The city of Munich is now providing free Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) CDs for the citizens of the city, in an effort to increase the adoption of open source software.

Munich has been at the center of a very heated debate this past couple of months, after the media picked up some statements made by a couple of people from the mayor's office regarding a switch to back to Windows from Linux.

In case you are not up to speed with everything, you have to know that the administration of the city has switched from Windows to a Linux operating system. The implementation of an open source solution took years, but in the end the Munich authorities said that they had managed to save millions of dollars, a sum that has been disputed by Microsoft on a number of occasions.

The latest heated debate regarding this migration was all about nothing. The LiMux project that is now running in Munich is quite successful and it's safe from any kind of lobbying or political interference from the local government. Its creators made sure that no one could interfere with it, unless there was a good reason to do it.

Now, it looks like Munich is also trying to educate its citizens in the use of open source and the Munich City Library is providing free Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) CDs to anyone who wants one, free of charge. This is not the first time that the Library had this initiative, but it seems that the new one was announced soon after the Microsoft and Windows debacle in the news.

The information about this program was published on muenchen.de, which is the official website of the city, and the article is in German.

Some of you might wonder why Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is promoted by the Library. We don't have the answer to that, but it's easy to guess. The system requirements for this particular distro are a little bit lower because it was released in April 2012. The OS built by Canonical has five years of support, so it's only halfway through its life. Developers will continue to update it and Ubuntu will remain secure until 2017.

Even when the updates for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS stop, users will be able to upgrade to a newer release, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and its support period ends in 2019.

It looks like Linux has won this minor skirmish in Germany, but Microsoft is a company that needs to sell its operating system in order to survive and its lobby won't stop so easily.