Italy's Ministry of Economics and Finance has been bitten by the open-source bug, and has decided to take the Linux plunge in a big way.

The Ministry announced this week that they have decided to utilize Linux for their mission-critical applications, including one of the government's most popular websites as well as the system that provides paychecks for more than a million government employees. The distro of choice for the economisti italiani is Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, which will be used in conjunction with
existing Oracle and MySQL databases.

As with the recent announcement that the New York Stock Exchange is switching to Linux, the Ministry cited Linux's ability to reliably provide mission-critical applications as an important reason for the decision.

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