In 2021, Jan Philipp Albrecht, then-minister for Energy, Agriculture, the Environment, Nature, and Digitalization of Schleswig-Holstein, discussed interest in moving the state government off of Windows.

This week's announcement also said that the Schleswig-Holstein government will ditch Microsoft Sharepoint and Exchange/Outlook in favor of open source offerings Nextcloud and Open-Xchange, and Mozilla Thunderbird in conjunction with the Univention active directory connector.

Explaining the decision, the Schleswig-Holstein government's announcement named enhanced IT security, cost efficiencies, and collaboration between different systems as its perceived benefits of switching to open source software.

Schrödter also claimed that the move would help with the state's budget by diverting money from licensing fees to "real programming services from our domestic digital economy" that could also create local jobs.

In 2021, Albrecht said the state was reaching its limits with proprietary software contracts because "license fees have continued to rise in recent years," per Google's translation.

In 2013, the LiMux project finished, but high associated costs and user dissatisfaction resulted in Munich announcing in 2017 that it would spend the next three years reverting back to Windows.

Saved 77% of original text.