City of Turin To Switch From Windows To Linux and Save 6M Euros

jrepin writes: The municipality of Turin in Italy hopes to save 6 million Euro 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.

Comments

maintenance costs

[globaljustin]

headline should read "...at least 6 million Euros"

they get their number from the license fees **only**

think about the savings from tech support & maintenance...

then think about how much could've been saved the the US government had done this 10 years ago

then think about how much of our tax dollars have gone to M$ or their subsidiaries just since 2000

Re:... and back again.

[gfxguy]

Ubuntu user here... unless I'm installing something really odd (which, if you work for some municipality you probably shouldn't be doing on your work computer), software installation is just as easy - sometimes easier - than using Windows. The days of downloading something that won't install because of missing dependencies, so you download them and they won't install because of missing dependencies.... etc., etc., is long gone with pretty much every distribution.

Don't know how this will turn out, of course, they are all pretty much test cases, and I think some of them make these announcements just to get MS to make them really great deals, and I'm not saying it will definitely work... but when you whittle things down to what a company computer should have installed in it - office software, email clients, browsers, etc., then there's no fundamental reason why Linux shouldn't work (except that it's not MS... which is what most arguments seem to boil down to).

Re: Boom in the EU = Boom in Redmond

[kenh]

Go price a management solution for your 8,300 'free' desktops - a Ubuntu wants $105/desktop per year for a system that hopes to someday be as stabil and robust as MS Active Directory and Group Policy solutions that are (essentially) free with Windows Server...

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/...

At 8,300 desktops and $105/yr, after six years you've invested neatly $5M to manage the desktops like you used to under Windows XP... Where did the savings go?

Then again, they could just cobble together a bunch of free tools and 'roll their own' management solution, I'm sure they welcome taking on that burden in the IT department - with no additional resources... To ensure maximal savings!

Re:... and back again.

[BarbaraHudson]

They're running XP currently. Given that they're still running a turn-of-the-century OS in 2014, it's not likely they're running anything approaching the latest version of Office. Do you really want to claim that someone running a turn-of-the-century version of MS-Office on XP is going to find no real difference with Office 2013 on Win8?

As for interoperability, last time I looked, Germany is in Europe, where open document formats are now mandated in many jurisdictions. Much easier to do with LibreOffice than MS-Office, just by using the default settings. So as far as "shitty interoperability" goes, score one for switching to Linux/ODF/LibreOffice.

And lest you forget, a couple of decades ago people had a hard time with Windows 95 just turning off their computers. "What? I have to click on Start to turn it off?" The Metro start menu is a problem for people who are used to a different paradigm - especially one that they've had drilled into them over the last couple of decades.