The City of Barcelona is embarking on a new tech plan to purge proprietary software and replace it all with open source.
The city’s first step will target key applications running on Windows, such as the Outlook email client and Exchange Server, which will be replaced with Open-Xchange. Office is also likely to be replaced with LibreOffice, while Firefox could fill the void of Internet Explorer.
Though Windows will remain running on most of the City’s PCs for the next year, the end game is to replace it with Ubuntu or some other Linux distribution, which is being trialed on 1,000 municipal computers.
The ultimate goal is to achieve and guarantee ” full technological sovereignty” for the municipality.
In October, Francesca Bria, Barcelona City’s commissioner of technology and digital innovation, announced the City’s Digital Transformation Plan, which aims to improve government-provided online services, boosting technology for government, supporting urban technology and smart-city projects, and promoting open data.
Bria says the City Council has planned to spend 70 percent of its software budget on open-source software by spring of 2019 when its municipal term of office ends.