7 ms·

I hate when switches like these get advertised first and foremost as some huge cost-cutting measure, further solidifying open source ecosystem as some cheap kno

by input_sh 10mo ago

I hate when switches like these get advertised first and foremost as some huge cost-cutting measure, further solidifying open source ecosystem as some cheap knock-offs of their commercial alternatives. How about instead you donate the same amount of money you would've paid to Microsoft anyways to fund open source projects you rely on? At least for one year, then drop it down to some arbitrary chosen percentage of that cost. That way you can still advertise it as a cost-cutting measure, and everyone would benefit.

NeutralForest 10mo ago
That's a really good point actually. If you're self hosting, you're already eating some cost by having people, probably in-house, doing the work but the price difference must be quite large and they should use it to support the project.
Bengalilol 10mo ago
I hope those are not mutually exclusive actions. Switching and contributing may be on the Schleswig-Holstein Administration's agenda.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
MrDarcy 10mo ago
The idea is sound but the feeling of hate is perhaps strong. It’s understandable there’s no incentive to pay for open source software, and doing so would be seen as an unnecessary allocation of resources that could better be allocated elsewhere. Given this understanding, the best away to achieve the desired outcome is to get creative about aligning incentives at the top of org structures where resources are allocated.
- nickff 10mo ago
  >”Given this understanding, the best away to achieve the desired outcome is to get creative about aligning incentives at the top of org structures where resources are allocated.” I really don’t understand what this means; could you please explain it? It comes off as ‘mushy’ consulting-speak to me.
  - manphone 10mo ago
    Make the execs bonus based on open source success and then it will be the most funded thing of all time.
  - shermantanktop 10mo ago
    It’s a mini-language that you don’t have to learn unless you work with executive types. But it does mean something. In particular it means “activity at the grassroots is wasted effort when the real decision maker with the money is not aware or in agreement with the direction.”
    - MrDarcy 10mo ago
      “Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.” -Charlie Munger
  - Terr_ 10mo ago
    Cynical read: "Executives are short-sighted and won't care unless the right thing somehow personally makes them money."
bell-cot 10mo ago
Yes. But budget decisions are made by politicians. Who know that one euro spent on things they could get for free is one euro less for things that voters and other interests are endlessly asking them to spend more on.
eloeffler 10mo ago
An alternative would be to create jobs for people that take on part of the development of used software. They would be a close connection between their organization and the Open Source project in question. Paying money to the project would be one way to go. Providing development resources another. Both would be best :)
- ghaff 10mo ago
  That's very true in the case of private companies. I'm not sure to what degree employing developers who contribute to open source projects (probably for lower than private sector wages) works in the case of a lot of public sector entities.
  - onion2k 10mo ago
    Why would it make a difference? Offering developers a salary to contribute to an open source project is a good thing. Leave the developers to be free if they want to work for the offered amount.
    - ghaff 10mo ago
      There are often different incentives, constraints, and pay scales. Nothing against public organizations doing this obviously. Just don't see a lot of evidence that it works well in general.
      - onraglanroad 10mo ago
        Might work as part of a job guarantee scheme. Rather than being paid welfare benefits you can get more money by working on open source. Edit: I mean from a society perspective you pay a tiny bit more for a real gain, without reducing labour from the private sector.
        hvb2 10mo ago
        The problem is that most of that work is not something anyone can pick up. Regardless of the coding, one would first need to be familiar with git or VCS in general. Also, you would want people to go back to normal jobs when they can. This would lead to short stints for all employees which I've always found to be one of the best predictors of bad outcomes
croes 10mo ago
Because in Germany the price is the only thing that counts. Building a new street? The cheapest bidder wins. Cuts to social security? As long it saves money in the short term in doesn’t matter if the long term costs will be higher or if the cuts don’t make sense.
hanshenning 10mo ago
