Munich city council approves the city's migration to Linux

Munich - The city council of Munich today removed the last hurdle in replacing Windows NT with Linux on more than 14.000 workstations and servers of the city adminstration. The city will invest about $39.6 Million to create a "more modern IT environment."

Despite doubts of conservative politicians, the city council of Germny’s third largest city has approved project "LiMux", which will affect about 16.000 employees. While some concerns circled around the potential that "hobby-programmers" could negatively affect the economical environment in Munich as well as the need for training of city employees, most aldermen believe that Linux will enable the city to become independent from any vendor, increase competition, and build more flexible IT environement to meet its future needs.

According to its roadmap, the city plans to implement Linux in three steps : After the evaluation and selection of software and service providers, Windows NT PCs will be equipped with Mozilla browsers and the Open Office suite. This is followed by the migration of all PCs to Linux. By 2008, the city plans to have implemented all of its applications to the open source environment.

Munich is the most prestigious Linux project so far which could be viewed as pilot implementation of the operating system in a city environment. Several similar but smaller Linux projects have been realized so far, most notably one in Garden Grove, California, in 1995. The most recent addition to teh growing list is Norway’s Bergen, which announced yesterday, that it will move from Windows and older Unix servers to Suse’s Linux Enterprise Server 8.