The German city of Munich is the second public administration to join the advisory board at the Document Foundation, a non-profit organisation promoting the development of LibreOffice. Munich is joining the advisory board in a meeting this week Thursday, the Document Foundation announced yesterday.

France’s MIMO (Mutualisation Interministérielle pour une Bureautique Ouverte, or Inter-ministry Mutualisation for an Open Productivity Suite) joined the board in June 2013.

The advisory board is for organisations that contribute significantly to the development of LibreOffice - by submitting code, for example, or by helping financially. The members meet the directors of the foundation once every three months, says spokesperson Italo Vignoli. “The discussions provide insight on the free software ICT market; it is also a way for the advisory board members to provide feedback on their large-scale implementations.”

In Munich, LibreOffice is now used on 16,000 PC workstations. “The city of Munich is a healthy reference for every migration to free software”, the Document Foundation quotes its chairman Thorsten Behrens as saying, “it will add a significant value to our advisory board.”

MIMO, set-up in 2005, represents about half a million users of LibreOffice and the closely related Apache OpenOffice, at eleven French ministries - including Energy (Ecologie), Defence (Défense), Justice Education and Finance. The Interior Ministry is responsible for the largest deployment of LibreOffice, with 240,000 desktops.

More information:

Announcement by the Document Foundation

Golem news item (in German)

El Pais news item (in Spanish)

OSOR study on Limux

OSOR news item on MIMO

OSOR study on MIMO