NL: Amsterdam to make OpenOffice and Firefox default on city desktops

At the same time, the council allowed the city to sign a new volume license contract with Microsoft.

The council on Wednesday unanimously adopted a motion filed by Sabina Gazic (Dutch Labour party, PvdA) and Jeanine van Pinxteren (GroenLinks, the Dutch Greens), instructing the city administration to make OpenOffice the default application for office productivity and Firefox the default for browsing the Internet.

The council next wants the city administration to start planning its move to a complete open source desktop. It wants to see a proposal before the end of the year.

The third demand the council made is that the city administration doubles the scope of its current open source desktop pilot. It wants the city to move a second city district and a second of the city's service departments to a complete open source desktop.

Volume licence

The motion was filed in response to the city administration's request for a volume-licence agreement with Microsoft. According to the administration this new deal is necessary in order to be able to use the company's proprietary virtualisation software (Softricity). The city wants to use this to standardise applications on about 6,0000 of the total of the 15,000 desktop PCs.

The administration had tried sweetening the volume licence deal by suggesting that OpenOffice and Firefox would be possible on the new desktop. The council took up that suggestion.

City council member Gazic: "We had agreed last October not to renew the city's volume licence contract with Microsoft. Six months later the administration explains us that we are forced to purchase yet another licence contract, in order to use only one part of it, the virtualisation tool. I would rather the city filed a complaint with the European Competition Authority. We would not be the first to do so."

More information:

Speech of council member Sabina Gazic (in Dutch)

City council motion (in Dutch, pdf)

Webwereld news item (in Dutch)