WHY THE FUCK DO I NEED TEAMS EMAIL ME BITCH
$11 million dollars is pocket change to a national government. Not ideal, but as a project to end reliance on a US entity, it’s an investment in the future.
Replacing Microsoft 365 with open-source alternatives might be the right approach to solving the sovereignty problem, but plans could eventually change. Replacing traditional software tools on aging IT systems is no easy “plug-and-play” task, as some users have remarked. The German city of Munich even tried to move from Windows to Linux in 2004, but eventually returned to the old operating system in 2017.
Let’s hope the outcome is better this time. And i also hope the result can be leveraged by other nations.
IIRC in Munich the effort “failed” in good part thanks to Microsoft lobbying and bribes.
Noooo, it’s just a coincidence that Munich switched off LiMux right after Microsoft moved their EU HQ there, and now has one of the highest IT budgets for a single city (500M€)
Yeah, talked to their CTO in 2012 when I wrote an article for heise.de (sadly, never released with his statements, only broad summaries) and he basically said the politicians were intentionally crippling support for Linux so that Microsoft IT support looked better. He specifically mentioned the WollMux form system as a failed software project.
Perhaps I missed it in the article, but I would be curious to see how much they currently pay and what they expect to pay over a given timeframe for Microsoft software and subscription licensing.
It was not in the article, but let me help you. Swiss bureaucracy is my speciality.
There were two procurements in the past years, where only the minimal amount of data is publicly available. By request, they would release more data, but that’s something that takes multiple weeks. So I can only share what I have found so far.
- Years 2020-2024: CHF 161.69m (USD 198.02m)
- Years 2025-2027 CHF 139m (USD 170.21m)
In those contracts it is not known how many licenses and which licenses were bought. So they will also include Operating Systems (client and server), and expensive licenses such as MSSQL Server. I’m sorry that I cannot share anything more useful right now.
This. The question is always how long it will take to break even. A year? 6 months? The big number is just for shock value.
Big number? It’s 11 million. That’s pocket change for something like that.
With an estimated 38,000 federal staff and a cost of $36 per month each for an enterprise license it looks like 12 million a year roughly.
A small price to pay for salvation.
It says how much it costs but how much will be saved in the end?
A moral and strategic imperative.
Yeah, I can see the point. Moving away from Microsoft sounds good in theory, but actually replacing everything without causing problems is probably the hard part
The tech is ready, the training of people is the hard part.
Exactly. The technology itself is probably the easier part. Getting people comfortable with a completely different workflow is where things can get complicated
This comes up at my job a lot. We end up not doing things because the staff whine about it. No where else have I worked have I seen such whining. It’s your fucking job. You can use whatever you want on your home computer. Now stop SSH’ing into production and fucking use source control.
It’s really a problem of poor management , here.
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