a purely business economic point of view does not make sense in public spendind. No highway is econimical for itself. One must consider the national economic benefits. With free software, it is clearly higher than for proprietary. The license fees fund the stakeholders of an American monopoly. Expenditure on migration, training, adaptations benefits local companies and people, improves and promotes the local know-how and the common good free software.
This is the kind of thinking that makes the public sector a quagmire of inefficiency. The IT department of the city of Munich has exactly one mission and that is to enable the employees of the city to service the citizens of Munich in the most efficient manner - not playing politics on behalf of the free software movement (or Microsoft, for that matter).
By the same yardstick, the city of Seattle should stick with Microsoft everything to protect local jobs, in spite of evidence of superior alternatives.
Exactly. It is more efficient for Munich as a City to support local business than to transfer money to american sharehoulders, if they think faresighted instead of shoresighted. Because part of the money comes back as taxes.
National economy is not a profit business but a money circuit. Therefore the efficienty laws are different. The goal max. efficiency is the same, but the ways to accomplish this are totallly different, because the economic systems are different.
I'm not saying that's what happened, I'm saying that's the kind of unintended consequences you risk running into when you muddle the mission goal.
By the way, any contract of any meaningful size must be tendered EU-wide. It's illegal for a city to demand that its providers are local.
By the way, you need to realize that Munich's finances are very sound. In 2012 the city had a budget surplus of around 700 million € - so spending 20-30 million € on a 10 year IT project is not something that hurts them very much...
The only source of income for the city is its citizens. The fact that they have apparently been overcharged to the tune of €700 million is not a license to squander €20-30 million - on a project that might decrease the quality of service.
I'm challenging the idea that there is a difference in how you measure the success of a public sector entity over a private sector one, not wether Munich is a competently run city.
In fact, the OP suggested that is was meaningless for Munich to have done this private-sector-style savings analysis. I wholeheartedly disagree with him and agree with the approach of the City of Munich.
Does the City have only this purpose? Is there not a secondary purpose in stimulating local business/spend?
In the UK we have local councils making people redundant and replacing local services and contact with call centres in a distant timezone. The cost saving by doing this is possibly offset by the increase in social security/benefit bill (from a national budget of course).