My favorite part about that whole story is how Steve Ballmer, back then VP of MS, and even Bill Gates personally visited Munich to have a talk with the people involved, to convince them how much of a mistake it would be [0]

[0] https://www.golem.de/news/von-microsoft-zu-linux-und-zurueck...

Yups. From another thread:

> It got rolled back after they elected [a] mayor who got Microsoft to move their German headquarters to Munich.

I keep reading that all the time in tech forums, and it's just so far off the truth.

It always baffles me how we tech people lose sight of a product's quality and usability the moment it's a FOSS product. We feature new products here on HN everyday, which is "like X but better", and it gets lots of upvotes in the style of "OMG finally someone builds something better".

But then you have a FOSS initiative, and because of FOSS, we turn two blind eyes?

People in an administration don't care about FOSS or not FOSS. And they shouldn't. Their job is to solve other problems. IT and software is there to serve the administration. If, as a user, I can't get my actual job done, or only with much more hassle than before, then that's all that matters.

If we want FOSS to succeed in administrations, we have to put the same product hat on that we wear when we look at all the other software showcased here on HN. And Limux (that was the project's name) just brutally failed here.