In May 2003 the city council decided to migrate to Linux, beginning with a one-year concept phase. As experience over recent years has shown, the decision in favour of LiMux (Linux in Munich) marked a turning point not only for IT systems in the city of Munich, but also for administrations all over the world. And the lessons learned should become a blueprint for other big migrations in the public sector.
In 2013 the project was finalised and the acceptance documents signed. By that time 15,000 seats had been migrated to Linux and LibreOffice, centrally managed by open source tools that comply with open standards.
The city of Munich claims to have saved several million Euros as well as gaining freedom of choice, strategic independence, and acceptance throughout its departments. Bonuses that are harder to quantify, but also important, include better project, quality and change management, software testing tools, central deployment, key and sign-in services, and other administrative tools and systems that had not been in place before 2003.
Peter Hofmann, LiMux project leader, and Jutta Kreyss, IT Architect for the City of Munich's Linux desktop, stress repeatedly that most of these achievements are not included in the financial savings documented by various studies – yet on a proprietary software path they would all have had to be bought and licensed from external companies.
Along the way the municipality also had to develop strategies to convince employees, train and motivate their IT staff. From both a technical and a social point of view, Munich was a first mover and the eyes of many other municipalities lay on the Bavarian capital. As Peter Hofmann said: “It's like penguins in Antarctica. Do you know how they find out whether there are Orcas in the water? They keep pushing from behind. If the first ones survive, it's safe for the others to jump, too.” At one point the LiMux project even had to establish a dedicated communications team simply to answer questions from other cities. And of course a change management system had to be installed to push through the necessary project management and organisational changes.
