Christian Ude, the mayor of Munich and occasional political cabaret artist, is trumpeting the cost savings made by switching from Windows to Linux, claiming his city has saved over €4m over the last year alone.

Ude claims that Munich's IT department saved about a third of their total budget last year by dumping Windows and Microsoft Office in favor of Linux and OpenOffice. Buying new Windows software and upgrading systems so they could actually run it would have cost over €15m, with another €2.8m due in 3 to 4 years of license renewal, according to official figures.

By contrast, the shift to Linux meant that the city could carry on using older hardware that wasn't so stressed by the operating system. Support calls to help desks fell from 70 a month to 46, and Ude stressed he had included support, retraining, and porting costs in his calculations, local newspaper Golem reports.

Read the complete article here
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/29/munich_linux_savings/


Mod's edit: topic moved to "Enterprise news" including small text editing