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Friday, June 18, 2004

Munich Linux Project is on Track.

Jo Best

writes in News.Com:

"Munich, the city whose switch to Linux was seen as so significant it attracted a personal visit from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, has announced that its yearlong trial is a success and that it will stick with open source for its PCs.

The change will officially take place on July 1, and 14,000 desktops will permanently migrate to the open-source platform. The pilot was run using Novell's SuSE Linux and IBM products. But the eventual contract - which could be worth tens of millions of euros - will be put out to tender.

The city's move to Linux is the biggest migration ever from proprietary software to open source, and it will call for municipal PCs and notebooks to move from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice and to use the Mozilla browser. City officials voted last year to make the change. [...]"

The current dispute over patents on computer-implemented inventions should not misguide anybody within the IP Community, including but not limited to patent professionals, to ponder any options to win that battle by relying on any assumptions hypothesiseing the decline of Linux - that brand of FOSS is well alive and will stay here for any forseeable future.

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