The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has switched 1,300 of the servers that manage its package tracking system to a Linux environment. The move has taken the better part of a year since all the original system code was written in Cobol and had to be converted for Linux -- a less expensive option than rewriting it altogether.

The migration is a part of a larger plan to standardize on open source software to lower operating costs and increase the number of transactions the system can handle. The USPS currently manages over 40 million transactions every day, from tracking priority mail to shipping packages for customers at local post offices.