For about almost a decade the German city of Munich remained a pioneer of “Linux migration” when it would come to the public sector institutions. It was a big win¹ for the open source software community. Munich even had its own brewed Linux distribution called LiMux², the “M” standing for Munich. In late 2017 though news³ came that the Munich city council decided to roll-back to Microsoft. While that was definitely a saddening news for the community, around the same time the Spanish city of Barcelona decided to adopt open source software. It was reported by El Pais⁴ on the 4^th December 2017.

The council is currently running Ubuntu on a thousand computers as a pilot test. Hopefully, if all goes well OpenOffice will soon replace Microsoft Office, Mozilla Firefox could replace Internet Explorer and Open-Xchange could replace Microsoft Exchange (for emails).

Francesca Bria, the Digital Innovation Commissioner at the City Hall explains that Barcelona is the first municipal council that has joined the FSFE’s campaign⁵ of Public Money, Public Code.

The city council aims to reduce expenses on services that require hefty licensing costs and vendor lock-in. It is also recruiting 65 computer scientists to reinforce the internal development of technology and there is plan to recruit a Data Protection Commissioner in accordance with the reform of the data protection regulations⁶ of the European Union that comes into force in March 2018.