City of Turku is the second (or third, I'm not sure) largest
city in Finland. It is from the Turun Sanomat newspaper on
9/11/2001 (second largest daily paper in Finland). Written by Jari
Heino for Turun Sanomat:
[ Tim was kind enough to translate key excerpts for us -ed.
]
"City of Turku might replace Microsoft's operating
systems and application programs with the Linux operating system
and OpenOffice software. The city is irritated by a change in
Microsoft's licensing policy that means millions of marks of
additional costs for the City of Turku.
The city council approved 320,000 FIM (about US$45,000) on
Monday for further study of this matter.
[Microsoft] offers its customers a special two-year transition
offer, during which the customer can move to the SA or upgrade
current MS Office versions to new ones. Heikki Kunnas, the
Information Technology Purchasing Chief for the City of Turku,
calculates that a two-year "breather" could cost the City over
seven million FIM (US$1 million) in update rights alone. After that
the update rights would make about 3.2 million FIM (US$ $450,000)
per year. Over four years Turku would have to foot a bill of 33.3
million FIM (US$4.75 million), including hardware upgrades.
If Turku will not grab onto the offer, but instead aquires new
licenses, this sum is increased to 43.2 million FIM (US$6.2
million).
One alternative still is an equal payments option, already
approved by the cities of Espoo, Oulu and Vaasa, where Turku pays
5.6 million FIM (US$800,000) yearly to Microsoft for the software
licenses. New machines and licenses would therefore cost 42.9
million FIM over four years.
