Munich Saves More Than €4m By Switching To Linux

The city of Munich saved approximately a third of its IT budget by switching from Windows to Linux as part of the city’s LiMux project.

Christian Ude, the city’s mayor, announced savings of more than €4 million (£3.3m) in licensing fees and claimed that the transition had so far incurred few problems.

Linux transition

In 2004, the city’s council made the decision to migrate public sector computers and laptops from Windows over to open source platforms and software. The LiMux project began slowly and with a few hiccups, but the switch would now appear to be justified.

Golem reports that the saving took into account the cost of 15,000 Microsoft Office licenses and 7,500 Windows licenses, as well as the price of purchasing the new hardware required by the latest versions of Windows.  By contrast, Linux works happily on older machines.

Ude said that the cost of upgrading to the Windows equivalent of the LiMux project, including various migration and training costs, would have been more than €15 million (£12.5m) with another €2.8 million (£2.3m) required every three to four years for license renewals. Ude went on to indicate that €2.08m (£1.7m) would be added to the LiMux budget for optimisation and testing.

The city council also announced that it recently finished migrating all public sector users over to OpenOffice and other web applications.

The Icelandic government will hope for similar savings in its migration, which was announced last week. A one year push will encourage all of the country’s administrations to transition to open source tools.

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