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from the foss-busting-out-all-over-dept. dept.
Softpedia reports:
The number of local authorities that decide to switch to open source to match the IT needs of a city is slowly increasing and now it looks like the city of Turin in Italy is also doing the same thing.
One of the main tools that are available for the local governments to decrease the public spending is to make some changes when it comes to upgrading the proprietary software. Usually, this procedure costs a lot of money and the only way that you can save funds is to adopt open source solutions.
In the case of Turin, that can be done by adopting Ubuntu, which is a Linux distribution developed by Canonical and which has complete support for the Italian language. Ubuntu is a free operating system and it's supported for a period of five years. Even when the support ends, the IT department only has to upgrade to the next release.
According to a report on repubblica.it Google translation, Turin wants to become the first city in Italy to move completely to open source for its 8,300 PCs used by the local authorities.
"The transition will begin this fall and it will take a year and a half to complete. It will become the first Italian open source city and we'll to get a saving on expenses for the computers that will go 20-40 percent compared to today," says [City Manager], Gianmarco Montanari.
"If we abandon proprietary software we will save EUR6 million ($8 million) in five years. The initial investment is low but, once installed programs and taught employees how to use them, the system will go ahead on its own feet, allowing the city to lower the cost even more," notes the Director of Information Systems, Sandro Golzio.
The complete price of migrating the PCs from a version of Windows to another, together with the Office suite, would cost the city EUR22 million ($29.5 million) over a five-year span, but with the adoption of Ubuntu, that price will go down to EUR16 million ($21.4 million).
A flurry of cities in Europe are doing similar things. In Germany, the city of Munich has already finished the transition to their own Linux distribution, and in Toulouse, France, the process is ongoing and it will be over in a couple of years.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 13 2014, @02:16PM
I am curious, because as a Linux guy OSX or any Apple products are like kryptonite to me--they make me soft, weak, and powerless.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday August 13 2014, @05:18PM
If you want to get over that powerlessness feeling on a Mac, the following will let you flex your dominance. From the terminal app...
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by mendax on Wednesday August 13 2014, @08:42PM
Well, MacOSX has an elegance that is missing in the Linux world, or at least it did until recently. I've noticed that it's lost some of its charm since my upgrades to Mountain Lion and then Mavericks. It's gotten noticeably slower. Of course, this may be Apple's way of telling me to replace my nearly 6 year old iMac. But why? It's fast enough, 4 GB of memory is enough for my needs, and it works.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.