// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
How an Italian Logistics Company Moved From Windows to Linux: A Real Migration Story
In the past, I have shared stories of how real people using Linux in the real world. My favorite is the interview with Stu Keroff, who educates students to make the best use of Linux in school.
When Mišo reached out to me and shared how he helped a local small business move from Windows to Linux, I though of reviving that old series where real people share real stories of how they migrated to Linux and open source.
Mišo Oroz is the founder of Zerolock, an Italian IT company based in Spirano, Bergamo, specialised in migrating small and medium businesses from proprietary systems to Linux and open source.
I got the call in early 2026. The owner of a small transport and logistics company in Mapello, Bergamo, had five office workstations and a team of drivers who needed to stay in contact throughout the day. He was not looking for a philosophy lesson about open source. He was tired of paying for software that kept causing problems, tired of calling an external technician, and tired of his team losing time to things that had nothing to do with moving goods from one place to another.
The office ran on a standard setup that most small Italian businesses would recognise. Five workstations running a proprietary operating system (you know which one), a commercial office suite licensed per user, third-party antivirus renewed annually.
The drivers communicated with the office using WhatsApp on their personal phones, which meant company conversations were happening on a consumer messaging app with no archiving, no administration, and no separation between personal and work messages.
Their data lived partly on local machines and partly on a shared folder. When I asked to see where the most important company documents were stored, it took a few minutes to find the most recent version of a file that should have been immediately accessible.
The owner had paid for eight to ten external IT interventions over two years. Update failures, slowdowns, the occasional scare that turned out to be less serious than it looked but still cost half a day of anxiety and cleanup time.
Before touching anything, I spent time understanding what each person actually did on their computers every day. This matters more than any list of installed software, because the real question is not what tools exist but which ones are genuinely in use and how.
The office staff used a word processor, a spreadsheet, email, and a shared filing system. The owner needed occasional remote access when he was out on the road. The drivers needed a reliable way to communicate with the office without using personal phones. No sector-specific proprietary software that would be difficult to replace, which made the project significantly more straightforward than many migrations I have worked on.