Summary: More migrations to Free software are seen in Germany and setbacks are spotted elsewhere in Europe

OpenOffice.org continues to evolve under Oracle's guard, which is good news. According to the following article, OpenOffice.org also continues to gain greater adoption in Germany. Here is Bull speaking about its migrations to OpenOffice.org. [English translation]

Insgesamt wurde weltweit auf mehr als 8.000 Arbeitsplätzen, davon 500 in Deutschland, das Lizenzkosten-freie Office-Paket installiert. Durch den konsequenten Einsatz von offenen Standards setzt Bull auf eine zukunftsfähige IT-Strategie, die die Abhängigkeit von kommerziellen Anwendungen und proprietären Standards verringert – getreu dem Firmen-Claim „Architect of an Open Worldâ„¢“.

That's a lot more desktops running Free software and ODF. Bull has a customer base with more than 100,000 installations worldwide. There is also this new update about Munich's migration to Debian GNU/Linux and ODF:

The consolidated IT of the city of Munich is reporting at CeBIT 2010 on converting their workstations to Linux and OpenOffice.

The migration to the free office package was finalized for Munich. All 15,000 office PCs of the city council will work on OpenOffice, under Linux or Windows. In the context of CeBIT Open Source, city experts and the DBI service will answer questions about the migration at booth F24. On display will be their Wollmux software tool for personalized templates and forms administration.

We wrote about Munich's important migration (which Microsoft tried to derail) on numerous occasions before [1, 2].

The trickier part, as Holland shows us, is getting rid of proprietary lock-ins and never returning to them again. Here is what Glyn Moody wrote about "The Continuing Scandal of Vendor Lock-in":

This is a strong argument for mandating open source/open standards solutions in the public sector: depending on “level playing fields” as Microsoft demands so vociferously is actually surrendering to the status quo because of the huge lock-in problem. The only way to get true equality of opportunity is to force people to move to open standards, and *then* let the market operate freely.

Moody has a new example of this Microsoft Office lock-in. He refers to the Microsoft-occupied Open University [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] which requests "application forms [for a CIO] only in .doc or .pdf..."

Speaking of lock-in, Pinguinpat has added to our Wiki this new page about how Microsoft is not only removing choice at the OEM level, but also goes further to rob taxpayers for increased lock-in:

Belgian tax money,

The Belgian national government is actually giving 'less gifted' people the opportunity to buy a computer to get access to the Internet.

Beautiful right? Well no: the minister in charge refuses to halt the cartel between Microsoft, computer manufacturers and vendors.

Getting a computer includes buying Microsoft software. So for every sold computer, Belgian tax money goes directly to Microsoft.

Minister Van Quickenborne minister ict - openVLD doesn't seem to care. As usual Microsoft doesn't need to take the law seriously.

It's one thing when a private company decides to trade with an abusive monopoly but entirely another when government institutions do so at taxpayers' expense and without their permission/approval. ⬆