'Urgently needed collaboration features' are forcing Germany's ministry of Foreign Affairs to move to a proprietary desktop operating system and a proprietary suite of office applications sold by the same vendor, it appears from answers by the German government to questions from the parliament.
"The ministry and its offices in foreign countries must be able to rely on a fast, frictionless and uncomplicated communication with many a national and foreign administration, organisations and enterprises. Because of the heterogeneous mix of document formats, including Microsoft's wide-spread binary formats, the Foreign Office must continue to support these proprietary formats."
However, the German government has no intention to make the proprietary vendor's applications an official government standard, nor does it wish to fortify the company's dominant hold on the market, it writes in a 21-page reply to 39 questions that the Greens, one of the parties in the German parliament, submitted last month.
The government writes that it will support open source software wherever it is useful and economical. It will also increase the activities of it's Open Source Competence Centre.
The reply by the government was sent last week to the Greens. Parliament Member Konstantin von Notz made the document publicly available yesterday.
'Importance misunderstood'
Germany's ministry of Foreign Affairs late last year began to switch its desktops from vendor independent systems to proprietary operating systems and proprietary office suites. With this, it is overturning its IT-strategy focussing on vendor independence, dating from 2002.
That IT-approach made the vendor independent GNU/Linux operating system an increasingly used choice for the ministry's desktops, with Linux installed exclusively on 2800 PCs and a thousand laptops. It made the Foreign Office one of the few public administrations in European that began to rid itself of IT vendor lock-in.
Advocates of free and open source software protest the government's change of strategy. "The government either does not understand the importance of free software, or is attacking it and the IT-companies that support this kind of software", comments the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) in a statement.
"The claims that free software is less usable, causes higher hardware costs and lacks warranties, should belong to the realm of fantasy rather than be part of a response by the federal government," said Elmar Geese, chairman of the Linux-Verband, representing open source IT services providers in Germany.
In a news item published yesterday, the German Linux Magazine concludes that the main reason for the ministry of Foreign Affairs to ditch the open source desktop seems to be that it wants an external party that it can hold responsible for mistakes and errors.
More information:
Replies by the German government (in German, pdf)
Blog post by the Greens on the questions to the government (in German)
Blog post by the Greens on the replies by the government (in German)
Linux Magazine news item (in German)
FSFE statement (in German)