The LiMux project, which oversees Linux migration in Munich, the capital of Bavaria, has reached another milestone. According to a 2009 development review that the deputy project leader Florian Schießl has posted on his blog, open source OpenDocument Format (ODF) is now the main document exchange standard.

Munich is now using a unified desktop system, Limux, its own distribution based on Ubuntu GNU/Linux on 14,000 of its total 15,000 desktops, spread over 51 offices across the city. That is 2,000 more than it's intended goal of using Limux on 80 % of its desktops.

Florian Schießl, deputy head of the Munich-based LiMux project for migrating the city's public administration to Linux, has been explaining why migrating the computing landscape to open source software has taken longer than originally planned. One reason cited is the proprietary world's "digital waste"

Representatives of the open source Mozilla project where pleasantly surprised this week, discovering that the city of Munich is making far more use of their software.

When the third largest city in Germany rebuffed Microsoft, even people in the US were talking about it. While the software revolution has quieted down, the change goes ahead with zeal.

The large-scale migration to LiMux goes pretty well; Microsoft increasingly attempts to derail such migrations

The Swedish Standards Institute (SIS) approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as a national standard, the ODF Alliance reported this week.

ODF, an international standard, is an open standard for any vendor to implement without restrictions. Massachusetts recently recognizing both ODF and OOXML as document formats, and Denmark running multi-format document trials. the European Commission has endorsed Open Document while various authorities in Austria, Brazil, France and the United Kingdom have adopted applications that support ODF.

In China the issue about the document format standard is even more complicated, because there's also the national standard UOF. Consequently, Chinese standardization organizations have to think what they need to do to proceed. Should they support a third standard, or not? How about unifying UOF with one or both of these standards?