The widespread use by the Greek government of the ubiquitous proprietary office suite is hindering public administrations that want to use open source, says George Georgiadis, head of IT at the Greek municipality of Kalamarià. The municipality is one of the few that implement the free and open source office suite Libre Office.
The IT manager is planning to contact all public administrations that have institutional links to Kalamarià, to explain how their IT choice is limiting technological options of others. "We're planning to help the Greek Linux User Group in organising a conference on this topic. We would like to invite all municipalities, the regions and the central government and universities, to tell them how useful it is to switch to free and open source."
Kalamarià, part of the Thessaloniki Urban Area, is currently installing the office alternative on all of the 170 desktop PCs in the municipal offices. According to the IT manager, one of the main reasons for moving to free and open source is to make sure that the public administrations use only properly licenced software. "In the current deep financial crisis we cannot afford to renew the proprietary licences."
Georgiadis and his IT colleagues are ready to help their municipal colleagues achieve a smooth transition to LibreOffice, he says. "We've made sure that we know how to use it ourselves, so we can teach others." The IT department will be using the open source e-learning tool Moodle to provide trainings to the civil servants. "We are particularly charmed by the courses offered by Freemoodel. It offers very good courses in Greek for LibreOffice spreadsheets and LibreOffice presentations."
More information:
Joinup news item
Freemoodle