Switching its IT systems to Open Source and Open Standards helps the city council of Munich to resolve problems with software applications and their dependencies, says Florian Schießl, deputy IT project manager for the city.
"GNU/Linux provides us with a great opportunity to remove dependencies between operating systems, business software and office applications. In the future, we will be able to really decide which applications to combine."
Schießl recently gave a presentation on the city council's ongoing migration to GNU/Linux based systems. He described the future IT system of the city to be web based and platform independent. Switching to GNU/Linux, he says, is the best way to achieve and keep this independence.
The IT department currently uses various intermediate solutions to deal with applications that depend on certain other applications or will only run on certain operating systems. The city council deals with these issues by using both proprietary and Open Source virtualisation and emulation applications. "It takes time to get all the software vendors on the right track. But we let them know that their applications could one day be exchanged for one that is platform independent. This part of the migration takes time and a lot of negotiation."
Schießl says that the city's 2003 decision to migrate to GNU/Linux has also helped to reduce the complexity of the IT infrastructure. "Each of the city's twelve departments used to have its own Microsoft Windows desktop clients. There were several types of back-end infrastructures, some based on Novell Netware, some using PC-Netlink or others."
The Munich IT department deploys LiMux, a customised version of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. It offers the users the KDE desktop environment, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox and GIMP. Now a thousand work stations run LiMux. Some 6000 other PCs use OpenOffice. Of all the work stations in the Munich city council's office, more than 90 percent uses Firefox and Thunderbird.
While preparing for the switch, the city's IT department discovered that the GNU/Linux client would have to be able to work with or offer alternatives for about six hundred applications that are used by the city's administrators, ranging from enterprise resource applications, specialised software for handling car licenses or registering citizens, to commodity software for creating websites or managing images.
The more complex the system, Schießl says, the longer the preparation for the migration will take. However, he adds, Munich does not work in isolation. "All over Europe, public administrations are moving towards Open Source software and Open standards. Governments, counties and municipalities no longer want to depend on monopolistic software vendors. They want to have choices. We are getting help from others and we share our experiences to others. There's increasing cooperation among the participants."
© European Communities 2008
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