Municipality of Barcelona migrates from Windows to Linux

Officials from the Spanish city of Barcelona are moving from closed to open software applications. Ultimately, all employees’ systems must move away from Windows as an OS and run on Linux.

Barcelona is spending 70 percent of its software budget on open source software this year and should be completely over by spring 2019, when the city council’s term ends. The aim is, among other things, to deploy local companies for the transition projects. In addition, the city is hiring 65 developers to build software whose source code will be made publicly available. This includes an online trading place, where local companies can offer services.

It’s Foss writes that on the basis of an article that appeared in the Spanish newspaper El País. That article states that the municipality will use Open-Xchange instead of Microsoft Exchange and also abandon Microsoft’s browser and office suite. It is not known which Linux distro will eventually be used, but there is a good chance that it will be Ubuntu. City hall is already testing a thousand workplaces for this distribution.

The move is in line with the Free Software Foundation Europe’s Public Money, Public Code campaign. The transition project comes after Munich decided in 2017 to end its transition to Linux and open source software, the LiMux project.