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Comment by kwhitefoot | Hacker News Reader

There are endless options. School systems have thousands of employees and administrators; if they can't figure out how to support what are generally wonderfully crafted, complex pieces of software handed to them on a plate, they're not really fit for purpose. We're outsourcing institutional self-sufficiency to Microsoft and Google.

The average enterprise with more than 1000 employees use 150 different SaaS products.

https://explodingtopics.com/blog/saas-statistics

Should they also brings those in house?

Yes, governments and public institutions like schools should do that.

You seriously think that every school district should have the expertise to develop software that 150different software companies specialize in?

Bring them in house as in encourage them to release their work on Linux, and if they don't, reimplement whatever thing it is in Linux. Should all be FOSS too if they can manage it. Public money, after all, should have public code.

The idea of re-implementing all those SaaS web apps as Linux apps is completely absurd and doesn’t benefit the end user.

Not all, only those that don't work in Linux for some inexplainable reason and whose developers no longer want government contract money. I think you'll find that that number is basically zero.

So it’s okay to have proprietary software as long as it is running on an open source operating system?

If you want, but why would you want that when there are as good and often better FOSS alternatives. With FOSS stuff you can have your cake and use any kind of plate you want to eat it from.

Is there a “better” alternative to an Office 365 subscription that comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, One Drive online storage, hosted email and each user csn use the same set of software between Macs, Windows, Web, Android, iPhones, iPads, etc?

A business can get that at retail for $160/year. A student can buy that for $79.00/4 years.

Those are retail prices. I can guarantee you that large organizations aren’t paying retail.

And don’t overlook the online component and the governance and the SSO. I know plenty of MS shops that use MS’s hosted SSO solution to log in to AWS.

It amazes me how little HN understands about the needs of large enterprises.

Heck I work for one of the Big 5 tech companies (FAANG - Netflix + Microsoft) and it isn’t MS and we all have Microsoft licenses.

What does a student need the MS Office package for in a school context?

The average enterprise also has massive competitive pressures to stay ahead of the curve.

Schools have no such pressures and in fact are better served by being conservative in how quickly they change what they do.

That’s how you get stuck with Lotus as your email system and IE6 in 2022, and frustrating competent admins with old technology.

And how you get mainframes managing their unemployment systems that can’t handle the load when unemployment spikes during a worldwide crises like what happened two years ago.

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