The Switch in the Town Hall

I. Two Switches

In “The Switch” we described how a judge at the International Criminal Court, Nicolas Guillou, was locked out of his digital life after issuing an arrest warrant against a head of government. Accounts, cards, services: everything depended on American providers, and they had to follow American sanctions. We called it structural proof: the switch that can turn Europe off digitally sits in Washington.

There is a second switch, and it is less conspicuous. It sits in the town halls, state parliaments and ministries where it is decided whether to become independent of the first switch. This second switch is not flipped by a foreign government but by the next majority at home. The city of Munich has demonstrated how it works.

II. Ten Years of Building

In 2003 support ended for Windows NT 4.0, the operating system of Munich’s city administration. At the urging of Mayor Christian Ude, the city council decided to switch to Linux instead. Ude later recounted that Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer interrupted a skiing holiday in Switzerland to change his mind and lowered the price several times. The scene is not independently confirmed, but it shows how seriously Redmond took a single German city.

What followed was laborious. It took ten years until, in 2013, some 15,000 workstations ran LiMux, the city’s own Linux based first on Debian and later on Ubuntu, with LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office. The city put its savings at around eleven million euros. Munich was the model for administrations all over Europe that wanted to free themselves from dependency.

III. Six Years of Dismantling

In 2014 Dieter Reiter (SPD) became mayor, in a coalition with the CSU and Josef Schmid as deputy mayor. Reiter publicly called himself a “Microsoft fan” and said open-source programs “occasionally” lagged behind Microsoft. Schmid complained that he had waited four weeks for his smartphone. Both pointed to a staff survey showing dissatisfaction. In October 2014, answering a question from the Greens, Reiter had to concede that the survey showed no link to Linux.

The city commissioned a report. It came in 2016 from Accenture, a close business partner of Microsoft, ran to some 450 pages and was never published. Its main finding was inconvenient for those who had commissioned it: the biggest problems were organisational. The city’s IT was fragmented across many departments, around fifteen different system versions were in use, and departments blocked updates. Linux was not the cause. Nevertheless, the report recommended merely patching LiMux where it was failing and, alongside it, building a Windows workstation from scratch, with Microsoft Office as the standard. That was a phased exit: if you only repair one house and build the other anew, it is clear where the family will move.

On 15 February 2017 the SPD and CSU tabled a short-notice amendment: a uniform Windows workstation was to be created by 2020. There was no cost estimate. On 23 November 2017 the final decision was taken by about 50 votes to 25, against the Greens, the Left, the FDP and the ÖDP. Only now did the administration give a figure: around 89 million euros, a good 49 million of it for Windows. Experts considered a three-digit million sum more realistic. The rollback from LibreOffice to Microsoft Office was not completed until 2023. Six years of dismantling after ten years of building.

One question suggests itself. As head of the economics department, Reiter had helped prepare the move of Microsoft’s German headquarters from Unterschleißheim to Munich-Schwabing, announced in 2013 and opened in 2016. Critics saw a connection. Reiter denied it, and it is not proven. What is proven is only that the same man who brought the one corporation into the city ended the alternative to it as mayor.

IV. What Was Really Broken

Being merciless here also means not letting the Linux project’s supporters off the hook. In 2019 the auditors of PwC judged LiMux uneconomic. The reason was not Linux as such, but the expensive parallel operation with Windows and an overly customised in-house Linux that only Munich maintained. Whoever builds his own island must also maintain it alone.

And many of the administration’s specialist applications ran only under Windows. The later IT head Thomas Bönig called this the main problem in 2020. That is correct, and it would have been a reason to hold the makers of those applications to account. Instead, the whole system was changed.

Incidentally, the organisational problem Accenture identified was solved. In 2018 Munich consolidated its IT into a new IT department with the municipal enterprise it@M. That could have been done with Linux. The tool was replaced in order to tidy up the workshop.

V. The Comeback in the Basement

In 2020 came another political change. The Greens and SPD agreed to prefer open source “wherever technically and financially sensible” and to publish software developed in-house: public money, public code. Since 2024 the city has had a dedicated office for this. The head of IT, Laura Dornheim, presented the results at a conference in Prague in October 2026. The trade magazine iX hails them as a “phoenix from the ashes”.

The results are real. Virtualisation is moving from VMware to Proxmox, saving around one million euros a year. Project tools are moving from Jira and Confluence to OpenProject and XWiki, databases from Oracle to PostgreSQL. A program the city developed to analyse traffic counts is now also used by Wolfsburg. And staff as well as outsiders can apply for a paid open-source sabbatical.

