This is a bluff that almost every government and municipality with huge contracts with MS does whenever they come up for renewal as part of their negotiations, nobody in MS is impressed.
In other news: 2020 is not the year of the linux desktop.
In other news: 2020 is not the year of the linux desktop.
The actual migration to Linux went mostly fine and was largely a success as far as government software programs go, FWIW.
To this day eventually this attrition pushes many back to the more compatible and familiar solution.
I've seen (usually very small) companies going to Linux and other FOSS solutions without actually understanding this beyond "they're free". Migration went great. Later on I came back to do the migration the other way around once they faced that attrition and realized that support costs were dwarfing the license cost.
Former actual LiMux team member here, so I can speak from experience (almost a decade ago though). The hardest part was convince users to be happy on utterly inadequate and aged hardware. No, 1 GB of RAM won't cut it when you have to have Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and some fucking Java crap open at the same time, and 1024x768 screens won't do so either.
The last part alone excludes many cheap vendors as they don't have government contracting experience, and the spare parts requirements kills the rest as they can only be so cheap because they don't have to build much of a spare parts infrastructure. (Note: this is not specifically relating to LiMux in any way, I have no knowledge about the contracts/tender process that happened back then)
Also, the scale matters: 15.500 PCs are even at 500$ apiece 7.75 million €.
It's too gentle to say that users are struggling or resisting.
The fact on the ground is that a significant part of users are simply incapable of learning new computer software, they can't even use effectively the software they've been working on for years. This is glaring in a giant government organization with tens of thousands of employees. Thus any attempt to move OS is doomed to fail.
Classic example is the popup when closing a word document. "Do you want to save the document before exiting? Save/Quit/Cancel". The typical user clicks the little red cross in the top right corner of the dialog.
I understand that it has been in the news that MS spent a lot of energy on preventing people from moving away from Windows, and I think I remember steep discounts but it has been a while since I read about it, but while the government could be going "haha let's put out another statement and get more discounts" I would say it's more likely that there are people in power in Europe that genuinely want to lessen our dependency on the benevolent big brothers from the USA. But that's just how the news reports it, perhaps I'm not cynical enough. Anyway, if you know of a statement by anyone in a relevant government that claims this was a negotiation tactic, that would be interesting.
Which in practice binds absolutely no one to absolutely anything.
But that lends the question; what does it take to end the Microsoft monopoly on our governments?
It can’t just be open document standards. I think it goes further than that; into our schools maybe.
I don’t have answers, but it’s a serious question I have.
That should be "offering" singular, not "offerings" plural.
And it's totally feasible to produce a superior ecosystem. The hard part is absorbing years of financial loss while building the new ecosystem from the ground up while it isn't compatible with the existing proprietary system.
Why ? An ecosystem consists of multiple offerings and there are also multiple commercial ecosystems.
> And it's totally feasible to produce a superior ecosystem. The hard part is absorbing years of financial loss while building the new ecosystem from the ground up while it isn't compatible with the existing proprietary system.
Being able to finance something is an inherent part of its feasibility.
While I generally agree that FOSS software (Libreoffice calc) is inferior for business needs, a _lot_ of the issues actually stem from compatibility.
Not just compatibility of the document system and interpretation, though that is a large part. But compatibility of functionality too, along with UI design.
People are more likely to re-train for a new UI on a new edition of their previous software because it is seen to them as a progression, but they are not so open to changing UI paradigms with different software that does the same thing.
In order for something "better" to be accepted it has to not just be better- it has to be _so_ much better that it trumps everything else.
in the very best of cases it has to be 100% compatible in all areas and _still_ at least substantially better.
That's without getting in to opensource financing, which is a difficult topic. Though I can imagine if Munich put their resources into a FOSS foundation which was providing productivity software it would help tremendously. I don't think they're going to do that because Linux (and ecosystem) is seen as cheaper, so why negate the cost saving?
Obviously that would disrupt quite a few existing business models in software industry, so do not take that as a completely serious proposal.
More specifically, if you can find another place which sells the same model for less, then you get it for the other price.
Thing is, they are the only seller of that model. The vendor has a model X123 for that shop, a model X124 for another place, etc. And that shop is the only one who can sell that specific model. So they of course have the lowest price.
Something similar exists for software: that's why there's "home" and "office" and "professional" and "enterprise" and so many other variants.
So, your "home" version only supports 2 connections at a time, your "office" one doesn't implement a certain function that "professionals" are more likely to use, and your "enterprise" defaults to logging. Even better, with software you can have a unique product for each sale.
All different pieces of software, so all different prices.
Then on top of that, you don't sell the software but software + support. And the support costs can vary.
Which means I think it's easy to bypass your hypothetical restriction.
> Thing is, they are the only seller of that model. The vendor has a model X123 for that shop, a model X124 for another place, etc. And that shop is the only one who can sell that specific model. So they of course have the lowest price.
This is endemic in the mattress industry. Products that are identical and manufactured by the same company will be relabelled based on the company that buys them.
That's why your "dream-air luxury liner" could not get a discount because the other company has a "dream-air luxury comfort", which is the same exact product.
There needs to be other vendors who can supply document editing software that is 100% compatible with MS Office. But more than this, there needs to be other vendors who can supply operating systems that are capable of running Windows software.
As long as a single company has the leverage that Microsoft has over the enterprise ecosystem we won't have a free market. Governments can start by mandating that new software deployments have several possible vendors, including at the operating system level.