The Inquirer chronicles a 3,500-computer migration to Linux and open source for the Italian Parliament in Italian parliament bets house on SuSE Linux:

“ITALY’S parliament is about to undertake Europe’s largest governmental migration yet to open sauce.

“The IT department of the Italian parliament presented plans on Wednesday to begin migrating some 3,500 desktop PCs, including those of its 630 MPs, away from Windows to SuSE Linux starting this September. The Camera dei deputati will also run SuSE on all of its two hundred servers.

“This makes it the second and largest parliament in Europe to choose open sauce. The French parliament, with 577 seats, voted last year to have open sauce installed on all of its 1145 PCs. France decided on Ubuntu this February and the migration in the Parliament should be underway.”

The MP who initiated the project, Pietro Folena, “estimates the switch makes PCs some 90 per cent cheaper and he expects larger savings to be realized on the servers… “The savings are important, but the primary motive for this decision is to gain freedom. Freedom from single technology, freedom from a single software owner and a single contractor, freedom to develop our own applications and freedom from viruses.”

Well spoken, indeed.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.