Munich to phase out municipal Linux project after criticism

The two ruling factions of the city of Munich want to phase out the use of Linux on civil servant systems and deploy a Windows client. This is evident from a municipal document. The LiMux project has been criticized for some time.

The governing parties CSU and SPD state in the document that a concept must be developed for a ‘client architecture based on a newly developed Windows base client’, which must be introduced by the end of 2020 at the latest. In the meantime, a combination of Windows and Linux can be used.

The administrators want the ‘standard products’ to be used in the workplaces city-wide. This concerns, for example, functionality such as word processing, spreadsheets, e-mailing and surfing the internet. This must concern office software with the ‘highest possible compatibility’ and the software must also be able to work well with external products such as SAP, according to the document. It seems from the wording that LibreOffice must also leave the field.

The strategic goal is that the workstations can run applications ‘independent of the operating system’. While that goal may seem to open the door for Linux, the development of a Windows client seems to have marked the end of the Munich LiMux project. That ending is not unexpected. 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. Critics such as the Free Software Foundation pointed out that Accenture is partnering with Microsoft in the Avanade joint venture, according to Tech Republic, which makes the report not objective enough.