ES: 'Involve universities and local tech companies when moving to open source'
Public administrations considering a move to open source, should make sure they involve universities and IT companies, said Martin Garcia, head of IT at the department for Infrastructure and Transport at the Valencia regional administration, yesterday at a conference in the city of Guadalajara, Spain.
The department started moving hundreds of desktop PCs to open source in 2004, and is also one of the main developers of gvSIG, an open source geographic information system (GIS). "Moving to open source meant no more viruses, no more misconfigured systems and no more pirated software", Garcia said in a statement by Cenatic, Spain's national competence centre on open source.
Garcia was one of the speakers at a conference organised by Cenatic, the city council of Zaragoza and Emergya, an open source IT service provider. The three hope to get public administrations to share their experiences in switching to open source software. "It is a complex process, involving economic aspects and change management", the organisation writes.
Other presentations at the conference included the city council of Zaragoza and the Caja de Guadalajara, partly owned by the regional government.
The city council of Zaragoza is one of Europe's largest public administrations that is using open source. It runs for instance the OpenSuse Linux distribution, OpenOffice and other open source application on more than 2800 desktops.
According to Cenatic, Caja de Guadalajara has been increasingly turning to open source over the past twelve years. "There is free and open source software all over the bank, including for security and telephony", it quotes Andrés Seco, head of IT. "This allows us to save costs, gives us technological independence, extends the time that computer hardware is used and had resulted in an increase of availability of our IT systems."
More information:
Caja Guadalajara case study (in Spanish)
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