Munich has saved 10 million euros due to the transition to Linux

At the request of the public organization at the Munich City Council published a report on the costs of the project LiMux, which provides for the installation of Linux and OpenOffice for 15 thousand city computers. The migration began in 2005, and the last 2500 computers were transferred to Linux in the fall of 2012. Preliminary estimates were such that the city would save around 4 million euros over several years. But in fact, the benefit was much greater.

The report compares the costs of LiMux with two technologically equivalent scenarios. The first script is Windows and OpenOffice, the second script is Windows and Microsoft Office. In the first case, only for the renewal of licenses would have to give 2.6 million euros, in the second case - 6.8 million euros. Plus, additional expenses of 4.7 million euros for upgrading equipment for new software. As a result, the total savings for the city budget for the first and second scenarios amounted to 7.1 million euros and 11.3 million euros, respectively.

The Windows scenario includes the cost of licenses for upgrading the operating system, which occurs on the Microsoft infrastructure every three to four years and is practically mandatory. The estimate takes into account a hypothetical upgrade to Windows 7 and the new version of MS Office.

The cost of migrating to Linux turned out to be quite low. For seven years, only 273,132 euros have been spent for these purposes, which is just a penny compared to the cost of Windows licenses.
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As can be seen from the table, all other expenses, including retraining of personnel and work on installing new software, are estimated at the same amount of 16.4 million euros. In other words, upgrading to Linux by labor costs is approximately equal to upgrading to a new version of Windows and, in fact, it is expensive. But you do not need to pay for licenses.


PS By the way, three days ago, the parliament of another German city of Freiburg voted to switch from Linux back to Windows and MS Office, the result of the vote: 25 votes "for", 20 "against", 2 abstained. The reason is that in 2007 a directive was adopted on the mandatory use of the ODF format, but in practice it was necessary to use MS Office for communication with external organizations, in parallel with OpenOffice, so they did not manage any savings.