The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is gradually increasing its use of free and open source. "The use of this type of software solution has increased over the last years, mostly in the area of web and application servers", a state spokesperson explains. " We still rely on closed-source products as they are required for specific governmental applications."
In June 2012, the newly elected government stated in its coalition agreement that it would increase its public administration's use of free software solutions.
Free software is increasingly used to run servers. The government spokesperson mentioned "GNU/Linux for operating systems and various open source implementations for web and application servers." Examples include Apache for webservers and Tomcat and JBoss for application servers.
Benefits
Just like the states of Hamburg and Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein has outsourced most of its ICT services to a government-owned company, Dataport. The non-profit also runs the joint tax data centre of these three states as well as for Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Lower Saxony. "The federal states have commissioned the firm to evaluate the benefits of using an open source relational database management system."
Dataport confirmed it is studying the use of open source RDBMSs, but said that it could not yet share any results.
Expiration date
Desktop PCs in use at Schleswig-Holstein's state administration run mostly proprietary software, the spokesperson said. However, either in the final quarter this year, or in the first three months of 2015, the state's CIO will consider the use of open source on PC workstations. "It is part of an update to our ICT-strategy and due to the fact that our contracts with the current vendors will expire."
Asked to clarify why this study takes place more than two and a half year after the coalition agreement: "The CIO aligns his strategy with the political decisions. The main question of this evaluation will not be 'if' but will concentrate on 'how and what'." The spokesperson also confirmed that the state is aware of the German city of Munich's migration to a complete open source stack. "We are closely following this project's progress."