One of the major benefits is that eThekwini was able to spend the developmental costs locally, and it awarded the tender to Adapt-IT, a small, Durban-based, black empowerment company. The cost for the contract could not be disclosed.

The migration took two years to complete, and, according to an Adapt-IT spokesperson, the main reasons for the migration were: 'The elimination of dependency on proprietary software; the municipality can take advantage of the freely available software and cut down on the licence costs of proprietary software; OSS offers more control, as the source code is available for manipulation by developers.'

Spencer adds that migrating to OSS was not entirely problem-free. Because it was built up from 'scratch' it meant that there was a lot of developmental work that had to be done.

The Linux (SuSE and Ubuntu) operating system, as well as some IBM mainframe operating systems, are currently being used.

According to the Adapt-IT spokesperson, the eThekwini municipality workers are well trained in the use of the applications.