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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: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Monday April 21 2014, @05:49PM
Other local governments and businesses have already made the transition and haven't seen those big hits at all. It seems they aren't actually a problem in practice.
I have actually used both.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21 2014, @07:44PM
Other local governments and businesses have already made the transition
Partial list:
Burlington Coat Factory (since last century)
City of Largo, Florida (since last century)
Ernie Ball, Inc. (since last century)
City of Garden Grove, CA (partial; started last century)
Autonomous region of Extremadura, Spain (80,000 seats switched to Linux in one weekend)
Public school system of Brazil (500,000 seats)
Panasonic, Inc. (300,000 seats)
Munich (over 95 percent FOSS and still converting stuff)
All it takes is leadership and a competent IT staff; everything else follows.
and haven't seen those big hits at all
98 percent of people can use FOSS do 100 percent of the tasks they previously did with EULAware.
Now, if you have locked yourself into specific single-platform apps, expect to wear chains for eternity like Jacob Marley.
Not having to defrag, reboot for no good reason, install/update/run anti-whatever apps (then decrypt what those say--and repair brokenness when they misbehave) leaves you time to become familiar with your software by using it to do USEFUL things.
-- gewg_