The City of Munich joins The Document Foundation Advisory Board

Berlin, January 12, 2015 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that the city of Munich has joined TDF Advisory Board, where it will be represented by Florian Haftmann. Back in 2003, the city of Munich – the third largest in Germany – has launched Project LiMux to migrate their software systems from closed-source, proprietary products to free and open-source software. The project was successfully completed in late 2013, which involved migrating 16,000 personal computers and laptops of public employees to free and open-source software. The City of Munich has hosted a LibreOffice HackFest since 2011, to improve features targeted to enterprise environments.

“The city of Munich is a healthy reference for every migration to free software, and as such will add a significant value to our Advisory Board, where it will seat side by side with MIMO, representing the migration to LibreOffice of French Ministries, and with other companies providing value added services on top of LibreOffice,” says Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of The Document Foundation. “Florian Haftmann will be introduced to other members of TDF Advisory Board during next planned meeting, on January 15, 2015.”

TDF Advisory Board has 17 members: AMD, CIB Software, City of Munich, CloudOn, Collabora, FrODeV (Freies Office Deutschland), FSF (Free Software Foundation), Google, Intel, ITOMIG, KACST (King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology of Saudi Arabia), Lanedo, MIMO (Consortium of French Ministries), RedHat, SPI (Software in the Public Interest), Studio Storti and SUSE.

About the City of Munich and Project LiMux

Munich, Bavaria’s capital, between 2005 and 2013 has successfully managed to migrate around 16,000 PCs in 11 business units and 4 municipal undertakings to an open source based, standard and stable operating system. Munich is the largest public-sector open source stake holder in Germany, and Project LiMux has always had a high visibility.

Project LiMux has been able to reduce in a significant way the dependence from legacy proprietary software products, and attain – in the long term – the desired flexibility of software and architecture, based on three fundamental decisions:

– Introduce a free and open source operating system, with office communications based on open standards for all workstations;

– To acquire or develop platform independent administrative procedures;

– To use a standardised IT platform with consolidated applications and databases.

In such a scenario, a suitable desktop office suite is a strategic core product. In the beginning, LiMux has started to deploy OpenOffice.org, but by now the reference office suite is LibreOffice.