The city of Paris is planning the next step in its move toward open-source software, with local officials eyeing the installation of open-source applications on all desktop PCs within a single department or on all the systems used by municipal workers in one of the city's 20 districts.

The open-source initiative was instigated by the city's Directorate of Information Systems and Technologies, which was created in 2001 by Mayor Bertrand Delanoe to examine how best to manage the government's IT budget from 2004 to 2007. The IT agency wants to move workers from Microsoft Office and other proprietary packages to open-source software in an effort to reduce the city's dependence on software suppliers.

Earlier this year, the city sought volunteers from among its 46,000 staffers to download and install software such as the Firefox Web browser and Open-Office.org application suite on their desktop PCs. The forced migration of a large group of desktop users to open-source applications will allow city officials to evaluate the real cost, in training and other expenses, of a large-scale switch, a spokesman said.

The city is more advanced in migrating servers to open-source software. Currently, 196 of its 395 servers are running Linux.

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