The IT department of the city of Geneva in Switzerland is about to stop its four-year use of open source email clients and OpenOffice, an open source suite of office productivity tools, and revert to the previous, vendor dependent solutions. Mathias Buschbeck, member of the the city council for the Greens, is submitting written questions to the mayor, arguing in favour of the current, vendor independent IT strategy and against the switch to proprietary solutions
The plans to revert to proprietary office applications and email system were reported by 20mins Online, a Swiss IT news site, last week. The site writes that the decision was taken by the city's administrative council.
Buschbeck today said that mayor has not been able to explain why the city is going back to the proprietary office suite. The city council member deplores the pending switch from the current Thunderbird email client to an email client from the same proprietary software vendor. "I'm surprised that, after four years, they want to revert to the proprietary solution. I hope I can convince the mayor to stick to the open source strategy."
According to the 20 Mins news item, the city's IT department, the Department of Urban Environment and Security (DEUS) explained that the decision to migrate back to proprietary IT solutions followed a review that concluded that replacing OpenOffice was the best solution in terms of efficiency and sustainability."
20 Mins writes that the city uses about three thousand desktop PCs.
More information:
20 mins news item (in French)