LiMux

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LiMux project in municipal administration of Bavarian capital Munich (1.3 million inhabitants as of 2006) is migrating 14,000 PCs and laptops of public employees to non-proprietary software. While this is not an economically large or particularly technically complex undertaking, it is the largest deployment of GNU/Linux and OpenOffice in the public sector so far, and this symbolic value turned it into one of the world’s highest profile migration projects. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, LiMux signals to public and private decision makers around the world that life beyond the existing order is possible.

The migration project in Munich is ongoing and not a hard switch to free software on every desktop. The main goal is to achieve more independence from software distributors, concerning client/server and native client software. The decision in 2003 had two componentes, on the one hand to get free software running on most of the desktops, and on the other hand to buy and develop web-based and platform independent (e.g. Java-based) business applications.