Italy: The Italian Municipality of Genoa has announced that it will increase its use of free and open source software, hoping to save €100,000 a year according to a report on Italian news site Lettera 43. The municipality states that its position is changing, from one in which open source software is treated on an equal basis to proprietary software, to one which specifically favours open source software and open standards.
The city”s IT department is developing e-learning modules, where possible using freeware or open source software, in order to train large numbers of employees in the new systems. The document goes on to list certain applications that will replace existing proprietary software: Gimp as an alternative to Photoshop, 7zip as an alternative to Winzip, and PDFCreator, for creating PDF files. Also mentioned are Zimbra, Quantum GIS, Kosmo, Postgres and PostGIS. These are all being introduced following testing.
Source: H online
