LibreItalia and Italian military collaborate on open source

Sep 16, 2015 02:20 GMT  ·  By

LibreItalia's Italo Vignoli reports that the Italian Ministry of Defense is about to migrate to the LibreOffice open-source software for productivity and adopt the Open Document Format (ODF), while moving away from proprietary software products.

The movement comes in the form of a collaboration between Italy's Ministry of Defense and the LibreItalia Association. Sonia Montegiove, President of the LibreItalia Association, and Ruggiero Di Biase, Rear Admiral and General Executive Manager of Automated Information Systems of the Ministry of Defense in Italy signed an agreement for a collaboration to adopt the LibreOffice office suite in all of the Ministry's offices.

While the LibreItalia non-profit organization promises to help the Italian Ministry of Defense with trainers for their offices across the country, the Ministry will start the implementation of the LibreOffice software on October 2015 with online training courses for their staff. The entire transition process is expected to be completed by the end of year 2016. An Italian law lets officials find open source software alternatives to well-known commercial software.

"Under the agreement, the Italian Ministry of Defense will develop educational content for a series of online training courses on LibreOffice, which will be released to the community under Creative Commons, while the partners, LibreItalia, will manage voluntarily the communication and training of trainers in the Ministry," says Italo Vignoli, Honorary President of LibreItalia.

The Ministry of Defense will adopt the Open Document Format (ODF)

The initiative will allow the Italian Ministry of Defense to be independent from proprietary software applications, which are aimed at individual productivity, and adopt open source document format standards like Open Document Format (ODF), which is used by default in the LibreOffice office suite. The project follows similar movements already made by governments of other European countries, including United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, and Holland.

It would appear that numerous other public institutions all over Italy are using open source alternatives, including the Italian Region Emilia Romagna, Galliera Hospital in Genoa, Macerata, Cremona, Trento and Bolzano, Perugia, the municipalities of Bologna, ASL 5 of Veneto, Piacenza and Reggio Emilia, and many others. AGID (Agency for Digital Italy) welcomes this project and hopes that other public institutions will do the same.