The capital of Piedmont has decided it's time to stop paying Microsoft. The City of Turin will switch from Windows XP to Ubuntu. In this way, they estimate they will save 6 million euros.
This move would mean installing an Open Source operating system on 8,300 computers. This means that the Municipality will not have to pay approximately 300 euros per machine (€2.5 million in total, just for the cost of Windows and Office licenses) – an amount that will increase over the years, as it will also be necessary to renew proprietary software licenses with each new version.
Another reason that motivated the City Council to make this decision is that the computers used in Turin are quite old, and installing Windows 8 will probably be too demanding for them, while Linux offers more flexibility on old machines. The change of the City's systems to Ubuntu was officially approved in early August and is expected to take about 18 months to complete.
