We have witnessed many German cities (like Munich) switching back and forth between open-source software and proprietary solutions for their administrative workplace and public offerings.
Now, it looks like another German town “Dortmund” is going open-source and for all good reasons.
It is interesting to note that it is the 8th largest city of Germany as per Wikipedia. Let’s take a brief look at what they had to say about it.
Dortmund goes Open-Source
The council of the German city of Dortmund recently announced their plans to embrace open-source wherever feasible.
All thanks to Document Foundation’s translated blog post on that, which informed us about it.
As per the announcement, the Dortmund Council has aimed to consider digitalization as one of the political leadership tasks in the memorandum 2020-2025.
Overall, two resolutions were passed to compliment their plans and they are:
- Use of open-source software where possible.
- Software developed by the administration or commissioned for development is made available to the public
Free and open-source software is being considered for its freedom and also the gain in public trust through the use of it.
They do want to eventually digitalize both the administrative workflows and public participation with the help of open-source solutions. And, that’s definitely one of the biggest advantages of using open-source solutions for anything – no matter whether it is for the government or private users.
And, they will also be requiring the administrations to justify why open-source solutions cannot be used over proprietary ones. Hence, the council mentions “wherever possible“.
Of course, switching to open-source should ensure fantastic benefits in the long-run, but a change isn’t easy for everything and a memorandum by the City’s council is great news for Germany in general.
The administrations have to work on getting rid of the vendor lock-ins and existing the proprietary solutions with a proper strategy and looking at a broad political support for open-source in Dortmund, you can hope for the best.
Closing Thoughts
I think it’s definitely an exciting news which should also encourage other governments/councils to realize the benefits of free software as a standard. Germany seems to be moving towards a free software standard, only time will tell.
What do you think about it? Feel free to share your thoughts.
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