Blackmoor Vituperative

The local government in the German city has transferred 100 staff members in the Lord Mayor’s department to a Debian configuration, and it intends to migrate 80 percent of the city’s PCs by mid-2009.

It has not been an easy transition for the government, which first announced its intention to move to Linux in 2003 and which had scheduled the first launch to occur in 2005.

But the project, dubbed LiMux, hit numerous delays after a dispute over software patents, extended contractual negotiations and a 12-month extension to the project’s pilot phase.

“The tests are over. We have fixed the bugs and solved some of the problems,” Florian Schiessl, deputy chief of the city’s Linux project, told CNET News.com sister site ZDNet UK on Monday. “Everything we wanted done for the first release is working at the moment.”

Schiessl said it would be impossible to migrate all city workers to open source, but that 80 percent would move across by between late-2008 and mid-2009.

(from CNET News.com, Munich fires up Linux at last)

It sounds like Munich is taking a measured, common-sense approach to migrating away from expensive, proprietary software to open source and open standards. The up-front cost of migrating is significant, of course, as it would be for any large-scale migration. Migrating their entire infrastucture to XP or Vista would cost as much or more. In the short term, they will benefit from the additional security Linux offers over Windows, as well as being free from Windows’ onerous licensing restrictions, but the real savings from migrating to Linux and open source software is long-term, and I am glad that Munich’s administrators are farsighted enough to realize this.