The Italian town of Montelupo Fiorentino is expanding its move to open source, following a decision by the town’s council. This year, the IT department aims to switch some 90% of all its PC workstations to an open source operating system.
The town of Montelupo Fiorentino (just over 14,000 inhabitants, and some 20 kilometres west of Florence) currently uses an open source office productivity suite on all of its PCs, and 50% of its servers are running on open source. Two years ago, it started using an open source email solution.
Montelupo Fiorentino announced the doubling of its open source efforts in February. This is an innovation process that will result in significant savings, the council motivated its decision.
The municipality is part of an informal network of Italian public services that focus on open innovation and the sharing and reuse of ICT solutions. This network, entitled “Mettiamo in comune l’innovazione” (“Let’s put innovation in communities”) includes the cities of Rome and Turin, as well as the Lazio region.
Ransomware
The town also points out that the European General Data Protection Regulation would require it to make changes to 70% of its computers. The council decided to focus on open source, as this will contribute to the local economy. The move to open source is also supported by national rules and the Agenzia per l’Italia digitale (AGID, or Agency for the Digitalisation of the Public Sector), the council said.
The IT department declined to provide details on operating system and applications, citing security concerns. “We are careful with this kind of information. Here we still have destructive attacks with encrypting ransomware that cause days and days of outages,” Lorenzo Nesi, the town’s Deputy Mayor, told the European Commission’s Open Source Observatory (OSOR).