Public sector open source quote of the week: “EU laptops should have LibreOffice or OpenOffice”

But who said it? According to Joinup, it was Christian Ude, the Mayor of Munich, whose local authority is a European leader in the deployment of open source by the public sector in general and local authorities in particular. It was said in a letter to Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the EU Commission, a great advocate of open data (why shouldn’t she and her organisation be encouraged to embrace open source too? Ed.)

Mayor Ude wants Kroes and Joaquin Almunia, the Competition Commissioner, to make sure that the public sector throughout Europe uses free and open source software “so that public knowledge remains accessible in the future.”

The mayor urges Kroes to make compulsory the use of open document standards for all of the EU’s public institutions to ensure that data remains accessible, regardless of the software used to create the documents, he writes. “A pan-European commitment to the use of these standards would make the cooperation between authorities in Europe easier, reduce the workload and help to save costs.”

Munich is well advanced in its adoption of free and open source software. Earlier this month, it was announced that the city was ahead of schedule in its plans to migrate the majority of its desktops to Limux, its own remix of Debian, with the total number of Limux desktops now standing at 9,000. As part of the migration all proprietary office suites – apart from a relatively small number of exceptions – are being replaced by OpenOffice.

By the end of 2012, the remainder of Munich’s 3,000 proprietary desktops will be migrated to Limux.