You're not wrong, but this is actually what they're pursuing; the article just leaves it out. > The goal is not only to save costs, but above all to gain digital sovereignty. > [It's true] that open source is not necessarily cheaper, [..] it requires investment. But the money flows into internal infrastructure, into the further development of Nextcloud, LibreOffice, and other similar systems, instead of proprietary ones. > Schleswig-Holstein pursues an "upstream-only strategy," meaning that developments flow directly back into international projects. The state does not want to maintain its own forks, but rather contribute all improvements directly to the main projects, thereby contributing to development for the benefit of the general public.[1] On a side note, the real key to the project's success is that it's supported by a coalition of the conservative and green parties. They actually value digital sovereignty and longterm cost savings. Contrast that with Bavaria, where the MS lobbyist managed to get them to sign a longterm Office 365 contract… [1]https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/hintergrund/Interview-Wie-die-OSS-Umstellung-in-Schleswig-Holstein-laeuft-10629991.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/hintergrund/Interview-Wi...
- k1musab1 10mo ago
  Thank you for providing this valuable context. I am hoping to advocate for OSS transition in my workplace and these examples go a long way to help make my case.
  - kuerbel 10mo ago
    I am thinking about opening my own shop, distinguished by digitally sovereign offerings, for instance, Stormshield over Cisco, Proxmox over VMware, Matrix/Element over Microsoft Teams, Nextcloud over SharePoint... I've been doing m365 and azure for more than three years by now and I just feel terrible. Especially regarding some of our customers, which are small gGmbH (kind of NGO). Instead of making a secure, privacy focused offering we just sell them the usual m365 package. We basically push them into the data industrial complex just to get some collab tools and mail.
    - lormayna 10mo ago
alecco 10mo ago
Many years ago some people proposed to move open source to paid licensing to guarantee income for core open source developers. But the self-righteous community attacked them like it was the end of the world. In the current cancel culture even if you use *GPL licenses you get attacked for not being MIT or similar. But mysteriously never a peep about Big Tech making billions off open source without giving back even a tiny 1% to the projects. Insanity.
- LexiMax 10mo ago
  "Open Source" has always been a play for Free Software from a pragmatic and business-focused point of view, as opposed to a community-focused and moralistic one. https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.opensource.org/docs/history.php https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso...
- ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
  The sales pitch for FOSS to corporations in the 1990s and 2000s was "free as in speech and free as in beer". Reneging on that is a straight-up rug pull on the adopters.
  - alecco 10mo ago
    Pretty sure it was "free as in libre and not as in beer". Source: I was there.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
      Both gratis and libre were talking points for FOSS advocates, with gratis being leaned on heavily to persuade businesses who didn't give a hoot about libre, which turned out to be almost everybody. Source: I was there too.
atonse 10mo ago
This has been my view too... all these years, all these organizations with collective billions, and didn't anyone have the vision to say, let's all pool some money together and actually get these open source alternatives to shed some of the papercuts, and maybe hire some UX/designers to make them look more polished?
ryukoposting 10mo ago
There are plenty of decision makers who will not be sold on an abstract concept like software sovereignty, especially when it requires them to change. Tell the same crowd "$15 million saved" and more of them will listen. They're out of their minds if they're donating nothing to Libreoffice, though.
ho_schi 10mo ago
True. Software and computers don’t even exist to save money. A lot of problems stem from the weird idea of MBAs that a computer, digitalization or even cloud are there to save money. I hope Holstein prepared the switch well and kill off any Microsoft stuff as quick as possible. Nothing is worse than co-existence with something hostile which doesn’t want to be compatible. * No Dual-Booting * No VM * Especially no WINE (your ducked with every odd update) * And by the love of god, hit everyone with a bat which tries to ship incompatible files (MS-Office, ppt, xls, pst…) to you. Links to “Microsoft Teams”? Hit harder and show no mercy :) What to do, minimal list: * Make plan. * Used standards wherever possible. * Switch file-formats and external platforms before. Use a standard distribution and DO NOT MAKE YOUR OWN DISTRIBUTION. If you have a big IT department with hundreds of employees, maybe an own repository with your custom software. * Enforce all suppliers hard to support Linux natively! If not? Drop them. Search a honest company which gives you also the source. * Avoid the usual mistake like “this a local support company” or “their offer is cheaper” * Don’t purchase shitty hardware. ThinkPads are a good start, but we speak about printers, NFC, label writers, scanners and so on. If your answer doesn’t include either Debian, Red Hat, Canonical or Suse it is probably the wrong choice. You need support. The remaining 20 percent of workplaces are currently still dependent on Microsoft programs such as Word or Excel, as there is a technical dependency on these programs in certain specialized applications. According to Schrödter, however, the successive conversion of these remaining computers is the stated goal. A red flag. Soft migrations work only, if both side cooperate. If not, hard migration. Short pain is better than long suffering. PS: And don’t repeat Munich! Munich is “HOW NOT”. Three distinct IT-Departments. And the next major was “convinced ” with tax money and a Microsoft Headquarters. Result, it is worse than before.
