Opinion

The city of Munich is currently considering a move away from Free Software back to Microsoft products. We consider this to be a mistake and urge the decision makers to reconsider.

For many years now the City of Munich has been using a mix of software by KDE, LibreOffice and Ubuntu, among others. Mayor Dieter Reiter (a self-proclaimed Microsoft-fan who helped Microsoft move offices to Munich) asked Accenture (a Microsoft partner) to produce a report about the situation of the City of Munich's IT infrastructure. That resulted in a 450-page document. This report is now being misused to push for a move away from Free Software. However the main issues listed in the report were identified to be organizational ones and not related to Free Software operating systems and applications.

The City of Munich is of course free to decide on their IT infrastructure. Nonetheless we believe the move away from Free Software would be a big mistake and feel compelled to speak up. Specifically the move away from Free Software will

• not actually fix the issues identified in the report by Accenture
• remove vendor-independence which was one of the core arguments for moving to Free Software in the first place
• incur estimated costs of €90 Million to be paid by tax-payer money. Another €15 Million are expected to be spent on replacing or upgrading hardware that cannot cope with the requirements of Windows 10 but runs fine with Linux.

The City of Munich has always been a poster child of Free Software in public administrations. It is a showcase of what can be done with Free Software in this setting. The step back by the City of Munich from Free Software would therefore not just be a blow for this particular deployment but also have more far-reaching effects into other similar deployments.

That said, we take this opportunity to invite all other administrations to leverage the work done by the City of Munich over the last years and are willing to help resolve remaining issues in the City of Munich related to our software.

Lydia Pintscher
President, KDE e.V.

Please also read the statement by The Document Foundation.

Our series of articles by Google Code In students continues with a review of educational applications GCompris by Sergey Popov.

Today the Free Software Foundation Europe reminds us to thank and celebrate all those in Free Software we love and whose work we enjoy and built upon. In KDE, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Everything we do in some way depends on Free Software written by many other people - the huge ecosystem around us. Here are just a few of the thousands of them:

• We Love Qt for being the best toolkit we could hope for to build our software on.
• We love the GNU Toolchain (gcc, GNU binutils, ..) - the most used toolchain to bring our amazing software to the masses.
• We love Valgrind and the GNU Debugger for helping us improve our software craftmanship.
• We love CMake for keeping our project structures sane and for helping us shine on every platform.
• We love Xorg and Wayland for giving us the ability to paint on the screen of many devices large and small.
• We love git for helping us manage our future and past.
• We love the KDE Free Qt Foundation for ensuring that KDE and everyone else can continue to rely on a free and open Qt.

Most importantly: we love all the *people* that help run these projects and organizations. Thank you for letting us stand on the shoulders of giants and ensuring together with us that more people have access to free software and control over the technology that shapes their life.

As the first of several opinion pieces exploring current issues in KDE, we offer you a video of Aaron Seigo explaining how KDE's success as a community producing all kinds of software led to outgrowing our old name, the "K Desktop Environment", what KDE means now and why it matters.