Spanish council saves thousands with LibreOffice

Spanish IT services company ElkarMedia S.L. reports (Spanish) that the municipality of Azpeitia in Spain’s Basque Country will be avoiding the maintenance costs involved in using Microsoft Office and saving up to €30,000-40,000 in 3-4 years since the company installed the free and open source LibreOffice office suite on the council’s computers.

In addition, ElkarMedia also provided training for council employees to enable them to use the new software.

The council has also made the following two decisions:

• Any computers bought in the future will have a free and open source operating system. This will result in a saving of €100 per machine by avoiding the cost of a Microsoft Windows licence;
• Servers will also use a free operating system; the council’s servers are replaced every 4-5 years and this will produce a saving of €5,000.