LibreOffice 5.0, an open-source office suite by The Document Foundation, has been adopted by multiple government and private organizations. The most prominent among these is the Italian Ministry of Defense Information Systems. The adoption of LibreOffice by this government body is due to switch around 150,000 desktops from Microsoft to LibreOffice, according to ZDNet.

In Italy, LibreOffice enjoys a solid backing from government offices. For instance, regional and local government organizations like the Regione Emilia Romagna and the provinces of Perugia, Cremona, Macerata, Bolzano, and Trento have all made the switch.

The cities of Bologna, Piacenza, and Reggio have already moved to LibreOffice. The newest member to fully adopt LibreOffice is the city of Bari. After a successful test run of 100 PCs, the entire network of around 1,700 desktops will migrate to LibreOffice starting next month, Fierce CIO reported.

"We also think that moving to open source will benefit our local IT market instead of some software multinationals, while allowing the city to archive all the knowledge it produces in an open format," Angelo Tomasicchio said, Bari City's councilor for organization and innovation.

The Ministry of Defense Information Systems will also start using the Open Document Format (ODF) for official government documents. And it is not just in Italy that this shift has gone full-speed. In the UK last year, the same format was adopted for all sharable government documents.

To further streamline their services, the UK also opted to officially use PDF/A for viewing government documents, according to another ZDNet article. Other governments have also made commitments to use open-source formats. Spain, France, and Germany all use open-source productivity suites.

The city of Munich in Germany uses open-source software from Linux for both its operating systems and productivity suites. The city is a global benchmark for the use of open-source software in official government use. The strong European backing of open-source software is expected to continue as more and more governments adopt open-source over proprietary software.

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