SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 1) by paddym on Monday April 21 2014, @06:36PM
Have to agree with how ridiculous F1 is. It's like they decided to fire up old netscape on some modem-network to find the answer. You can pull the real help from some server in Japan faster than to grep a file somewhere on your computer. And the best part is how the help never is useful because all the stuff in there is how things should work, not what to do when they don't work the way they should.
It's right up there with that "search the web to find a program to open this file". 1 extra mouse button every time I open an unidentifiable file. I often thought of starting a Microsoft Power magazine to have back stories for all these weird things that happen in windows that are still there. "And woe to ye who actually searches the web for a program to open a new file. Ye shall find nothing but misery as a constant reminder of why the gods wanted to integrate Internet Explorer into the operating system yet were banned to do so by the anti-Trust."