It's the kind of story that was cheered on on Slashdot. Multiple times. I can't count the number of times I've seen "Some German [agency|municipality|state] [is planning to adopt|has adopted|cancels adoption|reverses adoption] of [StarOffice|OpenOffice|Libreoffice|Linux]". I think it's some kind of meme, the product of peculiar German administrative politics, or a result of vigorous Free Software activism in Germany because I don't see such headlines nearly as often for any other locality.
Also there a _lot_ of different cities and municipalities in Europe. And when it succeeds you don't usually hear about it.
Like when I worked at an MPI in Germany, all the machines used Ubuntu. In Catalonia, most of the universities also use Ubuntu. The Ayuntamiento uses LibreOffice (and maybe also Ubuntu in some parts) - and for the most part, it all just works. It was the same in Zaragoza too.
You only notice it when they accidentally send a .odt file to someone who is only using Windows for example.
This is mostly because the "Munich case" was a star example for a long time. Also, star division, the company that started star office, is from Germany.
That's why Germany is a great place that would adopt open source more, because they have prominent "own" projects like Suse Linux or that office suite. Now, nothing much has come of that in that way (but the German university I briefly studied at, did use Suse, of course).
