The Valencia region of Spain has been at the forefront of European initiatives to adopt the free Linux operating system and open source software solutions to maximise IT productivity and cap IT costs.
Two weeks ago the Spanish region of Valencia completed its switch to the open source LibreOffice suite. Valencia’s ICT department announced that the office suite is installed on all of the 120,000 desktop PCs of the administration, including schools and courts. The migration will save the government some 1.5 million euro per year on proprietary software licences.
The ICT department’s Director General, Sofia Bellés said that the Valencia region’s migration began in the second half of 2012. It has already helped to save 1.3 million euro that would otherwise have been spent on licences for a proprietary office suite. The switch is part of measures taken by the region’s council to reduce the cost of ICT, in particular by saving on proprietary software licences.
In its statement, the ICT department points to other exemplary free software initiatives by the region, such as the implementation of the Linux distribution Lliurex on 110,000 PCs in all schools in the region. “This has generated saving of more than 30 million euro since its inception in 2005.”