14 DAY TRIAL // Germany is now at the forefront on open source because many cities in this country are either considering the switch to Linux or they have already finished this process. Now, the German city of Gummersbach is reporting that the administration is now almost exclusively running on Linux systems.
The city of Munich is definitely a success story when it comes to open source adoption, but at the end of the day it's just one city in a very large country. We wrote of another big city that might be following in its footsteps just a couple of days ago, but it looks like Gummersbach has already made the change.
This type of changes don't get enough press and the Linux community usually hears about them long after the process has ended, but now we have the opportunity to learn about it very fast.
Gummersbach is a small city with a big, open source heart
Gummersbach has only about 50,000 residents, so it's not what you might call a metropolis. It's smaller than one of the residential areas of Munich, but the city administration had a clear vision of what they had to do. The migration process started back in 2007 and it took them a few years to get everything in place.
All in all, about 300 PCs have migrated to open source from a proprietary system. City representatives didn't provide any details about that system, but they said it wasn't maintained anymore by the company that was making it. That sounds an awful lot like Windows XP and Microsoft.
"The administration now uses 300 thin client PCs, with desktop and applications retrieved a SuSE Linux Terminal Server cluster of six servers. The desktop environment is Mate. The city staffers use the LibreOffice suite of office productivity tools and the Open-Xchange suite of email, instant messaging, calendaring and online collaboration tools. Some departments use Wollmux, an open source tool for managing forms and document templates developed by the German city of Munich," reads the announcement made on the official website for the European Commission.
This is just the beginning
From an outside point of view it looks like Linux is becoming more and more popular in Germany. City officials from all over the county must see the progress made by other administrations and they are setting the wheels in motion to do the same. Granted, it will take a long time for Linux and Windows systems to hit at least parity, but that day is coming soon.