Derek Hinchliffe, Perth-based health, safety, and environmental consultancy MPL group's IT manager in Australia, began investigating open source on Windows about four years ago in an effort to curb rising software costs.

"We use Firefox regularly, GIMP (GNU image manipulation program) for image manipulation extensively, and open source PDF creation tools," Hinchliffe told Computerworld, adding that LDAPExplorer and Apache Tomcat are used on Windows servers.

Although Hinchliffe does not have a dollar figure on how much these free applications have saved the consultancy, use of the GIMP for "general" image work did allow the company to migrate away from Adobe's Photoshop.

Hinchliffe said with so much choice of free software on Windows it does open the gate for migrating to other operating systems, a move the company was "close to" but settled for a site licence with Microsoft instead. This was mainly due to the outcome of MPL's trial of OpenOffice.org, which showed it didn't support Microsoft Office's Word documents well enough.

"The OpenOffice.org suite was found to be quite intuitive and behaves better than expected," he said. "It's mainly the legacy document [support] issue but we review it regularly."