Greek municipality of Kalamarià installs LibreOffice

The free and open source advocacy organisation GreekLUG reports that the Municipality of Kalamarià near Thessaloniki in northern Greece is in the process of installing the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite on all of the council’s 170 workstations.

According to GreekLUG’s press release (PDF), some 120 installations have been done to date.

It is believed that this move will save the council some €38,000 in licensing fees (including VAT) compared with renewing and/or buying new licences for MS Office. As the Greek public sector is extremely short of money, to say the least, this is a very smart move.

GreekLUG welcomes this move, which means that Kalamarià now joins the pioneering municipalities of Heraklion in Crete and Pilea-Hortiatis (news passim) in pioneering the use of free and open source software in the Greek public sector.