Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website, reports that government of Spain’s autonomous region of Valencia has completed its migration from MS Office to LibreOffice, the free and open source office suite.
Under this initiative, LibreOffice has been installed on a total of 120,000 public sector workstations.
The initiative forms part of the costs savings and reduction programme undertaken by the autonomous government to reduce current ICT costs, and those of procuring proprietary software in particular. According to the government’s head of ICT, Sofia Bellés, “This action has already enabled us to save €1.3 mn. since the start of the project and will generate annual savings of €1.5 mn. in proprietary software licences starting from next year”.
Besides the financial benefits, the investment in LibreOffice entails other benefits, such as the availability of applications in Valencian and Spanish, vendor independence and the freedom to modify and adapt the software to the users’ needs.