Use of Open Protocols and Open Source Software

The University Computer Centre has been trying to push ahead with the use of open protocols, formats and open source software for several years. The reason for these efforts is the real threat of severe IT security problems and considerable financial dependency on providers due to the use of proprietary programmes, formats and operating systems.

Recent examples that demonstrate the relevance of these fears include the Justus Liebig University Giessen and the CERN Research Centre in Switzerland.

The

University of Giessen

For many years, CERN has been using products provided by Microsoft, who decided to strip CERN of its academic status last year. Roughly estimated, CERN is to see itself faced with a tenfold increase in the costs of licences. Following this decision, CERN initiated the

Microsoft Alternatives Project (MAlt)

These incidents have made the University Computer Centre more determined to speed up the use of open protocols, formats and open source software at the University of Greifswald. The University Computer Centre has already realised these changes to a considerable amount of the central IT infrastructure. Following the incident in Giessen, the University Computer Centre now plans to replace the Windows-based Active Directory Domain Controller with Linux servers with Samba.

In addition to the two negative examples of proprietary Microsoft solutions, it is important that we don’t forget aspects related to data protection. There are considerable concerns about the automatic transfer of telemetry data to providers, in particular with Windows 10. A number of data protection officers who are responsible for the Länder are not convinced that Windows 10 can be recommended for use in the public sector.

However, it is actually the users’ desktop systems that pose the most significant IT security risk and cause the majority of costs. We have conceived a step-by-step migration concept to combat the problems explained above.

1. As an immediate measure, we would like to ask users to use open formats wherever possible and when exchanging data. This means that you should no longer save your MS Word document as docx, but as odt (Open Document text format), or your MS Excel as xlsx, but as ods (Open Document spreadsheet format).
2. The University Computer Centre will cooperate with the administration to make sure that important forms (e.g. for purchasing requests, travel requests and travel expenses) can be used with free PDF viewers.
3. If possible, please use the programme package LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office. Ideally switch from MS Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird, or use our Webmail. A list of free software alternatives is available on our website: Recommended free and open source software [de].
   The Microsoft alternatives named above are pre-installed on all desktop systems that are administered by the Computer Centre’s Desktop Management System [de].
4. The University Computer Centre is working on a web-based solution to enable the editing of MS Office documents in their original format.
5. The plan is to replace the Windows desktop operating system with Linux once all of the above-named measures have been realised.