Heise Online: Tux Takes its Seat in Germany’s Federal Parliamentar

“After a lead-up period of almost a year and a heated
debate accompanied by intense lobbying up to the very last minute,
the commission responsible for information and communications
technology, known as the Iuk Commission, this Thursday came to a
decision on its recommendations regarding the future IT landscape
of the German federal parliament, the Bundestag. Hence from the
year 2003 onwards the solution implemented for the 150 servers will
largely be one based on Linux, whereas that for the 5000 working
computers will initially feature Windows XP.

“We have thus made the first successful step of our migration
towards open source,” Steffi Lemke, Green Party member to the IuK
Commission, declared towards heise online. Few obstacles now stood
in the way of a further move towards open source, she said. By
introducing a motion on the rules of procedure during the early
morning session commission members of the Conservative Party (CDU)
and the Liberal Democrats (FDP) had tried to postpone a decision.
“Only a week ago we had been handed a 500-page expert opinion,”
Hans-Joachim Otto, media-policy spokesman of the Liberal Democrat’s
parliamentary group, said towards heise online, explaining his
party’s reservations. In view of this, it had been a “bold” step to
come to a final decision this early, he declared.

Steffi Lemke on the other hand said that, given the one year of
lead-up time and the unambiguous guidelines issued by the federal
parliament’s administration, she considered the weighing-up process
to have been “very-well prepared”. Therefore the motion launched by
the conservatives and liberal democrats had been rejected by the
commission’s majority, made up of members of parliament from the
ruling coalition, the Green Party and the Social Democrats
(SPD).”

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