Munich Saves 10 Million Euros by Switching to Linux

At the request of a public organization under the Munich City Council, a report was published on the costs of the LiMux project, which provides for the installation of Linux and OpenOffice on 15 thousand city computers. Migration began in 2005, and the last 2,500 computers were switched to Linux in the fall of 2012. Preliminary estimates were such that the city would save around 4 million euros in a few years. But in fact, the benefit was much greater.

The report compares the costs of LiMux with two technologically equivalent scenarios. The first scenario is Windows and OpenOffice, the second scenario is Windows and Microsoft Office. In the first case, only license renewals would have to pay EUR 2.6 million, in the second case, EUR 6.8 million. Plus an additional cost of 4.7 million euros for the upgrade of 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 updating the OS, which happens every three to four years on the Microsoft infrastructure and is almost 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 was very low. For seven years, only 273,132 euros have been spent for these purposes, which is just a penny in comparison with the cost of Windows licenses.

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 in terms of labor costs is approximately equal to upgrading to a new version of Windows and, in fact, is expensive. But then you do not have 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 in favor, 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, for communication with external organizations, you still had to use MS Office, in parallel with OpenOffice, so they did not get any savings.