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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21 2014, @06:39AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21 2014, @06:39AM (#33869)

    they consider some form of increased support for a time to be par for the course
    Munich did a lot of hand-holding with each and every user, making sure that e.g. macros and templates were converted. [google.com]

    When calculating OS licensing, app licensing, CALs, etc, etc, etc, it quickly became a wash on costs.
    Now, (don't) repeat those costs every few years; using $0 FOSS actually becomes cheaper.

    Munich is still ~4 percent Windoze.
    (When they started, their goal was 80 percent FOSS; they zipped right by that mark.)
    They have some legacy crap like SAP that they haven't yet replaced with FOSS apps.
    If they got their ultimate wish, they would have control of 100 percent of the code they run.

    -- gewg_