Former Mayor of Munich Explains How Microsoft Undermined Linux

I know Atlassian changed it colors[1] for “cringy blue” because it made people less afraid of clicking than “serious blue”. But generally the same persons who succeed to become fashionistas on Instagram and plug it with their Google Analytics somehow and make hundreds with it, are sometimes the same who would need a training to use the Microsoft ribbon, come Monday morning.

[1] Heavy use of B400 for flat elements like the bar, to sashimi salmon for lozenges: https://atlassian.design/server/foundations/colors/

Unfortunately I left Limux years before that shit happened so I cannot answer that question directly - I'll try with general politics instead. It was a political decision IMO - politicians were fed up with Limux shortcomings (which was caused mainly by their inability to provide users with decent hardware), that got combined with the decision of MS to move its Europe headquarters and thus a lot of prestige and tax money to Munich. Basically a "quid pro quo" deal, the politicians knew what was expected (getting rid of the flagship Linux government project) for this. Old government head and Limux fan Christian Ude went out to retirement, his successor Reiter... well, my opinion about that dude is beyond what is acceptable under HN guidelines. I'm happy he's at least done what he could against our local neo-nazis, but everything else... thanks but no thanks.

> - how much more would be needed to fix LiMux problems

A shitload of money. Limux was 15k desktops (for ~30k employees) IIRC, which means replacing all of them at ~1k € (new PC, monitor, mouse and keyboard - believe me, everything needed upgrades) or 15 million € alone for the hardware, plus upgrading alll the government building networks (probably 500 buildings, of which alone 300 are schools) and uplinks which will rack into three-digit million sums... and for staff, instead of the ~8 people working on Limux proper maybe 30-50 developers alone, which means another 1.5M a year at least in staffing costs.

Personally, it feels like the beginning of the turning of a tide. Large organizations are finally starting to wear on the idea of "subscriptions" as a default base for lock-in and data collection. "Our service runs in the cloud for your benefit!" they say. "It's a subscription that delivers customer value!" they say. None of it's true. The angle is investor value. Everyone at Microsoft size is building products for the bottom line, not the consumer. Microsoft doesn't get a pass because the article doesn't drill on point by point how Microsoft has marginalized and abused OSS since they took the first pot shots at Linux.

I still don't understand how organizations rationalize Windows as a core OS their business runs on. Primarily Microsoft environments fuel the majority of the security industry today and so it appears to be one big cyclical money laundering scheme. Microsoft continues to build on a platform that's always rife with security flaws, the Enterprise security vendors "solve" this and it's a fantastic circle of POs for everyone, including Microsoft.

While you may not have gotten "value" from the article the continued solicitation of the punches Microsoft has pulled to continually remind people of that is worth it enough to publish it. Burying what they've done and continue to do brings nobody value.