The Munich city council has realised cost savings of over €10 million ($A12.36 million) as the result of a recent program to migrate its desktop PCs from Windows to Linux, a free, 'open-source' (ie re-programmable and customisable) operating system.

H-Online reports the city council conducted a study on the IT savings made by switching in comparison to two scenarios in which the city council continued using Windows.

Under the first comparison scenario, using Windows with Microsoft Office, the council would have incurred around €11.6 million in operating system related costs, including €4.2 million in Microsoft Office related costs, €2.6 million for Windows, about €5 million for hardware upgrades, along with application migration costs of around €55,000.

In the second scenario, where the council had continued using Windows but had migrated to an open source office suite such as Open Office, Libre Office or Calligra, it would have incurred additional costs of €7.4 million, gaining one-third the cost savings of a full switch to Linux.

By comparison, the Linux migration has cost the city council just €270,000 in application migration costs, with no licensing fees for open source software and no need to upgrade older desktops to support the platform.

This article first appeared on our sister site, SmartCompany.