- GoblinSlayer 10mo ago
  Apparently their tax administration has some extensive automation with Excel spreadsheets and VBA.
- jimnotgym 10mo ago
  >dependent on Microsoft programs such as Word or Excel This kind of suggests that they have a bunch of VBA scripts in the tax department and the legal team are dependent on sharing 'track changes' in contracts. It will do the world a favour if the VBA is forced out. Don't know what they will do about 'track changes', it is ubiquitous in the contract world. Hopefully they will force government suppliers onto the libre alternative.
PeterStuer 10mo ago
It should be what the kids these days call 'sovereignty', but ain't nobody got budget for that.
ninth_ant 10mo ago
You hate that, but what I hate that so many of my tax dollars are funnelled into bloated software run by awful foreign companies with massive lock-in scams, when better free software is available. I hate that lobbyists and consultants get these systems into place and can’t be unseated despite its utter unreasonableness. It’s a tremendous mis-allocation of public resources. Hiring local people to tailor the free software which already exists and contributing those changes back to the world would spend fewer of those dollars and spend them locally, and be pro-social at the same time. So I don’t hate this story. I love it and see it as a massive win.
- 9dev 10mo ago
  That's a double-edged sword, though. Those tax dollars don't just pay for the license, but for ongoing development, responsibility for security issues, support contracts, emergency personnel, and so on. With a purely Open Source strategy, you'll have to pay multiple external consultants to take care of part of this, and/or cover these roles in-house. And suddenly, you've taken up a lot of tasks completely foreign to your business domain, such as new infrastructure and its maintenance, documentation requirements, software development, and so on. And we haven't even talked about the massive effort of educating your entire workforce on new tools and workflows. Assuming you just replace a proprietary software ecosystem with an Open Source one and immediately get the same thing for free is a very naive view that will get you in trouble. Having said that, as a German, I am very happy this switch happens and seems to have some backing in the local administration at least. But it's still a high-risk wager and I'm afraid it'll turn out like the LiMux project in Munich, which was eventually (and cleverly so) framed as the origin of all problems in the municipal digital infrastructure. In the end, it got swapped out for a new Microsoft contract in a wonderful example of lobbyism and bribery, and Open Source and Linux have been discredited, to the point no winning mayor candidate can ever bring it up again as a viable alternative.
  - lenkite 10mo ago
    > Those tax dollars don't just pay for the license, but for ongoing development, responsibility for security issues, support contracts, emergency personnel, and so on. Maybe this was true at one point in time. But now, it just pays for AI/Copilot and your latest support chatbot.
nyankas 10mo ago
The German government actually started and funded quite a few projects supporting FOSS development over the past few years. For example, ZenDis was founded in 2022 to develop open-source software for the public administration. They are the driving force behind openDesk, which is shaping up to be a great office- and collaboration suite. Also, there's the Sovereign Tech Agency, where open-source projects can apply for direct funding. The available funds aren't as big as I'd like them to be, but it's not as if there's no funding coming from the German government.
- VerifiedReports 10mo ago
  This is the first I've heard of OpenDesk. What makes it specific to "public administration," vs. regular business?
  - nyankas 10mo ago
    ZenDis has the specific task of improving FOSS software for use by government agencies, so Germany's public administration is simply their primary focus in their development work. I honestly don't have enough experience with different collaboration suites to pinpoint any major feature differences.
    - VerifiedReports 10mo ago
      Thanks. The software's homepage also cites its target of "public administration," so I'm curious as to what it might lack for private companies or projects.
immibis 10mo ago
Why would a budget-conscious institution give away money for free?
Jean-Papoulos 10mo ago
>In contrast, there would be one-time investments of nine million euros in 2026 [...] and the further development of solutions with free software. They are contributing actively it seems, so even better.
- input_sh 10mo ago
  And in the sentence above that, they're "saving" 15 million in Microsoft licenses. So either they've paid 24 million to Microsoft this year, in which case their next year's expenses are dropping by over 60%, or it's the same pot of money, in which case their yearly bill dropped by 40%. I get that 9 million sounds like a lot, but it's much, much lower than what they would've paid to Microsoft anyways. And those 9 million are advertised as a "one-off investment", while their contract with Microsoft was perpetual.

