City of Munich Is Now Represented in The Document Foundation Advisory Board

The city of Munich migrated to an open source infrastructure a few years back and now it's also part of The Document Foundation Advisory Board, the entity that makes the office suite LibreOffice.

Munich is often cited as a success story for a city that managed to almost completely shed its dependency to Microsoft products. It took them years to do it and they even have their own operating system based on Ubuntu, but the process has been completed. It stands to reason that LibreOffice is an integral part of their open source software stack.

In fact, The Document Foundation is actually an integral part of the city of Berlin. This is a special kind of governance model the LibreOffice community has chosen, so having a Munich representative in the Advisory Board is also pretty interesting.

Why is this important?

Munich is now among the biggest enterprise users of LibreOffice and it stands to reason that they would want to have a say in the making and planning of the office suite. It's a lot easier to push regular changes and improvements to regular people, but it's much more complicated to do the same thing for enterprise users.

"The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that the city of Munich has joined TDF Advisory Board, where it will be represented by Florian Haftmann. Back in 2003, the city of Munich – the third largest in Germany – has launched Project LiMux to migrate their software systems from closed-source, proprietary products to free and open-source software."

"The project was successfully completed in late 2013, which involved migrating 16,000 personal computers and laptops of public employees to free and open-source software. The City of Munich has hosted a LibreOffice HackFest since 2011, to improve features targeted to enterprise environments," reads the announcement.

Munich's decision to adopt a Linux system has caused quite a debate, but it's not often cited as a complete success. The authorities said on more than one occasion that their decision helped the city save millions of dollar and that it really paid off.