FOSS-Bridge Use Case

Speaker : Stefan Koehler, Gonicus, is an active European member in the FOSS-Bridge project. He gave  a talk around the Use Case of City of Munich and presented also some results of the successful joint cooperation taking place with its Vietnamese partner.

Title of presentation :  “FOSS migration in Munich Government, implementation model, experience on solutions choice and lessons learnt ”

Abstract : The decision made by the City of Munich in 2003 to migrate towards Free and Open Source Software on the desktop (LiMux project) broke new ground in several ways. Munich was the first major city in Germany to venture such a project on a huge scale. It is also noteworthy that the decision was not made because of monetary reasons but rather to avoid a vendor lock-in.
At the end of 2008 the project is way behind its initial timeframe but nevertheless very successful in terms of implementation of the strategic goals. Several departments already finished their migration project. The use of FOSS did pay off and the project itself did develop a solution for generating documents which was released under a free license.
The talk will explore the reasons that led to the decision to migrate to FOSS and the rationale to choose the software stack implemented into the solution running on the desktops  so called Basisclient.
The development of the Basisclient is an ongoing process and we will venture into the heart of the solution and how the solution did change over the time and features were readjusted.
Finally we will get an outlook on thesteps that lie ahead. The implementation in the various departments with varying infrastructure is a huge challenge. When this challenge will be masterde the LiMux project may be called a full-blown success. Until then it is on the right track and encourages people around the world to follow suit.