NeutralForest 10mo ago

That's a really good point actually. If you're self hosting, you're already eating some cost by having people, probably in-house, doing the work but the price difference must be quite large and they should use it to support the project.

Bengalilol 10mo ago

I hope those are not mutually exclusive actions. Switching and contributing may be on the Schleswig-Holstein Administration's agenda.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

MrDarcy 10mo ago

The idea is sound but the feeling of hate is perhaps strong. It’s understandable there’s no incentive to pay for open source software, and doing so would be seen as an unnecessary allocation of resources that could better be allocated elsewhere. Given this understanding, the best away to achieve the desired outcome is to get creative about aligning incentives at the top of org structures where resources are allocated.

nickff 10mo ago
>”Given this understanding, the best away to achieve the desired outcome is to get creative about aligning incentives at the top of org structures where resources are allocated.” I really don’t understand what this means; could you please explain it? It comes off as ‘mushy’ consulting-speak to me.
- manphone 10mo ago
  Make the execs bonus based on open source success and then it will be the most funded thing of all time.
- shermantanktop 10mo ago
  It’s a mini-language that you don’t have to learn unless you work with executive types. But it does mean something. In particular it means “activity at the grassroots is wasted effort when the real decision maker with the money is not aware or in agreement with the direction.”
  - MrDarcy 10mo ago
    “Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.” -Charlie Munger
- Terr_ 10mo ago
  Cynical read: "Executives are short-sighted and won't care unless the right thing somehow personally makes them money."

bell-cot 10mo ago

Yes. But budget decisions are made by politicians. Who know that one euro spent on things they could get for free is one euro less for things that voters and other interests are endlessly asking them to spend more on.

eloeffler 10mo ago

An alternative would be to create jobs for people that take on part of the development of used software. They would be a close connection between their organization and the Open Source project in question. Paying money to the project would be one way to go. Providing development resources another. Both would be best :)

ghaff 10mo ago
That's very true in the case of private companies. I'm not sure to what degree employing developers who contribute to open source projects (probably for lower than private sector wages) works in the case of a lot of public sector entities.
- onion2k 10mo ago
  Why would it make a difference? Offering developers a salary to contribute to an open source project is a good thing. Leave the developers to be free if they want to work for the offered amount.
  - ghaff 10mo ago
    There are often different incentives, constraints, and pay scales. Nothing against public organizations doing this obviously. Just don't see a lot of evidence that it works well in general.
    - onraglanroad 10mo ago
      Might work as part of a job guarantee scheme. Rather than being paid welfare benefits you can get more money by working on open source. Edit: I mean from a society perspective you pay a tiny bit more for a real gain, without reducing labour from the private sector.
      - hvb2 10mo ago
        The problem is that most of that work is not something anyone can pick up. Regardless of the coding, one would first need to be familiar with git or VCS in general. Also, you would want people to go back to normal jobs when they can. This would lead to short stints for all employees which I've always found to be one of the best predictors of bad outcomes

croes 10mo ago

Because in Germany the price is the only thing that counts. Building a new street? The cheapest bidder wins. Cuts to social security? As long it saves money in the short term in doesn’t matter if the long term costs will be higher or if the cuts don’t make sense.

hanshenning 10mo ago

You're not wrong, but this is actually what they're pursuing; the article just leaves it out. > The goal is not only to save costs, but above all to gain digital sovereignty. > [It's true] that open source is not necessarily cheaper, [..] it requires investment. But the money flows into internal infrastructure, into the further development of Nextcloud, LibreOffice, and other similar systems, instead of proprietary ones. > Schleswig-Holstein pursues an "upstream-only strategy," meaning that developments flow directly back into international projects. The state does not want to maintain its own forks, but rather contribute all improvements directly to the main projects, thereby contributing to development for the benefit of the general public.[1] On a side note, the real key to the project's success is that it's supported by a coalition of the conservative and green parties. They actually value digital sovereignty and longterm cost savings. Contrast that with Bavaria, where the MS lobbyist managed to get them to sign a longterm Office 365 contract… [1]https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/hintergrund/Interview-Wie-die-OSS-Umstellung-in-Schleswig-Holstein-laeuft-10629991.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/hintergrund/Interview-Wi...

