Updates/Edits:

When news broke about Schleswig-Holstein’s move to replace Microsoft Office with LibreOffice, it felt like a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t just the fact that they’re switching to open source, the framing was also on point. It wasn’t just about cost saving, but they talked also about digital sovereignty and innovation. As a fan of the open source movement and of sound public policy, it really spoke to me.

Yet as expected, whenever any news breaks about open source in public administration, a few are quick to point out: “Didn’t Munich switch to Linux for a few years then switch back to Windows?” (referring to the LiMux project). I never really knew what to respond to those people. That is until last week, when I came across this amazingly put together OSOR case study, written by Ola Adach, on my Mastodon feed (shared by Andrew (@puck@mastodon.nz)). It was an eye opener about how there’s much more to the Munich story, and I would like to talk about that and on the future of open source in public admin in Germany.

The Naysayers’ Favorite Scapegoat: Munich’s LiMux

Munich’s LiMux project is often dragged into conversations as an example of why open source might not be the best choice for public administration. Sure, LiMux faced its share of challenges—interoperability issues, lack of sustained political support, and logistical hurdles. But if you dig deeper as they did in that case study, you’ll find that despite these setbacks, Munich’s efforts weren’t in vain. The city saved millions of euros and paved the way for future open source projects. Here’s a short summary of the story of LiMux

The LiMux project began in the early 2000s when Munich’s administration faced the costly prospect of upgrading from Windows NT 4.0. Opting instead for a switch to an open-source operating system based on Ubuntu Linux, the city council approved the LiMux project in 2003. By 2012, 12,600 desktops were running LiMux, and by 2013, the project saved the city an estimated €11 million.

But the move wasn’t just about cost-savings. In retrospect, it should be seen as a truly visionary move. Many years later, in 2019, a PWC study commissioned by the German interior ministry (BMI) warned about the country’s heavy reliance on Microsoft software and the risks that poses to digital sovereignty (96% of public officials’ computers in Germany ran on Microsoft!). In the US where there is a similar dependency on Microsoft products in federal government, ex-White House cyber policy director notes that it also poses a significant security threat.

The OSOR case study and the PWC report also shows how LiMux project’s challenges were really multifaceted and can’t be reduced to “open source bad, propriety good”. Some city departments needed specific software that only ran on Windows due to compliance or legal reasons, or when open source alternatives didn’t exist. Plus, there were issues with bugs and missing features in LiMux. Interoperability and document compatibility was also a pain— highlighting the importance of open standards and regulation.

The scale of the transition required a lot of internal communication and organization, which can cause a lot of friction in day to day work. Most notably however, a transition of this scale required a strong and consistent political backing, which seems like it kind of faltered in Munich at some point after the 2014 elections. The sum of these issues eventually led to the decision to revert to Windows 10 in 2017.

There’s a lot we can learn from the Munich example, to borrow from the case study with some insights from me:

  1. Better Communication: Public administrations need to talk more to each other and share their experiences to make these projects work. It’s certainly not easy in a country as big and federated as Germany, but it’s doable.
  2. Local Tech Capacity Building: Involving local and regional IT companies boosts tech independence, and keeps public money circulating within the economy, much better use of public funds than relying on proprietary vendors.
  3. Manageable and Scalable Goals: Custom-built solutions are tricky and take some time to get right. A progressive transition to more open source software might be better than trying to engineer an all in one solution.
  4. Training Matters: Employees need proper training to adapt to open source tools smoothly, particularly if they’re only used to proprietary solutions at home or at school.
  5. Sustained Political Support: Consistent political backing is crucial for the success any large-scale project, and transition to open source is certainly not special in that regard. If a project is not allowed it’s due time to work out kinks and develop an ecosystem then administrations will be stuck in proprietary walled gardens.

One last takeaway from that case study is, it’s not fair to say that Munich has given up on open source, because it clearly hasn’t. The 2020 local elections brought in a coalition that promised to use open standards and open source whenever possible, and consider open source as a criteria in public procurement. This aligned with the strategic recommendations of the PwC report, which suggested fostering the use of open source to mitigate dependency on a few software providers.

