Despite politics driving a decision to move off its landmark custom Linux distro in 2017 and back to Microsoft, the City of Munich in Germany is still ambitiously pursuing an open source agenda, its Chief Digital Officer has said.
CDO and Head of IT Dr Laura Dornheim said the city was embracing open source alternatives to VMware, Oracle, and Atlassian software during a keynote talk at the Open Source Summit Europe last week.
Dornheim said: “We have a political commitment that's written in all our procurement procedures that, whenever possible, open source software is the default… [and] whatever we develop ourselves, be it as small as patches and fixes or be it our own products, we publish them as open source.”
She told other public sector organisations to “talk more politics” by capitalising on broader discussions such as the need for sovereignty, and emphasising cost savings related to open source technology to bring political leaders on board.
