General Camillo Sileo said that by taking into account the deadlines set by the military’s current Microsoft Office licenses, we will have 75,000  LibreOffice users by 2017, and an additional 25,000 by 2020. So far 5,000 workstations have been migrated.

Sileo must be important, he has a title which is so long we could not get it into a paragraph with other information. He is the Deputy Chief of Department VI, Systems Department C4I, for the Transformation of Defence and General Staff, for ISA (Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations).

The entire transition process from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice is expected to be completed by the end of the year 2016.

Sileo said: "We started with an impact assessment, a series of briefings to the staff, and the training of trainers, installers, and IT representatives. We are now working on a LibreOffice e-learning course for our users, which will be made available under a copyleft license.

The entire migration is run under the LibreDifesa project, which follows the LibreOffice Migration Protocol published by The Document Foundation, and similar movements already made by governments of other European countries, including Germany, Holland, United Kingdom, Spain, and France. With this move, Italy's Ministry of Defence wants to set an example to the rest. Of course if it were a local council the savings would all be safely stashed in some Mafia off-shore bank-account after bribing a politican to look the other way.