Munich Begins to Switch Windows Out for Linux

A follow up on a story we haven't heard much about in a while. It looks like Munich is finally moving forward with its plan to migrate most of their desktop computers to Linux. A couple quotes from the article:
Munich has begun its migration to Linux on the desktop, a year later than planned and nearly three years since the city announced its move to open source software.
“There have been some delays along the way but we’re now moving steadily ahead,” Florian Schiessl, manager of the Limux project for the city of Munich, said Thursday by telephone.
By the end of this year, the city of Munich plans to have migrated 200 computers to the open source desktop environment. “Most of these computers are used for relatively simple office communications,” he said.
The configuration is based on Linux Distribution Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, the KDE 3.5 user interface and OpenOffice 2.
It's great to see this highly publicized migration finally come to fruition. While they are certainly behind schedule, a lot of that had to do with some unneeded patent issues and the reality is that most projects of this scope end up being way behind schedule if they're completed at all. The fact that they added one year to the pilot project and still decided to move forward makes it clear to me that they are happy with both their original analysis and their decision to move to Linux. The plan now is to have 80% of the desktops converted over by the end of 2008. With about 14,000 desktops total and some fairly complex processes used by some of the larger departments, this seems like an aggressive but realistic goal. We'll certainly keep watching.
–jeremy
Linux, Open Source, Munich, Debian, KDE