Furthermore it mandated that all software developed by the city’s IT department, it@M, should be shared on the organisation’s public Github repository. In 2020, the city council set up an Open Source Hub to encourage collaboration on open source projects. Most recently in November 2023, the city launched https://opensource.muenchen.de/ to highlight its open source efforts. Open source in Munich is alive and well.

Momentum is Building in Open Source in Public Administration

Schleswig-Holstein’s recent announcement and the Munich examples aren’t happening in a vacuum. We’re not in 2012 anymore, across Germany, there’s a growing momentum towards adopting open source in public administration. According to the Bitkom Open Source Monitor 2023, 59% percent of surveyed public administrations leveraged open source software. Less impressive though, only 29% actually had an open source strategy.

This lack of strategy is compounded by the fact that the federally coordinated efforts have stagnated for decades now. When it comes to federal efforts to promote open source software in the public administration, there’s two stories I need to tell: OpenDesk and dPhoenixSuite.

dPhoenixSuite, is a solution marketed as a digitally sovereign workspace for public administrations. It is developed by Dataport, a non-profit public institution founded in 2004 by Hamburg, Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein, and Saxony-Anhalt, to provide software for the public administration of those federal states. Since its inception, Dataport has grown significantly, reaching a revenue of one billion euros in 2021 and is reportedly planning to double both its revenue and workforce by 2027.

While dPhoenixSuite incorporates many open-source components and their work has been somewhat well received, the overall suite remains proprietary and must run on Dataport’s servers, limiting public access to the project and effectively locking Dataport as the only “vendor”. That, along with a history of delays, lack of transparency and under delivering have drawn lots of criticism, least of which from organizations like the Free Software Foundation Europe.

This leads us to 2021 when OpenDesk was announced, an initiative led by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) to create a fully open-source workspace suite for public administrations. The suite is based on the various open-source components which also formed the bulk of dPhoneixSuite such as Univention Corporate Server, Collabora Online, Nextcloud, OpenProject, XWiki, Jitsi, and the Matrix client Element. It is also designed to be extensible to meet specific administrative needs. Starting in 2024, the coordination and management of OpenDesk will be handed over to the Centre for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS GmbH).

However, as reported by Netzpolitik, despite initial enthusiasm and some early adoption by institutions like the Robert Koch Institute, progress has been slow. The government has not been able to provide adequete financial support, allocating only 19 million euros for 2024, far less than the 45 million euros ZenDiS calculated it needs.

Additionally, while several federal states like Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia are interested in joining ZenDiS, their membership processes are stuck at the federal level, causing frustration. I do hope is that ZenDIS and the OpenDesk initative can help break the gridlock and move open source in the public administration forward, but if we are to learn from LiMux, the political will and full commitment needs to be there lest we end up with another cautionary tale.

On a brighter front, recently launched was also the Open CoDE platform, the central repository for open source software in public administration started by the BMI and the federal states of Baden-Württemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia. It hosts the OpenDesk code amongst 1000+ other projects, really exciting to browse through so I’d recommend it!

Finally, I also must plug my employer here, because a successful sovereign work space can only be built and sustained on sound and solid sovereign digital infrastructure. All this increased dependence on digital software means the few people who maintain that critical infrastructure underneath (libraries, operating systems, developer tooling) needs more maintenance, and that’s where the Sovereign Tech Fund comes in, supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK).

Is the Future is Bright for Open Source in Public Administration?

I’m ending on a question because I have many at the moment, but also reason to be hopeful. I can’t wait to see what ZenDIS and the OpenDesk project achieve in the coming years, but also perhaps it’s just not just the big projects that deserve our attention, but also the progressive and incremental work by city level IT departments like it@M, Dortmund and Berlin (the self-titled Open Source Big 3).

Also, news like the ones coming from Schleswig-Holstein, are refreshing, but we also have to learn from the past, whether it’s LiMux or dPhoneixSuite (if you haven’t made the connection yet, Dataport is still the official IT provider for Schleswig-Holstein AFAICT). It must be done for the right strategic reasons, and the commitment must be there on the long term.

If you’ve made it this far down, thank you, I set off to write a short blog post about the Munich case study by the OSOR but it snowballed into all of this, hope you found it interesting. I’d love to hear from you what you think the future will bring to Open Source in public administration or what your favorite public admin OS project is.