Munich is replacing VMware with Proxmox, and Jira and Confluence with OpenProject and XWiki

Laura Dornheim, Munich’s chief digital officer and head of its IT department, used a keynote at the Open Source Summit Europe in Prague to set out what the city is running and what it is replacing. The talk was titled “Munich after Limux: more open source than ever”, and two of the migrations she described are straight swaps of American commercial software for European open-source products.

Munich is replacing VMware with Proxmox VE. The project is due to finish in 2027 and the city puts the saving at roughly one million euro a year, after what Dornheim described as changes to VMware’s pricing model. Jira and Confluence are being replaced by OpenProject and XWiki, a decision taken in 2025, worth more than half a million euro a year. Her stated reason for leaving Atlassian was not only cost: prices and licence models went up year after year, and the push toward the cloud came with no guarantee that the cloud version would comply with Munich’s own data-protection rules.

A third migration is slower. The city is moving Oracle databases to PostgreSQL and giving open-source options priority for anything new, but many of its software suppliers certify their products only against Oracle. Munich is now asking those suppliers directly whether it may run their applications on an open-source database instead.

The policy behind all of this dates from 2020, when the council resolved that open source should be the default in procurement wherever it is not more expensive and nothing technical argues against it. Munich set up an Open Source Program Office in 2024, and software the city writes itself is published openly — a traffic-analysis tool it has used since 2021 is now also in use in Wolfsburg. For its roughly 40,000 staff the city runs MUCGPT, a GDPR-compliant front end to large language models that started on OpenAI and later added Mistral, built so that employees would not reach for unsanctioned tools instead.

The history matters for how this reads. Munich’s LiMux project put Debian, KDE and LibreOffice on city desktops and was declared finished in 2013; a 2017 council decision reversed it, and the migration back from LibreOffice to Microsoft Office was only completed in 2023. What is happening now is narrower and, on the evidence of the numbers, more durable: infrastructure and collaboration tools chosen one at a time, each with a cost case attached.

Dornheim was explicit that the money is not the real argument. Open source is the better answer for other reasons, she said, but every political institution is under budget pressure, so the cost case is what opens the door.