Treviño's Blog

After the French Parliament’s migration to Linux, the Italian Chamber of Deputies (Camera dei Deputati) chose to let "The Penguin" enter into the heart of the Italian Democracy…

As partly reported by the Italian newspaper Repubblica, on July 10^th, 2007 a plan suggested by the left deputies Pietro Folena and Franco Grillini to migrate all the computers of the Parliament from Windows to Linux was approved by the Chamber.

The migration will affect about 3500 public boxes of the Chamber, both desktops and servers, and each Deputy/Party may also ask to migrate his/its (private) computers to the Free Operating System.

This choice has been taken for various reasons… Fist of all this decision will allow to economize, saving more than 3 million Euro every year (the licenses of each machine actually cost about 900€/year). It’s also a great step towards the technological freedom and independence, moving away from (monopolistic) proprietary software that contrasts with the meaning of democracy itself.
There are many technical reasons as well, the most important dealing with the security of the Parliament (and because of that all the citizens).

With this decision Folena (after explaining better the migration) hopes that also the local administrations will move to free environments as well, like the province of Bolzano already has done with the FUSS! project.

EDIT [12-07-2007]: according to The Inquirer’s article (that has made a small interview to Folena) and to a short message that Folena has written today [13-07-2007], the Italian Parliament – starting from September 2007 and for about two years – will move to SuSE Linux since the Camera has already a contract with Novell. For an Ubuntu lover like me it isn’t the best choice, but also if Novell has made a pact with the Devil (read it Micro$oft) it’s always running “our” kernel 😛

Thanks for having dugg this story!