An association of Berlin and Brandenburg IT companies, SIBB, is pressuring the Berlin state senate increase the use of open standards and Open Source software in its IT systems.
The Berlin city government early May rejected a Green party plan to migrate all computers to Open Source software. A majority of Berlin lawmakers wants to continue the current mixing of Open Source and proprietary software. A mixed system performs better and is less costly, the representatives believe.
SIBB criticised the decision. The government should use increase the use of open standards and Open Source, because this will result in local IT jobs, reasons SIBB. "Local companies demand that the city's administration use open systems", said Ortwin Wohlrab, chairman of the association, in a interview with the German IT news website Heise.de.
As part of its lobby on the city government, SIBB last Friday organised a public discussion on the use of open standards in Berlin.
Berlin's plan's for Open Source date back from December 2005. Tests are currently underway in two Berlin city districts, Tempelhof-Schöneberg and Zehlendorf-Steglitz are testing Open Source on the desktop. Tempelhof-Schöneberg in February and March of this year compared Microsoft Office 2007 and Open Office 2.1.
Berlin's districts combined use some 20.000 of the total 58.000 desktop PCs in owned by the city government.
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