August
02
Techworld writes “The Spanish region of Extremadura has gone open source, deciding to move its entire administration to Linux and open source software within a year.”
The region of Extramandura decided in 2002 not to upgrade its school computers with the latest Microsoft version. Instead they moved to a Spanish Linux distribution based on Debian. This saved the poorest region of Spain a chunk of money (70,000 desktops with Linux and OpenOffice.org as productivity suite).
Now the administration has decided to do the same for their IT needs. They stress that the freedom represented by OpenOffice and OpenDocument Format (ODF) are vital to their decision. “Vázquez de Miguel said the move was expected to make Extremadura’s government less exposed to forced upgrades, and would make public documents easier to preserve and more easily accessible by the public.”
One can only conclude they were satisfied with the functionality and the total cost of ownership.