k1musab1 10mo ago
Thank you for providing this valuable context. I am hoping to advocate for OSS transition in my workplace and these examples go a long way to help make my case.
- kuerbel 10mo ago
  I am thinking about opening my own shop, distinguished by digitally sovereign offerings, for instance, Stormshield over Cisco, Proxmox over VMware, Matrix/Element over Microsoft Teams, Nextcloud over SharePoint... I've been doing m365 and azure for more than three years by now and I just feel terrible. Especially regarding some of our customers, which are small gGmbH (kind of NGO). Instead of making a secure, privacy focused offering we just sell them the usual m365 package. We basically push them into the data industrial complex just to get some collab tools and mail.
  - lormayna 10mo ago

alecco 10mo ago

Many years ago some people proposed to move open source to paid licensing to guarantee income for core open source developers. But the self-righteous community attacked them like it was the end of the world. In the current cancel culture even if you use *GPL licenses you get attacked for not being MIT or similar. But mysteriously never a peep about Big Tech making billions off open source without giving back even a tiny 1% to the projects. Insanity.

LexiMax 10mo ago
"Open Source" has always been a play for Free Software from a pragmatic and business-focused point of view, as opposed to a community-focused and moralistic one. https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.opensource.org/docs/history.php https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso...
ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
The sales pitch for FOSS to corporations in the 1990s and 2000s was "free as in speech and free as in beer". Reneging on that is a straight-up rug pull on the adopters.
- alecco 10mo ago
  Pretty sure it was "free as in libre and not as in beer". Source: I was there.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
    Both gratis and libre were talking points for FOSS advocates, with gratis being leaned on heavily to persuade businesses who didn't give a hoot about libre, which turned out to be almost everybody. Source: I was there too.

atonse 10mo ago

This has been my view too... all these years, all these organizations with collective billions, and didn't anyone have the vision to say, let's all pool some money together and actually get these open source alternatives to shed some of the papercuts, and maybe hire some UX/designers to make them look more polished?

ryukoposting 10mo ago

There are plenty of decision makers who will not be sold on an abstract concept like software sovereignty, especially when it requires them to change. Tell the same crowd "$15 million saved" and more of them will listen. They're out of their minds if they're donating nothing to Libreoffice, though.

ho_schi 10mo ago

True. Software and computers don’t even exist to save money. A lot of problems stem from the weird idea of MBAs that a computer, digitalization or even cloud are there to save money. I hope Holstein prepared the switch well and kill off any Microsoft stuff as quick as possible. Nothing is worse than co-existence with something hostile which doesn’t want to be compatible. * No Dual-Booting * No VM * Especially no WINE (your ducked with every odd update) * And by the love of god, hit everyone with a bat which tries to ship incompatible files (MS-Office, ppt, xls, pst…) to you. Links to “Microsoft Teams”? Hit harder and show no mercy :) What to do, minimal list: * Make plan. * Used standards wherever possible. * Switch file-formats and external platforms before. Use a standard distribution and DO NOT MAKE YOUR OWN DISTRIBUTION. If you have a big IT department with hundreds of employees, maybe an own repository with your custom software. * Enforce all suppliers hard to support Linux natively! If not? Drop them. Search a honest company which gives you also the source. * Avoid the usual mistake like “this a local support company” or “their offer is cheaper” * Don’t purchase shitty hardware. ThinkPads are a good start, but we speak about printers, NFC, label writers, scanners and so on. If your answer doesn’t include either Debian, Red Hat, Canonical or Suse it is probably the wrong choice. You need support. The remaining 20 percent of workplaces are currently still dependent on Microsoft programs such as Word or Excel, as there is a technical dependency on these programs in certain specialized applications. According to Schrödter, however, the successive conversion of these remaining computers is the stated goal. A red flag. Soft migrations work only, if both side cooperate. If not, hard migration. Short pain is better than long suffering. PS: And don’t repeat Munich! Munich is “HOW NOT”. Three distinct IT-Departments. And the next major was “convinced ” with tax money and a Microsoft Headquarters. Result, it is worse than before.

