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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 Tork on Monday April 21 2014, @05:34AM

    by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 21 2014, @05:34AM (#33860)
    If the work these workers do is anything like what I do for a living then they don't just sit there and use one app for a living, they use a bunch of programs to help them throughout the day. The primary app I use is available on Linux, but if you suddenly plunked me in it to use I'd be slowed down until I figured out how to navigate the file system (i.e. where to plunk files on my own computer, etc.), something sorta like Notepad where I can take scratch notes, calculator, picture viewer, etc. Could I do all that? Sure. Is it as easy as you describe? Um, no. We are using computers, not appliances. All the little things I've done to make my day go more smoothly have been taken away from me and I'm having to start moving forward again. Heck, just putting me on a fresh install of Windows will do a fair amount of damage to my productivity.

    No, we haven't become that stupid, just the opposite actually.
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