The City of Barcelona is embarking at a new tech intend to purge proprietary software and replace it all with open source.

The city's first step will target key applications running on Windows, particularly the Outlook email client and Exchange Server, which will be replaced with Open-Xchange. Office is likewise likely to be replaced with LibreOffice, while Firefox could fill the void of Internet Explorer.

Though Windows will remain running on most of the City's PCs for those next year, the end game rrs always to replace it with Ubuntu or some other sort of Linux distribution, which is being trialed on 1,000 municipal computers.

The ultimate goal would be to achieve and guarantee " full technological sovereignty" for ones municipality.

In October, Francesca Bria, Barcelona City's commissioner of technology and digital innovation, announced the City's Digital Transformation Plan, which aims to improve government-provided online services, boosting technology for government, supporting urban technology and smart-city projects, and promoting open data.

Bria says the City Council has planned to spend 70 percent of that software budget on open-source software by spring of 2019 when its municipal term of office ends.

"The presence with the IT giant Bill Gates in municipal computers is definitely progressively reduced by the end of this municipal term of office," said Bria.

The Digital Transformation Plan possesses a budget of €72m ($88m), with about half of a slated for projects dedicated to developing open-source software.

The city announced in December that it can hire 65 new developers to support this program, which includes building a portal for local businesses to bid for government IT tenders. Eventually it plans to put together 300 employees in the Municipal Institute of Computing, your system that provides ICT services for that City Council.

The city hopes its investments in open-source software are usually shared with others that's why it will be publishing its code on GitHub.

Barcelona City has also introduced new guidelines for purchasing ICT services. As a substitute for prioritizing price when contracting work, it can include other factors such an open data policy, support for free and open-source software, and whether the contract supports smaller local businesses.

Bria told El Pais that public funds must be invested in systems able to be reused and open for that local ecosystem. She noted that Barcelona is most likely the first council to join the Public Money, Public Code campaign initiated with the Free Software Foundation Europe.

On Twitter, she wrote that your move to free and open-source software was "about changing procurement to spend public budget for local open-source entrepreneurs contrary to too-big-to-fail multinationals".

Munich City Council also designed a wholesale shift to open-source software in 2003, swapping Windows for Linux, but in 2020 it plans to commence a massive Windows 10 rollout to 29,000 PCs.

As at 2015, Barcelona's IMI IT group was managing around 7,800 PCs and 5,200 phones for the city.