Success Stories

The Government of British Columbia, Canada, needed to innovate its public services to develop digital offerings faster and make them easier to use. It established the BC Developers’ Exchange to take advantage of the innovation of private sector technology companies and entrepreneurs and support collaboration using open source tools. As a result, the province can now provide agile, collaborative development following a DevOps approach, create and update services faster for citizens, and balance innovation with security requirements. Challenge: Evolve digital services to meet modern demands The Government of British Columbia wanted to improve its technology offerings—and its user experience. However, its existing data center infrastructure was too slow and fragmented […]

Over 14 years ago, the city of Munich took a decision that was bound to put its IT administrators in the spotlight. At that time it was clear that Microsoft would soon stop supporting Windows NT 4.0, the operating system that ran most of the more than 10,000 desktop machines in the Bavarian capital. The IT specialists and politicians in Munich had to decide: a migration was inevitable, but to where? In May 2003 the city council decided to migrate to Linux, beginning with a one-year concept phase. As experience over recent years has shown, the decision in favour of LiMux (Linux in Munich) marked a turning point not only […]

In 2014, Egypt’s Health Ministry launched a new online portal for Hepatitis C patients to register to receive the (HCV) drug Sovaldi for treatment. The portal allows patients to register with their full names and a valid ID number so that in a period of 24 hours they can find the nearest medical center to receive treatment. An open source software have been used to develop the Hepatitis C – treatment registration portal, nccvh.org.eg. The main purpose of using OSS was to accelerate the development process. The portal developed using a set of open source solutions, such as the programming language (PHP), and database management system (MySQL), and the web […]

In 2010 the Egyptian Ministry of State for Administrative Development, in cooperation with the General Authority for Government Services, launched the government e-procurement portal to facilitate publishing tenders and auctions electronically via the Internet, a portal that was developed by open source software. The portal, etenders.gov.eg, designed to help the government to publish tenders and auctions over the Internet in all areas, and to make it easier for suppliers to apply for those operations and evaluating their bids electronically so as to ensure transparency. The portal developed using a set of open source solutions, such as the programming language (PHP), and database management system (MySQL), and the web server software […]

Italian Ministry of Defense decided in 2015 to use an open source office suite as a replacement of Microsoft office, in a move to save licensing costs of proprietary software. The Italian Military chose to use LibreOffice office suite and started the migration process by sign a deal with the LibreItalia Association, which is a non-profit organization that promotes LibreOffice. The non-profit organization helped the Italian Military with trainers for their offices across the country, in a project they called LibreDifesa. Under this LibreDifesa project, over 100,000 desktops of defense ministry will be migrated to LibreOffice from Microsoft Office by the deadline of the project after about four years. Around […]

Government of Spanish autonomous region Canary Islands, a popular tourist destination in Europe, has saved around 700,000 euro by switching to Open Source software. 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 […]