Munich delays Linux rollout to extend tests

Speed is seldom a word used when describing public administrations. The City of Munich, which has been planning to migrate to Linux on the desktop for nearly three years, is no exception.

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City officials admit they have failed to meet their initial deadline of migrating 14,000 PCs running Microsoft's Windows operating systems and Office applications to Linux and OpenOffice.org by the middle of this year, and now expect the migration to happen a year later.

But they are quick to add that the delay isn't entirely their fault.

"A couple of developments have happened since we started this entire process," said Florian Schiessl, a spokesman for the Linux project team at the City of Munich. "First of all, the debate on software patents and its impact on users of open source software came in the middle of our public tender process. As a result, we were forced to halt the tender until we could study the situation."

A group of legal experts, commissioned by the city to study the implications of using Linux ahead of proposed European Union legislation, came to the conclusion that there is only a very small risk of software patent infringement, according to Schiessl. "The experts told us that almost every user of software faces some risk," he said.

Then the tender process dragged on -- from October 2004 to April of this year -- because the offers from the competing bidders "were very different and impossible to compare," Schiessl said. "Some were very comprehensive, others not. So we needed to go back to the bidders and discuss our requirements to achieve greater transparency."

In April, the city finally chose Softcon and Gonicus to install open source software provided through the Debian GNU/Linux project.

Since then, IT experts in the City of Munich's migration project, called LiMux, have been working with Softcon and Gonicus on a concept for testing new open source applications in the city's various offices.

"We recently decided to extend the pilot phase another six months," Schiessl said. "We want to make sure that the entire solution works with all of the various services -- and not just one piece of it, like Linux."

In November, the LiMux team will begin offline tests of the client software before entering the pilot phase in January, according to Schiessl. In this phase, select staff members will use the new open software client to do their jobs, he said.

The first department to migrate will be the mayor's office.

Although the City of Munich aims to deploy as much open source software as possible, it has no intention of abolishing Microsoft products altogether, according to Schiessl. "We will continue to use the company's products in areas where it makes more economic sense, for instance, to run department-specific applications on Windows than on Linux. Contrary to what many people have said and written about our decision to use open source software, we have no political mandate against Microsoft."

At the Systems IT and media exhibition in Munch next month, the LiMux team plans to demonstrate a beta version of its new open source client software.