At Open Source Summit Europe, Munich's chief digital officer, Laura Dornheim, said the city is again embracing open-source software, but not in the same way as its famous LiMux project. Instead of bringing back a Linux desktop, Munich is swapping proprietary infrastructure software for open-source alternatives. That means replacing VMware with Proxmox, moving from Jira and Confluence to OpenProject and XWiki, and adopting PostgreSQL in place of Oracle databases.
ZDNET reports that the infrastructure and collaboration migrations alone are expected to save at least €1.5 million annually. Munich also continues to support the "public money, public code" principle, committing to make publicly funded software available for other cities to reuse. The city established an Open Source Program Office in 2024 to coordinate this work.
Dornheim said the original LiMux project, which put Linux on more than 14,800 desktops by 2013, did not fail because of technical problems. She attributed the switch back to Windows to politics, noting that open-source projects in the public sector need sustained political support. Munich's current strategy is less about making a statement and more about proving practical savings and control, with Dornheim saying the city is saving roughly a million euros a year through its open-source shift.
The source for this article is a single ZDNET report, so there are no differing accounts to compare. The key nuance is that this is not a return to LiMux; it is a narrower, infrastructure-led approach to open source.