The Finnish city of Turku has moved closer to switching to Linux, following a preliminarystudy of the platform's suitability. Turku kicked off the investigation earlier this year in response to Microsoft's new licensing terms and conditions, which Turku estimated would cost it €1-€2 million.

Turku has now completed the first part of its investigation, and will now be looking into functionality and effects of a switch over a longer timescale. It will also be taking into consideration likely success of OpenOffice and Linux deployments elsewhere in Europe.

The switch itself isn't likely to disrupt Redmond's coffers overly, but the Turku investigation has attracted widespread interest from other authorities and agencies in Finland, and elsewhere in Europe. The Finnish Finance Ministry is conducting its own investigation.

If Turku goes ahead, it will be introducing OpenOffice, and will be switching over from Windows to Linux gradually, over several years. Turku expects the deployment to cover 3,500-5,000 machines.

Show-offs can read what we are assured is the press release in Finnish here, while super show-offs can even read the entire report in Finnish here. Thanks to the show-offs who did just that and put us straight when we got the story slightly wrong earlier. ®