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The savings made possible by switching to open source help to get the civil servants in the city of Miskolc involved and enthusiastic about it, says Dr. János Kovács, head of the IT department. Hungary's fourth largest city reports that it is saving 3000 euro per user per year on licences for proprietary software.

A case study on the migration to open source was published on Joinup on 26 July. "After a false start, the Hungarian city of Miskolc is now in the middle of a transition to an open IT environment."

The city's move to open source began in 2009. The project aims to reduce the amount of money spent on proprietary software licences, and implement IT functions in open source as much as possible.

This means that all server-side services will use open source solutions. The city will also convert almost all of its 500 desktop PCs to the Linux operating system, deploying Libre Office, creating a central template library, and training users in Ubuntu Linux, Calc and Writer.

Serious doubts
"The most critical part of this transition was to change the mentality and habits of both users and decision-makers", Kovács says in the case study. "Initially the users did not believe in this project. Even well-trained users still had serious doubts. Yet we managed to migrate our users without any reduction in service quality or functionality, and we did not require any more operational staff. So we confuted their fears through practical training and the success of the project itself."

More information:
Miskolc case study
Joinup news item