Munich is saving roughly €1.5 million annually by replacing proprietary infrastructure software with open-source alternatives, according to Dr. Laura Dornheim, the city's chief digital officer, speaking at Open Source Summit Europe in Prague. The German city isn't reviving its famous LiMux Linux desktop project that ended over a decade ago, but it's pursuing a different strategy: swapping out individual layers of proprietary infrastructure where the financial and technical case is clear. Munich's current approach focuses on turning publicly funded software into a reusable public asset while reducing its dependence on proprietary vendors.
The city is replacing VMware with Proxmox, moving from Jira and Confluence to OpenProject and XWiki, and adopting PostgreSQL as an alternative to Oracle databases, according to the report. The two infrastructure and collaboration migrations alone account for the roughly €1.5 million in annual savings, or potentially more. Munich's original LiMux project, which ran from 2003 to 2013, migrated more than 14,800 desktops to a custom Linux distribution and saved about €11 million by dumping Windows, a European Commission case study reported. The council voted to reverse course in November 2017, returning computers to Windows by 2020, and the migration from LibreOffice to Microsoft Office wasn't completed until 2023.
Dornheim explained that LiMux didn't fail because of technical problems. "Open source in the public sector doesn't fail because of technical issues. It mostly fails because it's not aligned with the political agenda," she said. Munich had switched away from Linux because a new government got Microsoft to agree to make Munich the headquarters for Microsoft Germany, according to Dornheim. She added that her strategy for getting politicians to support open-source software over the long haul is to connect open source with priorities they understand, including budgets, public services, and the ability to make software available across the administration. The report notes that a proposed cloud transition to Azure without sufficient assurance from Microsoft of GDPR compliance would have required the city to scrutinize who could use each tool, creating management overhead that didn't help make a case for staying with Microsoft.
Munich established an Open Source Program Office in 2024, adding a dedicated structure for coordinating its open-source work and embracing the "public money, public code" principle: software developed with public funding should be available for others to inspect, use, and improve. The city is now an open-source software development participant, not simply a customer choosing between licenses. Munich has shared DAVe, its application for documenting and analyzing traffic data in use since 2021, which has also been adopted by Wolfsburg, Germany. The city has also developed MUCGPT, a municipal AI application that enables employees to access large language model capabilities for writing and proofreading emails, and launched an Open Source Sabbatical program supporting developers working on open-source projects. Dornheim said such collaboration should become routine rather than depend on another city discovering a suitable project by accident, adding that "there needs to be a structure across the whole public sector." The broader political risk that sank LiMux has been addressed through a pragmatic, layer-by-layer infrastructure transition that delivers measurable savings politicians can defend, while the city builds reusable software that extends the benefits beyond Munich's borders. Policymakers in other municipalities may find that framing open-source adoption as a budgetary win rather than an ideological commitment offers a more durable path through shifting political winds.