Dear Ubuntu User Reader,

In between issues, this happened:

In 2003, the Town Hall of Munich, capital of the wealthy region of Bavaria, Germany, was considering getting rid of an annoying vendor that was forcing them to upgrade its software. The new software, without offering any substantial advantage over the previous version, came with new expensive licenses – several per desktop – because the Town Hall would have had to pay for the use of not only the new operating system but also all the new apps that came with it. It would have also meant the City Corporation would have had to renew many of its 15,000 workstations, because the current hardware, which was in perfect working order, would not have had enough oomph to run the new, much more power-hungry programs.

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