The City of Genoa in Italy is now encouraging the use of free and open source software and is saving local taxpayers more than €100,000 per year, Lettera43 reports.
The Municipality of Genoa has decided to promote the use of free software and open source to save more than €100,000 a year. The council has already begun to use free software for services such as email, civil registry (births, marriages and deaths) and its intranet.
In addition, trials are underway in nursery schools with e-learning and the use of PCs with free software and new groupware tools.
“Free software, basically free, is a software in which the source code is accessible to all, editable by all,” said councillor Isabella Lanzone. “It will help us to free ourselves from the monopolies of the big computer companies and limit local government costs.”
Furthermore, Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, writes that Genoa will use open source ‘wherever possible’. The council is to start using the image manipulation tool Gimp, document archive solutions 7Zip and PDFCreator, as well as testing the use of Quantum GIS, Kosmo, Postgres and PostGIS for its Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
In addition, the council has announced it will be using Open Document Format as the standard format for its electronic documents.
Finally, the city is to use Linux for a number of PCs meant to be used by council staff members that do not have access to a computer by default to enable them to access the council’s personnel resources.