Free software finds favour in Munich

Hot on the heels of the New Year comes encouraging news from Munich, where the city council is progressing with its LiMux free software project.

Writing on his blog, deputy project leader Florian Schießl notes a number of major milestones.

Firstly, the open source and ISO standard Open Document Format (ODF) is now the main document exchange standard within the council for files that need editing, with PDF being used for non-editable files. Moreover, the city council’s standard desktops now consist of the free OpenOffice.org office suite, Mozilla’s Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client, plus other open source applications, such as the GIMP image editor (sounds eminently usable. Ed. 🙂 ).

Other major achievements during 2009 include:

• 12,000 work stations using OpenOffice;
• 2,000 work stations in four departments migrated to LiMux, Munich’s ‘roll-your-own’ version of Debian with the KDE window manager and desktop environment (similar to what your scribe is using now and at home. Ed.);
• all other council departments starting migration to GNU/Linux in the course of the year.

The migration to Linux is expected to be completed by 2012. Although Bristol City Council was regarded as a pioneer for ditching Microsoft for Star Office, this achievement seems to pale somewhat in the light of Munich’s efforts. When will we see British local authorities emulate their colleagues in Bavaria?