DE: Rate of government adoption of their software surprises Mozilla

The LiMux team at the city administration of Munich met with Dan Mosedale, CTO at Mozilla Thunderbird and David Ascher, CEO of Mozilla Messaging in Munich on 27 October, to discuss the implementation of open source software in the municipality.

The developers were surprised to find that, alongside their Firefox browser,  Mozilla's email application Thunderbird has been a basic component of Limux's open source clients since it began. In fact, Thunderbird is used on around 15,000 municipal PCs. And LiMux project leader Peter Hofmann explained he wants the coming third version of Thunderbird integrated into the city councils workstations.

Hofmann said that the migration was going to plan and dismissed any reports of the contrary.

"Our goal is not limited to rolling out Linux desktops. At the moment we are busy installing OpenOffice, with which some 14,000 workstations have now been equipped. And along side, we also have finished some two thousand Linux PCs."

The migration to the GNU/Linux distribution Debian is currently in progress and is expected to be completed by 2010. Hofmann: "We want 80 percent of our PCs running on Linux by 2011. It will still take a lot of work, but it is a realistic goal."

The LiMux team expressed being interested in using other applications from the Mozilla suite: "Messaging would be an interesting application, but that will be integrated by independent contractors."

Munich's councillors also wanted to learn more about the Mozilla calendar, Lightning. Mosedale and Ascher said they had been working in close cooperation with the French Gendarmerie, where around 140,000 PCs are being migrated to open source software.

Information gleaned from the municipal application work experience will flow back into the Mozilla project, Hofmann expects. He pointed to the open source client Wollmux, spawned directly from the Munich project, as an example of open source software connecting the Limux project with the Mozilla applications.

The Mozilla developers wanted to find out if government organisations have different needs than other users. Hofmann replied that government bodies often have more sets of security rules in place, but  agreed with Mozilla that government's needs do not differ much from enterprise users.

The Mozilla team were especially interested in the reasons for the City of Munich's migration to free software. The LiMux project leader answered that the main argument is vendor-independence.

He added that public administrations in particular should be using open source. "Governments care a lot about independence, for themselves and for their citizens. These should not be forced to use a vendor-specific format when communicating with their administrations or governments."

Another third reason is, he said, that through the choice for open source small and medium enterprises from the region can be supported, because they become the government contracts. The city of Munich has hired an additional 1200 people for the project.

Saving on license costs are a part of the decision, but not the main driver.