The Social Democratic Party of Germany and the European Green Party, which until the next elections in 2026 have taken leading positions in the city councils of Munich and Hamburg, a coalition agreement to reduce reliance on Microsoft products and bring back the initiative to migrate government IT infrastructures to Linux and open source software.
The parties have prepared and agreed, but not yet signed, a 200-page document describing the strategy for governing Hamburg over the next five years. In the area of IT, the document specifies that in order to avoid dependence on individual vendors, given the technological and financial possibilities, the emphasis will be on open standards and applications under open licenses. In addition, the document defines the principle of "public money - public code", which implies that the code developed with the money of taxpayers of software products must be open, with the exception of components that include confidential and personal data.
Similar agreements have been drawn up in Munich, Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia, Bremen and Dortmund. The agreement in Hamburg is notable for the fact that earlier the administration of this city has always been more aggressively focused on the use of Microsoft products. According to the head of the Hamburg-Mitte branch of the Green Party, the city wants to become an example of digital independence and will expand the use of open source software in digital control systems, and also intends to create its own code, which will remain open.
Including project to create an open cloud office suite , which is planned to be used in the local parliament. The project is commissioned by a non-profit organization engaged in the development of IT systems for government agencies. Phoenix will be developed as a modular product that can be deployed both in rented cloud environments and on your own equipment. Of the modules that are already ready and have been used in pilot mode since April, tools for video conferencing and messaging are mentioned. The provision of modules with a word processor, an accounting system, and a scheduler calendar is delayed due to the COVID-19 coronavirus infection pandemic.
General plans include modules for organizing collaboration (email, address book, calendar-scheduler), shared storage with version control and file sharing service, office typing (word and spreadsheet processors, presentation editor), communication services (chat, video / audio conferences ), modules with applications. The appearance of the Phoenix interface, with the exception of rebranding and a number of small things, is identical to the platform interface with integration . Nextcloud developers last year on the implementation of this platform in public institutions in France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.
It is noteworthy that in Microsoft spokesman told the German edition of Heise Online that the company sees nothing wrong with the desire to expand the use of open source software in government agencies and does not consider such a step as an attack on itself. Moreover, he said that Microsoft itself is now actively using and developing open source software, and welcomes fair competition.
Recall that the process of replacing proprietary software with free analogues started in Munich in 2006, and by 2013, 93% of all workstations were on Linux (the distribution kit was used , based on Ubuntu). In 2017, after a change in the composition of the city council, the movement towards open source was stopped by the new mayor, with the support of the leading parties at the time (Social Democrats and Christian Social Union), in parallel with the decision of Microsoft to move its German headquarters to Munich (return on Windows was perceived as a kind of demonstration of loyalty to this company). The result was development plan by the end of 2020 of a new client software for government agencies based on the Windows platform. Now Munich is once again reviving the project to introduce Linux and open source software.
Source: opennet.ru