The German state of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to move 30,000 local government PCs from Windows and Office to Linux and LibreOffice, according to a blog post from the Document Foundation, the organisation that oversees the development of LibreOffice.
The decision by the northern federal state was taken after a successful pilot, Mike Saunders of the Document Foundation wrote.
This is not the first time that a German city or state has opted to move from proprietary software to free and open-source alternatives. In 2001, the city of Munich began a move from Windows to its own customised Linux distribution known as LiMux.
The move was expected to take 12 years and by 2013 about 15,000 of the city’s 18,000 desktops were running LiMux. But in February 2017, the city voted to move back to Windows, with plan to be effected by 2020 if it was given the go-ahead.
{loadposition sam08}The back-and-forth was reportedly not due to technical reasons, but more driven by politics. This backflip began after Munich’s new mayor, Dieter Reiter of the Social Democratic Party, took office in 2015, he,has said publicly that he is a fan of Microsoft.
Reiter commissioned Accenture, Microsoft’s Alliance Partner of the Year in 2016, to report on whether a change should be effected.
Since 2017, little has been heard about this backflip, with the last report being that the city would continue to stay with LiMux, following the election of a new administration which will be in power until 2026.
The Document Foundation said the decision by Schleswig-Holstein came in the wake of a finding by the European Data Protection Supervisor that the European Commission’s use of Microsoft 365 constituted a breach of the bloc’s data protection law.
That decision, reported on 29 March, said the EC had “failed to provide adequate safeguards to ensure that personal data transferred outside the EU/EEA are afforded the same level of protection as that guaranteed within the EU/EEA”.
“Furthermore, in its contract with Microsoft, the Commission did not sufficiently specify the types of personal data to be collected and for what explicit and specified purposes when using Microsoft 365. The Commission’s breaches as data controller also relate to data processing, including the transfer of personal data, carried out on its behalf.”
Saunders cited a post by Daniel Gunther, minister-president of Schleswig-Holstein, in which the latter wrote: “Independent, sustainable, secure: Schleswig-Holstein will be a digital pioneer region and the first German state to introduce a digitally sovereign IT workplace in its state administration.
“With a cabinet decision to introduce the open-source software LibreOffice as the standard office solution across the board, the government has given the go-ahead for the first step towards complete digital sovereignty in the state, with further steps to follow.”
Saunders said the Document Foundation was (understandably) pleased with the decision to shift these desktops from proprietary to open-source software.
