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Slovak Government Keeps Paying Millions for Microsoft Products

Categories: Eastern & Central Europe, Slovakia, Digital Activism, Economics & Business, Governance, Law, Technology

Every year, the Slovak state pays about 200 Euros per computer for a license allowing the use of the newest Microsoft products and services.
Activist Štefan Szilva has collected information [1] [pdf, sk] about 30 percent of the 82,000 ‘state-owned computers’. From it, the IT website dsl.sk has computed this statistics [2] [sk]: 76.4 percent of PCs have Windows XP (released in 2001) and 50.2 percent of PCs have MS Office 2003.

Despite the campaign [3] [sk] organized by Szilva and The Society for Open Information Technologies (SOIT [4]), and despite the appeals of Aliancia Fair-Play [5] [sk], the current government is refusing [6] [sk] to search for a more effective solution.