City of Turin decides to ditch Windows XP for Ubuntu and €6m saving

jeremy · 09-15-2014, 11:12 AM

Quote:

€6m: the amount the municipality of Turin hopes to save over five years by switching from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux in all of its offices.

The move will mean installing the open source operating system on 8,300 PCs, which will generate an immediate saving of roughly €300 per machine (almost €2.5m altogether, made up from the cost of Windows and Office licences) — a sum that will grow over the years as the need for the renewal of proprietary software licences vanishes, and the employees get used to the new machines.

Or rather, to the old ones. Another reason for the switch was that the computers Turin uses are quite old, and installing Windows 8 would have probably been too demanding for them, whereas Linux offers more flexibility with more mature machines. And, as the support for Windows XP officially ended this year, sticking with Microsoft didn't make much sense to Turin. The switch to Ubuntu was officially approved in early August and is expected to take around a year and a half to complete.

While the economic argument is the main driver behind Turin's decision, it's fair to say that the city certainly offers a favourable environment for open source: from Turin University's Nexa Center for Internet and Society, to the city's polytechnic, to the Officina Informatica Libera (a community for Linux enthusiasts), there's no shortage of places where free software topics are being debated. Yet more proof of the region's open source links: the 'Cyberia – Turin as the open source software capital' event is taking place on 14 September, which will feature open source guru Richard Stallman as one of its speakers.

More at ZDNet...

--jeremy