has some other real skills, and writing-up a document is only an incidental part of their job. Tig welders aren't less productive at welding, just because they don't know what format they should save documents in.

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