German state wants to switch completely to open source software in the long term

The parliament of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein has approved a plan to switch completely to open source software in due course. It now wants to investigate how such a transition is possible.

Parliament passed a proposal on Thursday that includes the target. It announces “it wants to switch completely to open source software in the long term.” This would have the advantage that the state saves money, is less dependent on ‘monopolists’ and that the number of vulnerabilities is minimized.

In addition, companies from the Land could take on the maintenance and development of the software. A study must now be conducted that provides a definitive answer to the question of when and how the switch to open source software can be made. The adopted proposal does not mention names such as Microsoft or Linux.

The plan is striking, because the German city of Munich decided to return to Microsoft at the end of last year, after it wanted to make a transition to Linux as part of the so-called LiMux project. Munich took a decade to migrate all civil servants’ PCs and laptops; by December 2013, 15,000 systems had switched to open source software such as Ubuntu with KDE and LibreOffice.

Schleswig-Holstein is not the only party in Europe that wants to walk the path to open source. For example, the Spanish city of Barcelona announced that it wanted to set up a similar project.