The German city of Munich will continue to explain to other public administrations how it successfully switched to an IT architecture based completely on free and open source. In the most recent case study published on Joinup, those involved in the switch explain the success is partly the result of the open source community. 'The team still joins events, trade fairs and holds lectures about the project and sparks crowd-sourced office feature development'.
The capital of the state of Bavaria hopes that other municipalities will join in the development of open source software 'that is perfectly adapted to the public sector'.
Representatives of the IT department will also continue to present the success of the switch at congresses, events, tutorials and trainings.
The case study, published on 26 December, reports that if other municipalities want, they can have support from the city of Munich. The city is already extending and promoting the use of the Open Document Format (ODF, the standards-compliant and open document format used by OpenOffice, LibreOffice and others). This will help other public administrations to integrate their office macro's, document templates and office standard applications when they switch to free and open source office solutions.
Results
Munich's switch to open source took a little more than ten years, and costed the city 18.7 million euro, the case study reports. The system is some 12 million euro cheaper than continuing with the proprietary alternative, although the case study stresses that costs were never the driving factor. The city now runs OpenOffice and LibreOffice on 15,000 desktop PCs and has introduced centralised IT services including project management, testing and deployment.
In the report, the IT department lists the results, including an extraordinarily high level of independence from vendors, independence in its operating system, the overall use of open standards as normal practice, a very high level of IT security and no shutdowns of any services or processes over a migration period of several years.