The city council of Barcelona, Spain has decided to ditch Microsoft Office and eventually Windows in favor of open source alternatives.
As a local commissioner put it “the presence of the IT giant Bill Gates in municipal computers will be progressively reduced by the end of this municipal term of office”.
As a first stage, Windows will be kept as the operating system but browsers will switch to Mozilla and the office suite will be one of the OpenOffice alternatives.
The final stage will be dropping Windows in favor of Linux or Ubuntu. That’s already being trialed on 1,000 computers across the municipality.
It will be interesting to see how the transition goes. In theory it’s cheaper, but the costs of re-training staff becomes an issue.
