The rise and fall of Limux

The LiMux (or Limux) initiative in Munich has been heralded as an example of both the good and bad in moving a public administration away from proprietary systems. Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) President Matthias Kirschner reviewed the history of the initiative—and its recent apparent downfall—in a talk at Open Source Summit Europe in Prague. He also looked at the broader implications of the project as well as asking some questions that free-software advocates should consider moving forward.

History

He began by revisiting the year 2000; we had just survived the Y2K scare and public administrations (cities and other governmental organizations) were realizing that Windows NT 4.0 was about to reach its end of life. So some of them started evaluating the possibility of moving to Linux. One of those administrations was the city of Munich. There was a lot of media attention focused on the idea that Munich might move away from proprietary software. Microsoft CEO (at the time), Steve Ballmer, famously left his ski vacation to talk to the mayor, but that didn't dissuade the city from starting a project to move to Linux.

A few weeks later, though, the project did stop because the city was worried about patents. That problem was studied and the city came to the conclusion that the patent risk was no worse for free software than it was for proprietary software. Still, over the years, there were repeatedly rumors about the demise of the project and that Limux, Munich's Linux distribution, would be dropped.

One of the questions that Munich wanted to answer was if switching would save it money. An IT committee estimated it would save €20 million by using Linux clients for the desktop. There were other studies, including a Microsoft-funded one by HP that said it would cost €43 million more; that study was not published, though its conclusions were featured in the news.

The rumors that Munich would drop Limux often cited cost as a reason for doing so but, even now, it is difficult to estimate what the cost of switching was. There was more to the switch than simply desktop clients as the city also centralized much of its IT infrastructure at the same time. It is hard to separate the organizational and technical costs to really determine the bottom line, Kirschner said.

Along the way, it was reported that 20% of the users of Limux were not happy or satisfied with it; other reports had the number at 40%. In most cases, it was not at all clear what they were unhappy with—was it the client or something else? Those reports never said anything about how happy the city workers in "Hamburg or Paris or wherever" were. He noted that one of the changes moved the support staff to a centralized facility, rather than it "being the guy in the next room". He wondered if that may have impacted users' happiness with their desktops.

Another thing that was often reported was that it was difficult to exchange documents with other administrations in Germany. There was a German policy that documents were supposed to be delivered in an open format, but Munich regularly got documents in proprietary formats.

Despite all of the reports of the imminent downfall of Limux, by 2013, 15,000 computers had been migrated. In addition, 18,000 LibreOffice templates had been created for documents. Previously, each office had its own templates, but the new ones were shared across the city administration. The mayor who had started the project was "always supporting it", Kirschner said. He continuously backed the team behind Limux.

That all ended in 2014. The old mayor did not run for reelection, so a new mayor, Dieter Reiter, from the same party was elected. Reiter did not like Limux and was quoted in some articles as being a Microsoft fan. He ran partly on the idea of switching away from Limux.

The cause of all evil

From then on, Kirschner said, "Limux was the cause of all evil in Munich". For example, iPhones did not work with the city's infrastructure, which was blamed on Limux though it had nothing to do with the desktop client. A mail server outage was also unfairly blamed on Limux.

All of that led people around Europe to believe that Munich had already switched away from Limux, but that was not the case. The new mayor was making a lot of noise about it, which made things hard for the IT staff. Effectively, the boss was not supporting their work.

The city government paid for a study to look at the IT problems that the city was having. It was done by Accenture, which is a Microsoft partner, so the FSFE and others expected the worst. It turned out not to be what they expected, he said. The study identified several problems, one of which was about an old version of Windows that was still in use, but the biggest problems were organizational rather than technical.

It turned out that there were fifteen different operating system versions in use throughout the city administration. Upgrades could be blocked by departments if they didn't like the update or didn't have time to do them. That meant there were users who were dealing with bugs that had been long fixed in LibreOffice (or OpenOffice before it). The study recommended that those problems be fixed.

The Munich city council decided to do a reorganization of the IT department, which was similar to some of the study's recommendations, but not the same. A city council meeting was held with a late, surprising, addition to the agenda: to vote on moving to an integrated (proprietary) client. There were no costs or justifications associated with that agenda item, it was just an attempt to have a decision made about that question.

