Photo - Tim Mossholder - Unsplash
Munich again
In public institutions in Munich, the transition to open source began more than 15 years ago. It is believed that the impetus for this was the end of support for one of the most popular network operating systems . At that time, the city had two options: upgrade everything or migrate to Linux.
A group of activists convinced the city's mayor, Christian Ude, that the second option would save 20 million euros and had an advantage in terms of information security.
As a result, Munich began developing its own distribution kit - LiMux .
LiMux is a ready-to-go desktop environment with open source office software. The Open Document Format (ODF) has become the standard for city office work.
But the move to open source didn't go as smoothly as planned. By 2013, 80% of computers in the administration had to work with LiMux. But in practice, government agencies used proprietary and open source solutions at the same time - due to compatibility issues. Despite the difficulties, by this time more than 15 thousand workstations had been transferred to the open distribution kit . Also, 18 thousand LibreOffice document templates were created. The future of the project looked bright.
Everything changed in 2014. Christian Ude did not participate in the elections for the post of the head of the city, and Dieter Reiter took his place. In some German media he was called "a fan of proprietary software." Unsurprisingly, in 2017, the authorities decided to refusefrom LiMux and completely return to the products of a well-known vendor. On the other hand, the cost of return migration over three years was estimated at 50 million euros. The President of the Free Software Foundation Europe noted that Munich's decision would paralyze the city administration, and civil servants would suffer.
Creeping coup
In 2020, with the change of political parties in power, the picture changed again. The Social Democrats and the Green Party have signed a new agreement aimed at developing open source initiatives. Where possible, the city administration will use free software.
All custom software developed for the city will also be transferred to open source. Representatives of the Free Software Foundation Europe have been promoting this approach since 2017. Then they launched the Public Money, Public Code campaign. Its goal is to ensure that software developed with taxpayer funds is released under open source licenses.
The Social Democrats and the Green Party will remain in power until 2026. It can be expected that until this moment in Munich will definitely adhere to the course towards open projects.
And not only there
Munich is not the only city in Europe migrating to open source. Up to 70% of Barcelona's IT budget is spent on supporting local developers and developing open source projects. Many of them are being implemented not only throughout Spain, but also around the world - for example, the Sentilo Platform for analyzing data from weather meters and sensors is used in the city of Tarras, as well as in Dubai and Japan.
Photo - Eddi Aguirre - Unsplash
2019 open source CERN. , . VoIP-.
The European Parliament also recommends switching to free software . From May of this year, IT solutions developed for government organizations should be open source and released under open source licenses (if possible). According to parliament representatives, such an approach will increase information security and make data processing more transparent.
In general, the topic of open source software and import substitution of office suites is of interest to Habré, so we will continue to follow the development of events.
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