The city of Munich adopts Linux in a big way!

It’s certainly not a case of an overnight conversion. The city of Munich began to seek open source alternatives way back in 2003.

With a population of about 1.5 million citizens and thousands of employees, this German city took its time to adopt open source. Tens of thousands of government workstations were to be considered for the change. Its initial shopping list had suitably rigid specifications, spanning everything from avoiding vendor lock-in and receiving regular hardware support updates, to having access to an expansive range of free applications.

In its first stage of migration, in 2006, Debian was introduced across a small percentage of government workstations, with the remaining Windows computers switching to OpenOffice.org, followed by Firefox and Thunderbird.

Debian was substituted for a custom Ubuntu-based distribution named ‘LiMux‘ in 2008, after the team handling the project ‘realised Ubuntu was the platform that could satisfy our requirements best.’