Most major German cities giving open source 'serious thought'

Nine German cities in the state of Rheinland Pfalz are in advanced talks to replace many, if not all, of their Microsoft Corp. software products with open-source alternatives, particularly the Linux operating system. The cities are among the largest in the state of Rheinland Pfalz: Alzey, Kaiserslautern, Koblenz, Landau, Mainz, Neustadt, Speyer, Trier and Worms. Should they dump Microsoft for open source, they would join two other cities that have already made the move: Schwäbisch Hall and Munich. While Schwäbisch Hall, a community of 36,000 in southern Germany, has decided to build its entire IT infrastructure on the open-source Linux operating system, replacing Windows from Microsoft, Munich, the capital city of the state of Bavaria, will equip all of the 14,000 computers in its public administration with Linux and other open-source office applications. Almost all major German cities and many smaller ones are giving open-source software "serious thought" due largely to tight IT budgets, according to Donsbach. The cost of licensing Microsoft products and the lack of support for some of them, such as the NT operating system, which is still used widely in many city administrations, are among the chief reasons for the nine German cities to mull a switch from the U.S. software giant to providers of open-source products, he said.