GoblinSlayer 10mo ago
Apparently their tax administration has some extensive automation with Excel spreadsheets and VBA.
jimnotgym 10mo ago
>dependent on Microsoft programs such as Word or Excel This kind of suggests that they have a bunch of VBA scripts in the tax department and the legal team are dependent on sharing 'track changes' in contracts. It will do the world a favour if the VBA is forced out. Don't know what they will do about 'track changes', it is ubiquitous in the contract world. Hopefully they will force government suppliers onto the libre alternative.

PeterStuer 10mo ago

It should be what the kids these days call 'sovereignty', but ain't nobody got budget for that.

ninth_ant 10mo ago

You hate that, but what I hate that so many of my tax dollars are funnelled into bloated software run by awful foreign companies with massive lock-in scams, when better free software is available. I hate that lobbyists and consultants get these systems into place and can’t be unseated despite its utter unreasonableness. It’s a tremendous mis-allocation of public resources. Hiring local people to tailor the free software which already exists and contributing those changes back to the world would spend fewer of those dollars and spend them locally, and be pro-social at the same time. So I don’t hate this story. I love it and see it as a massive win.

9dev 10mo ago
That's a double-edged sword, though. Those tax dollars don't just pay for the license, but for ongoing development, responsibility for security issues, support contracts, emergency personnel, and so on. With a purely Open Source strategy, you'll have to pay multiple external consultants to take care of part of this, and/or cover these roles in-house. And suddenly, you've taken up a lot of tasks completely foreign to your business domain, such as new infrastructure and its maintenance, documentation requirements, software development, and so on. And we haven't even talked about the massive effort of educating your entire workforce on new tools and workflows. Assuming you just replace a proprietary software ecosystem with an Open Source one and immediately get the same thing for free is a very naive view that will get you in trouble. Having said that, as a German, I am very happy this switch happens and seems to have some backing in the local administration at least. But it's still a high-risk wager and I'm afraid it'll turn out like the LiMux project in Munich, which was eventually (and cleverly so) framed as the origin of all problems in the municipal digital infrastructure. In the end, it got swapped out for a new Microsoft contract in a wonderful example of lobbyism and bribery, and Open Source and Linux have been discredited, to the point no winning mayor candidate can ever bring it up again as a viable alternative.
- lenkite 10mo ago
  > Those tax dollars don't just pay for the license, but for ongoing development, responsibility for security issues, support contracts, emergency personnel, and so on. Maybe this was true at one point in time. But now, it just pays for AI/Copilot and your latest support chatbot.

nyankas 10mo ago

The German government actually started and funded quite a few projects supporting FOSS development over the past few years. For example, ZenDis was founded in 2022 to develop open-source software for the public administration. They are the driving force behind openDesk, which is shaping up to be a great office- and collaboration suite. Also, there's the Sovereign Tech Agency, where open-source projects can apply for direct funding. The available funds aren't as big as I'd like them to be, but it's not as if there's no funding coming from the German government.

VerifiedReports 10mo ago
This is the first I've heard of OpenDesk. What makes it specific to "public administration," vs. regular business?
- nyankas 10mo ago
  ZenDis has the specific task of improving FOSS software for use by government agencies, so Germany's public administration is simply their primary focus in their development work. I honestly don't have enough experience with different collaboration suites to pinpoint any major feature differences.
  - VerifiedReports 10mo ago
    Thanks. The software's homepage also cites its target of "public administration," so I'm curious as to what it might lack for private companies or projects.

immibis 10mo ago

Why would a budget-conscious institution give away money for free?

Jean-Papoulos 10mo ago

>In contrast, there would be one-time investments of nine million euros in 2026 [...] and the further development of solutions with free software. They are contributing actively it seems, so even better.

input_sh 10mo ago
And in the sentence above that, they're "saving" 15 million in Microsoft licenses. So either they've paid 24 million to Microsoft this year, in which case their next year's expenses are dropping by over 60%, or it's the same pot of money, in which case their yearly bill dropped by 40%. I get that 9 million sounds like a lot, but it's much, much lower than what they would've paid to Microsoft anyways. And those 9 million are advertised as a "one-off investment", while their contract with Microsoft was perpetual.