But the phoenix flies in the basement. Changes are made where staff don’t notice: servers, tools and databases. On the roughly 29,000 desks Windows with Microsoft Office continues to run, and that is where dependency is greatest. Since 2017 nobody has dared to touch it. And with the city’s AI assistant MUCGPT, the interface is openly on GitHub, but the decisive question of whose models and servers it runs on is not answered in the report. We described in “No American AI” why exactly this question matters.

VI. The Counterexample

How it can be done differently is shown by Schleswig-Holstein, which we already mentioned in “Die digitale Kolonie” (German). The state set out to free its administration from Microsoft, and it has come a long way. According to a report from December 2025, around 80 percent of state employees work with LibreOffice, 44,000 mailboxes have moved to Open-Xchange, and documents are stored in the open ODF format. The state expects savings of over 15 million euros a year from 2026, with one-off costs of about nine million. There are exceptions, such as the tax administration, which is bound to nationwide systems.

What is remarkable is who is doing it. It is not a left-wing city council alliance but a state government led by the CDU. Digital independence there is not an ideology but precaution. And the state does not build alone. Its IT provider Dataport works for several northern German states, and the federal government has had openDesk developed as a shared workplace for administrations, which the International Criminal Court also intends to use. Whoever builds together cannot so easily turn back alone.

VII. What Makes a Decision Last

The lesson from Munich is not technical. Linux can run an administration, as Schleswig-Holstein, Denmark and France show. The lesson is political: a decision that one majority worked on for ten years can be reversed by the next majority within a year without having to justify anything. A smartphone annoyance, a survey without probative value and a report from the vendor’s orbit were enough.

In the language of control engineering, negative feedback was missing. The mood built up, and nothing in the system braked it. What could brake it can be named:

A duty to justify reversal. Whoever wants to undo a long-term infrastructure decision must present a full cost calculation and an assessment before the vote. Not afterwards.

Independent assessors. Whoever is a business partner of a vendor does not assess whether to switch to that vendor. In construction this is taken for granted.

Build together. What several cities and states operate and develop together cannot be switched off by a single council alone. The program Munich and Wolfsburg share is, in miniature, the right model.

Hold specialist software to account. Whoever wants public contracts for administrative software must deliver it to run in the browser, independent of the operating system. Then the strongest reason for going back disappears.

Sovereignty as a criterion. The formula “where technically and financially sensible” needs a third part: and without a foreign switch. Whoever compares only the licence bill overlooks what it costs when one day someone else cuts the power.

VIII. Is That Democracy?

At this point one might ask angrily whether it is democracy when individuals can push through such a decision. The uncomfortable answer is: formally, yes. It was not one individual. Reiter initiated it, but some 50 councillors decided against 25, in a proper vote. And Reiter was no fool. He had a preference, perhaps interests too, and he pushed them through. That is worse than stupidity, for stupidity cannot be prevented, but a decision without justification can.

What failed was not the vote but everything that should have happened before it. When the direction was set in February 2017, there was no cost estimate. The report remained under lock and key and in essence said the opposite. And most councillors probably voted as their group told them, not after examining the matter themselves. We described this mechanism in “The Merzgefallenen”: party discipline holds as long as it pays, and for none of the fifty did dissent pay.

Plato would have seen his objection to democracy confirmed. In his parable of the ship the sailors fight over the helm, and none of them has learned to steer. We described it in “The Helmsman Nobody Elects”. But Karl Popper had the better answer: democracy does not guarantee good decisions. It only guarantees that bad ones can be corrected without bloodshed. That is exactly what happened in Munich. In 2020 a new majority came and changed direction again. Democracy worked, only slowly, expensively and without anyone having to answer for the costs.

That is the real deficiency. Whoever decides wrongly pays nothing. Reiter was re-elected in 2020, the citizens pay the millions, and nobody has to explain what for. A democracy in which decisions are taken without justification and mistakes remain without consequences is formally correct, but it does not learn. It has a control loop, but the measurement is missing.

That is why the proposals in the previous chapter start with rules, not persons. And they connect with proposals we made earlier: the Transparency Council, which discloses who decides what with whom, and representatives without party, who do not have to vote along group lines. Both aim at the same gap: bringing scrutiny and responsibility to where today the parliamentary group decides.

IX. Who Still Needs to Fly

In 2003 the head of Microsoft interrupted his skiing holiday to change the mind of a single German city. In 2017 nobody had to fly any more. The city changed its own mind.

In “The Dependency Game”, “The Vassal” and “The Half-Baked Answer” we described how deeply Europe is embedded in American technology and how half-heartedly it responds. Munich adds an uncomfortable finding: dependency is not only imposed in Washington. It is also chosen in European town halls, again and again.

Europe cannot dismantle the switch in Washington. The one in the town hall it can.