Munich and Vienna to cooperate on open source software

During a joint press conference held on 10 September 2004, the officials in charge of information technology in Munich and Vienna said the two cities would reinforce their cooperation in the ICT area. In particular, they said the cities could work together on OSS – an area that lends itself well to cooperative work – including for instance for the development of an OSS-based “public authority desktop” or of an open source groupware (software that facilitates communication, coordination and collaboration among groups of users) to facilitate the exchange of experience.

Both Munich and Vienna are in the process of migrating desktops from Microsoft Windows to Linux. While Munich plans to progressively switch all of its 14,000 desktops to OSS until 2009, the migration will be more limited in Vienna. About 7,500 of the Austrian capital's 16,000 computer users will be offered the choice to switch to Linux as of 2005, and an evaluation will be carried out after a year before a decision is made regarding a further extension of the scheme.

in http://europa.eu.int/ida/en/document/3279/194