Constitutional affairs legal affairs

Workshop: Legal aspects of free and open source software 
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Legal aspects of free and open source software in 
procurement: the example of the City of Munich 
Oliver Altehage, Kirsten Böge & Dr. Jutta Kreyss 
 
CONTENT 
1.  ORIGIN AND ORGANISATION OF THE LIMUX PROJECT 
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2. STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT IN THE PUBLIC SERVICE 
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3.  STAKEHOLDERS IN THE LIMUX PROJECT IN THE CAPITAL OF                
BAVARIA, MUNICH 
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4.  LEARNING THE LESSONS OF THE PROJECT TO DATE; PROSPECTS          
FOR FURTHER DEVELOPMENT 
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5. BIBLIOGRAPHY 
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1  ORIGIN AND ORGANISATION OF THE LIMUX PROJECT 
Bavaria’s capital, Munich, recently finished an IT migration project regarding its clients. In a 
project like this, the focus is often on the technical aspect, while the cultural and human 
dimensions are neglected. Yet an IT project on such a large scale requires a holistic 
approach, taking into account the organisational preconditions, political factors, individual 
habits and the cultural specificities of a large public-service organisation (Theuvsen et al. 
2010). A holistic approach is built around comprehensive stakeholder management, which 
means strategic planning of relations with the project’s main stakeholders. It is thanks to 
shrewd cooperation with the main protagonists, such as the City Council, Staff Committee, 
management and also the open source community, that in 2012, a good nine years after 
the LiMux project began, and despite all the imponderables, the project was successfully 
finished. It is thanks to its solid relations with the principal stakeholders that the project – 
often referred to as a ‘flagship’ project
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 – has the requisite stability.  
Before a full description of all the stakeholders, it seems helpful to provide a few key data 
about the project. 
The aim of the LiMux project was to migrate all the approximately 15 000 PC work stations 
present in 11 business units and 4 municipal undertakings to an open source-based, 
standardised and consolidated system. To put it precisely, all the PC work stations used by 
the administration of the City of Munich are to be equipped with Open Source office 
systems and at least 80% of all PCs are to run on a Linux-based operating system. 
The LiMux project was intended to progressively eliminate the legacy of dependence on 
proprietary products and in the long term attain the desired flexibility  of software and 
architecture. As a rule, although using products tailored to one another which are available 
from a single producer is convenient in the sense that functions can be used in common or 
(proprietary) file formats can be used throughout the organisation, there are also 
                                                 
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’Flagship project’ is a term used to describe an exemplary project which, in addition to fulfilling 
its particular purpose, is also intended to set an example which can be followed by numerous subsequent projects. 
Apart from success, therefore, the aim is to ensure that the project is widely known. 
(http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuchtturmprojekt, 16.11.2011) 

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Policy Department C: Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs 
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drawbacks because this makes it significantly more difficult to replace these products, the 
easiest option then being to purchase further products from the same manufacturer. This 
gives rise to costs and dependences which could have been avoided. Ultimately, this 
significantly restricts freedom of choice of appropriate IT systems within an organisation. 
Moreover, the LiMux project is seen as a blueprint for the project culture approach to be 
adopted in future IT projects. 
The approach adopted by Munich City Council in 2003 was based on three fundamental 
decisions: 
1.
 
to introduce a free, open-source operating system, including office communications 
based on open standards for all work stations; 
2.
 
that in the future all specific administrative procedures should be acquired or 
developed as being platform independent; 
3.
 
that a standardised IT platform with consolidated applications and databases should 
be used. When the project began, there were 21 IT business units, more than 1000 
applications, some of which were redundant, innumerable versions, no uniform 
template system and, apart from a central LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access 
Protocol - server, absolutely no standardisation throughout the city. 
In the early summer of 2005, the work station migration project was then launched. 
As of December 2011, all staff was working on their PCs with the free office communication 
products OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird, and more than 9 000 work stations have 
migrated to the Linux-based operating system. 
This makes Munich the biggest public-sector open-source project in Germany with high 
visibility. This would already be a sufficient reason to write about it. But the aim of this 
note is also to describe it from a particular point of view, with reference to the significance 
of important stakeholders in the project. What contribution are politicians, management, 
staff or the open source community making to the success of the project? 
 
2. STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT IN THE PUBLIC SERVICE 
The term ‘stakeholder’
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 is derived from the word ‘stake’, which can mean an asset risked 
in  gambling  or  an  investment  or  interest  in  a  business.  ‘Holder’  meanwhile  refers  to  the 
person who owns or possesses it. ‘Stakeholder group’, or simply ‘stakeholders’, is a good 
way of referring to the main parties with an interest in the LiMux project. 
With the focus on the relevant stakeholder groups, the desire arises for successful ‘relations 
management’. How can one communicate with the main stakeholder groups in a manner 
which they appreciate, and how can those relations be successfully maintained? 
According to the definition provided by ISO 10006 (
http://www.iso.org
), stakeholders in a 
project are all those who have an interest in the project or are affected by it in any way. 
A distinction is made between active and passive stakeholders (Freeman 1984). Active 
stakeholders are directly involved in working on the project (e.g. team members) or are 
directly affected by it (e.g. users, suppliers, business management). 
Passive stakeholders are only indirectly affected by the implementation of the project or by 
its effects (e.g. representatives of interest groups, associations, etc.). 
Moreover, each project has its specific stakeholders, whose significance needs to be 
established by means of a force field analysis (Lang 2010). In such an analysis, various 
interests and attitudes of relevant groups can be analysed to create a portfolio: 
 
                                                 
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For the concept ‘stakeholder’, see 
http://wirtschaftslexikon.gabler.de/Definition/anspruchsgruppen.html
 

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