The open source web site of the European Commission is reporting that Iceland's government has started a project to prepare for the migration of all its workstations to open source software. This project is scheduled to be completed within a year and according to its leader, Tryggvi Björgvinsson, the city of Reykjavik, the National Hospital and all of the country's ministries are setting good examples for such migrations.

"The goal of the project is not to migrate public institutions to free and open source software in one single year but to lay a solid foundation for such a migration which institutions can base their migration plans on", says Björgvinsson. To make the migration easier, the project plans to implement a joint infrastructure between different organisations that collects and shares information on the maturity of open source alternatives compared to the proprietary solutions currently in use. Additionally, a group of specialists has been assembled to monitor the project and guard against possible failures in the deployment of the new software.

The new policy is a continuation of efforts to migrate all public institutions to free and open source software – over the last four years many schools and other public bodies have already moved away from using proprietary software – originally instituted in response to a guideline released by Icelandic Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir which charges the government to evaluate open source software on equal terms to proprietary software whenever software purchases are being made.

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(fab)