Munich finally stops LiMux project

The German city of Munich has decided to permanently stop its LiMux project, which was set up in 2004. The city wants to switch from Linux to Windows 10 in 2020, which involves an amount of almost 50 million euros.

Munich’s city council voted by a two-thirds majority in favor of the plan to migrate to Microsoft’s operating system, SPD politician Anne Hübner told The Register. A committee of the board had previously voted on this, but now the decision is final after a full vote. Documents show that the transition to Windows 10 can probably be completed in 2022, as the release of the new Windows client could start in 2020.

The current estimate of 49.3 million euros includes Windows 10 licenses for 35,000 employees and the bulk of the money will go to Hübner’s technical infrastructure. The license costs would also amount to 9 million euros for a period of six years. Hübner tells the site, “I think the decision will ultimately make it cheaper to buy government software because it’s all made for Windows.” However, there is also a lot of criticism of the migration, as emerged during the previous voting round.

Munich took a decade to migrate all civil servants’ PCs and laptops to LiMux; by December 2013, 15,000 systems had switched to open source software such as Ubuntu with KDE and LibreOffice. This made it one of the largest projects worldwide to provide desktop systems with Linux. Many problems soon came to light, including setting up a mail server for mobile synchronization. An Accenture study at the end of 2016 already recommended moving away from LiMux and opting for Microsoft.