The Italian city of Genoa will continue to use open source where possible, says the city councillor responsible for IT, Isabella Lanzone. A pilot with Linux PCs is underway and the city is also gradually moving to LibreOffice, an open source suite of office productivity tools that is being installed side by side with a aged version of the ubiquitous proprietary alternative.
The Linux pilot is intended to see if the city can substitute the proprietary operating system. The city is using a version that is no longer maintained by the vendor. "A selection of workstations have been switched to Linux", councillor Lanzone told the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR). The pilot is an in-depth comparability test, testing open source alternatives for many of the applications used by the city administrations.
Linux also continuous to be used for the city's servers, the councillor adds, and for running several public Internet points. Genoa has also installed 63 PCs with Debian GNU/Linux in schools. "Free software is giving young children their first introduction to the digital world" Lanzone says.
The city is using e-learning to prepare its civil servants for the changes. "In particular, we have courses on the Open Document Format (ODF) and on using LibreOffice."
Digital agenda
In September, in an interview with Digital Agenda, an Italian ICT news site, the ICT councillor says that the use and reuse of open source solutions is part of the city's Digital Agenda, and closely related to making the city's ICT systems interoperable, internally and externally, cost savings and an increase in efficiency.
In May of last year, the city council announced it would increasingly turn to free and open source software solutions, aiming to reduce its dependency on IT vendors. At the time, the city council already used free and open source for its e-mail system, for its citizens records and for the city's website.
l'Italia s'è desta
In September, several Italian city administrations reported on progress and plans regarding free and open source software. This includes the city of Udine, two towns in the Umbria region and the city of Turin.
More information:
Agenda Itale news item (in Italian)
OSOR news item
OSOR news item
OSOR news item
OSOR news item