Where have we heard this before? Germany is a country who wants to be at the forefront of the opensource movement, as another of its state has opted to go this route.
Schleswig-Holstein has decided that it is done with closed, proprietary Windows and has outlined plans to move to the opensource Linux within by the end of year 2026. As part of this drive, some 25,000 German state computers will bid goodbye to Windows.
The first step of this migration involves moving these machines from the Microsoft Office suite of applications to LibreOffice from The Document Foundation.
Eventually, all of these devices will follow suit, and be powered by Linux.
In the words of Jan Phillipp Albrecht, the minister overseeing the digitization of the state, one of the main reasons for moving away from proprietary solutions was the cost of licensing itself. Additionally, this strategy also brings in more flexibility.
As put:
“Firstly, financially, because license fees have continued to rise over the past few years. Second, with regard to our goals for the digitization of administration. Open source simply offers us more flexibility. At the same time, all the advantages that open source always has apply: sovereignty, data security and data protection.”
Some of you might recall, something similar happened a few years back when Munich decided to embrace the opensource way of Linux by ditching Windows.
That venture eventually failed, with the Munich government back on the Microsoft operating platform once again somewhere around 2015.
Let’s see how this pans out!
