I’ll admit that I’m not knowledgeable about the German public sector, but I’d really love to see how they managed to save money. I work primarily with digitiza

I’ll admit that I’m not knowledgeable about the German public sector, but I’d really love to see how they managed to save money. I work primarily with digitization and efficiency, so I’m cursed in that I’m always thinking about cost efficiency. This is actually the primary drive behind my personal open source idealism. Since open source is customizable, we can cut away the clutter and focus on user experience and results. But because of my background I can’t help but think about the man-hours they must have spent on the organizational implementation, and how many hundreds of millions of euro that must have cost them. Maybe the German public sector is less digitized than we are, making the change lighter. Don’t get me wrong, we could certainly save money on licenses too. It’s just that the cost of doing it far exceeds the benefit, but I’d love to learn from Munich. The cost of change is why I personally think hard switches (I did notice them calling it gradual on the wiki page, but I’d argue that it’s not if you swap OS before every other system is ready) are a mistake in enterprise. We’re gradually changing our plumbing to be more open, but we’re doing it so that nobody notices. Our MSSQL cluster is a good example, it’s currently necessary because of legacy software. In one or two license cycles I fully expect it to be replaced by open source however. If things go as planned then no-one on the business side is going to notice anything but the freed up funds.