14 DAY TRIAL // Italian cities Todi and Terni have decided to drop the proprietary office solution used by the city's administration and to adopt LibreOffice.
Numerous cities around the world have started to adopt free operating systems and software in order to replace the proprietary solutions used by the local administration. This is done primarily to cut costs with the updates for the previous installed applications. It's also a good way to educate the employees and the citizens about the free alternatives that are now available.
The rate of adoption for free software has risen considerably, for a couple of reasons. First of all, the recent economic crisis is forcing people to look for ways of cutting costs, and adopting free applications instead of purchasing updates for the old ones is a really good way to save some money.
The second reason is that the quality of the free software has increased quite a lot in the last two or three years. It's now much easier to install, maintain, and teach people how to use it.
Towns in Umbria region go for LibreOffice
"The public administrations of the Italian cities Todi and Terni are switching to LibreOffice, announces LibreUmbria. The regional project is assisting the Umbria region's public administrations to use this free software suite of office productivity tools."
"This month, the city of Todi will complete its switch to LibreOffice, and the one in Terni will start, says Alfredo Parisi, founder of LibreUmbria and a researcher at the University of Perugia - one of the the project's members. The administration of Todi has 70 PCs, and Terni 50. LibreUmbria last year assisted the administration of the province of Perugia, using LibreOffice on all of its 1200 PCs and the Perugia Local Health Authority, which installed the office suite on 600 PCs," reads the announcement made on the website of the European Commission.
LibreUmbria is a nonprofit organization that is now also trying to make the schools in the Umbria region aware of their alternatives. The organization can help people learn how to work with free software like LibreOffice or Ubuntu.
Even if the two cities mentioned in the announcement are pretty small and the number of computers that are now using LibreOffice is not big, LibreUmbria hopes that a waterfall effect will take hold and more cities will soon follow in the footsteps of the others.