[antisthenes]

35,000 office workers for 1 city?

I realize Munich is a pretty big city, but holy crap, that sounds extremely bloated. I can definitely see why they tried to save money on Windows licenses, but perhaps their choice of OS isn't the problem that needed solving in the first place. Maybe their efforts (and money) were better spent on automating many processes (e.g. like you said - printing ID cards should be 100% automated and not require human intervention in most cases)

Or maybe it's total employees, and not only people who sit in the office?

If I were mayor, I'd seriously look at the bureaucratic bloat required to run the city and trying to make it more efficient (Windows to Linux you just shift money around from licensing to retraining and overhead)

[germanier]

This includes all workers, including childcare, public schools, museums and garbage disposal. The administration itself has around 8000 employees. They do practically all everyday tasks: issue parking fines, marry people, register residents, issue residence permits for foreigners, organize all elections, grant building permits, organize the city's own construction, plan traffic, register cars, and so on. Maybe you can streamline a process here or there but there is not much you can save.

Regular ID cards are printed by a central contractor in Berlin (presumably automated). However, emergency ID cards or passports are printed directly in the office with special ink. There is not much you can automate here – it doesn't happen too often but can't be batched as people need them immediately. Just with ID cards I can think of a lot of other specialized hardware: optical scanners for the ID card itself, optical scanner for paper documents, fingerprint readers, contactless readers, automated forgery checkers, and probably more. All of that needs to be supported.

I can't think of many processes that still aren't automated that could be. The only thing is that most internal processes where many employees need to work together are still paper based and a file is often transported physically to a couple of people – for example to have a medium-sized contract at least the case worker, their supervisor, the tender office, a lawyer, and the treasury need to have it on their desk. But paper is going to be replaced with an electronic file system soon (but again – that is probably not developed for Linux and needs to be ported).

[anonbanker]

most socialist governments have public-sector employment rates approaching 50% (or sometimes more). In my canadian province, 49% of the population works for the government.

[sveme]

That's ridiculous, Munich has around 850,000 employees, so 35,000 is nowhere near your 50%. Do you actually know what socialism is?

[anonbanker]

Nowhere in my post did I say that Munich was a socialist government.