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Only Able to Use Windows? You're Fired

posted by n1 on Monday April 21 2014, @02:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the survival-of-the-fittest dept.

gewg_ writes:

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 hankwang on Monday April 21 2014, @06:56AM

    by hankwang (100) on Monday April 21 2014, @06:56AM (#33874) Homepage

    If the local government thinks they can fulfill the same governmental tasks with fewer people and costs than they do today, it sounds to me like there is some dead wood in the organization that could be removed regardless of OS.

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  • (Score: 1) by Jesus_666 on Monday April 21 2014, @11:44AM

    by Jesus_666 (3044) on Monday April 21 2014, @11:44AM (#33907)
    Or they can't afford their current workforce anymore and see slashing licence costs as a way to keep firings to a minimum. Regional governments are chronically underfunded and South Tyrol probably wants to avoid being both underfunded and understaffed as much as possible.

  • (Score: 1) by opinionated_science on Monday April 21 2014, @11:49AM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Monday April 21 2014, @11:49AM (#33910)

    perhaps we should all consider that anything a government does should be for the public benefit, since the public is PAYING for that service.

    Do we think that public money should be supporting corporations maintain the status quo, or perhaps employing local people to adapt and refine FOSS software to solve the government tasks?