Limerick City in Ireland embracing open source

The city council of Limerick, Ireland's third-largest city, is making more and more use of free and open source, to rid itself of IT vendor lock-in. It began three years ago by switching to the free and open source suite of office tools LibreOffice, replacing a proprietary office suite.

Getting rid of IT vendor lock-in is the main reason for Limerick to move to open source, the head of the city's IT department, Mihai Bilauca, explained.

"It is not good for anybody to have only one supplier, nobody likes to have just one mechanic in the city, nobody wants to have only one supermarket."

"Asking people to pay a particular software supplier in order to be able to exchange documents with us, the government, is wrong, and that is why we're going to open source and open standards", summarises Bilauca, in a presentation on 1 November at a meeting in Limerick C‎ity with other Irish city councils.