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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.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday April 21 2014, @11:48AM
you cant just throw somebody in front of new software that they've never seen and expect them to be able to use it.
Nonsense, employers do it all the time. Plus, moving from XP or W7 to W8 is a much bigger change than changing to KDE, and going from familiar menus (which MS always rearranged with every "upgrade") in Office to that damned ribbon is MUCH more of a change than from MS Office to Oo.
Often my employer did offer training and it was usually 100% useless. For example, when they went from Quattro to Excel they offered training. No sooner had I taken the training than they upgraded to a newer Excel, which was more like Quattro than the Excel they trained me on. I got training in dBase which didn't teach me anything reading the manual had.
I sure am glad I'm retired.
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