Germans claim Linux lowers costs

German research outfit Soeren Research said that the use of open source software can result in savings of up to 30 per cent compared to proprietary alternatives such as Windows.

The report was based on chatting to more than 50 organisations and calculating the costs based on their specs. Most of the savings came from reduced licence fees and operating costs.

Apparently large organisations saved much more than SMEs because they had more Linux or other open source experts on hand.

The greatest cost saving opportunities that Soreon Research found were in the adoption of a variety of office applications on work-stations. Over three-years, a 2000-seat organisation would save around €525,000 with office applications, €57,000 with servers, €32,000 with content management systems and €21,000 with databases.

For a €1,000,000 budget, the use of OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office would provide a 20 per cent cost advantage.

The industry body for open source within Australia said in a statement that the results from the German study proved that a Microsoft-funded TCO study undertaken by IDC in December 2002 which claimed that the use of Microsoft products would ensure a lower TCO was complete pants. µ