Italian parliament bets house on SuSE Linux

ITALY'S parliament is about to undertake Europe's largest governmental migration yet to open sauce.

The IT department of the Italian parliament presented plans on Wednesday to begin migrating some 3500 desktop PCs, including those of its 630 MPs, away from Windows to SuSE Linux starting this September. The Camera dei deputati will also run SuSE on all of its two hundred servers.

This makes it the second and largest parliament in Europe to choose open sauce. The French parliament, with 577 seats, voted last year to have open sauce installed on all of its 1145 PCs. France decided on Ubuntu this February and the migration in the Parliament should be underway.

The size of the Italian migration to open source makes it an important case study, said Pietro Folena, member of the Italian Communist party, who earlier this year proposed the switch. "It will present all public offices with best practices."

The Italian MPs may decide for themselves whether they will also have Penguins waddle on their laptops. The laptops were not included in the plans presented Wednesday, explains Folena, as they are private property.

Folena estimates the switch makes PCs some 90 per cent cheaper and he expects larger savings to be realise on the servers. He could not immediately provide further details on this. "The savings are important, but the primary motive for this decision is to gain freedom. Freedom from single technology, freedom from a single software owner and a single contractor, freedom to develop our own applications and freedom from viruses." µ