Steve Ballmer made a sudden and unscheduled trip to Munich last winter. The CEO of Microsoft had been vacationing with his family in Europe when he got word that the Bavarian capital was about to scrap the Windows operating system on its 14,000 PCs and switch to free "open source" Linux software to run its machines. Loath to lose a prominent government customer, Ballmer jumped into a business suit and rushed to Munich. But he was too late. The city decided to go open source.
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