In 2013, the IT department of Canary Islands successfully concluded the switch to a cluster of computers, running free and open source software. This cluster of servers and workstations is used for government’s databases, payroll systems, the government websites and its email services.
This switch to open source saved around a million euro in proprietary software. Which made the islands government pays 300,000 euro per year for the support for free software used by IT department.
Also, the IT department also approved OpenOffice as one of the possible solutions for the Canary Islands’ public administrations. Roberto Moreno, director of the Department for Telecom and New Technologies said “we replaced the current office suite by a free software alternative. To do this, new office solutions installed on some 30,000 workstations”.
City of Toulouse
Not only Canary Islands saves millions of euros by using open source, Toulouse, France’s 4th largest city, has saved one million Euro by migrating to Open Source office suite LibreOffice.
Migrating to LibreOffice was one of the key project of city’s new digital policy. The migration started in 2012 after the political decision for the switch was taken in 2011. It took one and a half-year for the migration to complete and as of today, 90% of the desktops (used by around 10,000 people working for the city) run LibreOffice.
As per the city officials, software licenses for office suite costs around 1.8 million Euro every three years. The migration cost about 800,000 Euro. The city already saved around a million Euro.
It’s not just LibreOffice. Most of the official web portals of Toulouse like toulouse.fr, toulouse-metropole.fr, and data.grandtoulouse.fr are supported by free software. Alfresco is the choice for collaborative tools.