The FSFE wrote to all of the city council members (and the press) to ask about the effects, costs, which services would not be available after a switch, and so on. That led to multiple press inquiries to the city council and a television crew showing up at the meeting. Many of the questions the FSFE had asked were brought up in the meeting and the council wanted "real answers"; they had never gotten so many requests from the public about any other issue, Kirschner said.

In the meeting, the mayor said that the agenda item was not actually about making a decision, but was instead about examining options. It was agreed that, before a decision could be reached, clarity on costs, service disruptions, and the like would be needed. A decision would be made by the council at some later date.

In that meeting, though, it became quite clear that a lot of parties had already made up their mind, Kirschner said. There would be a move to a unified desktop client over the next few years. In fact, without waiting for a decision from the city council, some services were stopped and email started to be migrated to Microsoft Exchange. The "pattern is quite clear", but the public is being told that the city is still examining options. That is "harming not only free software, but also democracy", he said.

Moving forward

The "lighthouse we had seen before will not be there anymore". Limux will be replaced with Microsoft clients. It doesn't make sense, he said, because the city already had a strategy to move away from desktops to "bring your own device" and other desktop alternatives. He wondered if this is all really Munich's fault or whether the free-software community also unwittingly helped Limux fail. It is something we need to understand and learn from for other migrations that may happen in the future.

To that end, Kirschner had a few different questions that he thought the community should think about. "Do we suck at the desktop?" We are dominant in everything from supercomputers to embedded devices, but have never made any real gains in the desktop space. Many in the community use other operating systems as their main desktop. Is our desktop client bad or is it applications that are needed, especially for public administrations?

Was there too much focus on the cost savings? People in the community promised that Munich would save money and he is confident that in the long run that is true, but a switch always has costs. If the budget is tight, switching to save money may well not be the right plan. He also wondered if the community should do more to support companies and individuals who charge for free software.

"Do we sometimes harm these migrations by volunteering?" Migrations to free software are generally driven by individuals, either inside a public administration or by a parent for a school. Those individuals start bringing free software in and do lots of work (for free) to make it all work. Problems arise and there is no budget to bring in others to help out; people burn out and then everything fails. Instead of coming to the conclusion that not having a budget led to free software failing, the organizations often decide to "get a budget and do it right". He thought it might make more sense to try to get the budget for the free-software project, instead of volunteering.

It may be better to focus on applications, rather than on the operating system. Public administrations have applications for all sorts of different tasks, such as passport programs or marriage license applications. Those need to work right away as part of any migration. Maybe a path forward is to make the argument that those applications should be free software, so that they aren't so closely tied to a particular platform.

There was a tendency in the community to point to Munich whenever the topic of free software in public administrations would come up. That may have been too much focus on one migration. As seen in Munich, decisions about migrations are not always made for technical reasons, but since that migration was always touted, it means that Munich failing equates to free software failing in some minds. There are other examples of migrations in public administrations, he said; we should research those and point out multiple different migrations instead of concentrating on one.

Public money, public code

The FSFE has started a new campaign, called Public Money, Public Code, that seeks to make all code developed for the public be released as free software. He quoted the Director-General of the European Commission's IT directorate who said: "Sharing and reuse should become the default approach in the public sector". He showed a short video [YouTube] from the campaign web site that highlighted the absurdity of proprietary restrictions on software by analogy to public infrastructure like roads and buildings. If the owners of public buildings could force complete replacement in order to upgrade or restrict the kinds of votes that could be taken in legislative building, it would obviously be completely unacceptable, but that is often what is required for our public code infrastructure.

There is a open letter that Europeans can sign to demand that lawmakers "implement legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence.". Organizations can also join the campaign and donations are accepted to further the work. He concluded with a quote: "Many small people, in many small places, do many small things, that can alter the face of the world."

In the Q&A, Kirschner noted that, unlike companies, which often don't want to share with their competitors, public administrations are not in competition with each other. It should be easy for them to understand the advantages of sharing and reusing the software they procure. He also said that part of the campaign's work is in trying to convince lawmakers to support the effort. For the German elections, FSFE contacted all of the candidates and asked for their support; the same will be done for elections in other countries and for the EU Parliament.

[I would like to thank LWN's travel sponsor, the Linux Foundation, for supporting my travel to Prague for OSS Europe.]