The regional government of Extremadura has long been a success story for open source in government after the Regional Ministry of Education, Science and Technology launched its gnuLinEx project for use in the region’s schools.

Some 70,000 desktops and 400 servers are now running the Linux distribution, which is based on Debian, and that is set to be expended across the entire public authority infrastructure.

Councilor for infrastructure and technological development, Luis Millan de Vazquez de Miguel, announced that LinEx will become the default operating system for all public authorities and civil servants within the next 12 months.

This is an important initiative that the Junta de Extremadura has been working on for a long time, accumulating experience and analyzing the impact on our organization so as to guarantee its success, Vazquez de Miguel was quoted by LWN.net.

The regional government is also the latest to announce support for the ODF format for office documents and will require the use of ODF for administration purposes, as well as the Portable Document Format to ensure compatibility when exchanging documents with outside bodies.