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I agree it's not written in the clearest way, nor verifiable (though Stefano Marinelli does seem to be a semi-public figure in the online IT community, so it's not some anonymous blog).

>So we have just learned in paragraph 1 that the current system is dated and full of security holes and missing features. In paragraph 2 we have learned that the current system's infrastructure is "solid" and "working fine".

This confused me too, until I realized that he probably meant that his company set up the hardware infrastructure ("reputable IP classes, redundant datacenters"), but doesn't manage the software. Otherwise, why shred your own credibility from the first sentence by crapping on the "ancient," "insecure," and "ineffective" Exchange server?

>How can the price be both "reasonable" and "absurd?"

Agreed, this part makes no sense.

The price was reasonable given the average quotes received by similar entities and the prices on the market, but it was absurd when considering the service provided. Perhaps I didn't make that point clear, and I'll likely modify it slightly. The concept is that the price, which was initially acceptable to them, was in fact absurd when viewed in terms of what was being provided.

Ah, that makes sense. I would update it to say something like "the price was competitive with the generally overpriced market."

I've modified this sentence, I hope it's clearer now:

They had already received a proposal - expensive but, when compared to similar offers made to other organizations, apparently reasonable — for a managed service hosted by an external provider and based on an open source mail stack. The company offered a managed version with its own proprietary additions and enterprise support.

The catch? While such pricing had become almost "normal" in the market, it was still wildly inflated considering what was actually being delivered. Agency A already had solid infrastructure - reputable IP classes, redundant datacenters, everything running smoothly. We had built and maintained that environment for years, and it was still performing perfectly.

Perfect! Exchanges like this are why the internet is still a great place.

Thank you, agree this is much better!

PS: thank you for your suggestion!

Side question: If you and your co-workers (across multiple government agencies) had strong suspicion that the vendor had a backdoor to spying on your emails why wasn't the obvious choice contacting federal law enforcement? I'm not sure what it is like in the EU, but in the US I'm pretty sure that if something like this was discovered at a government agency that vendor would quickly find their office raided by FBI agents.

> I'm sorry but this reads like AI slop. Or maybe it's not AI slop, it's just regular human-generated slop, but regardless: it's useless.

> For one: it's intentionally completely unverifiable. Sure, maybe the writer's not brave enough to break their NDA by sharing names. But it's also convenient: nobody can ever poke holes in the story, or add their own context to it. The story just gets to live on its own and earn internet karma regardless of whether it's at all true.

I’m not sure why this would be surprising: it’s a personal story shared on a blog, not an investigative article in a newspaper.

I also don’t think it helps calling everything “AI slop” these days only if one doesn’t like it for some reason.

Updating Exchange would have meant spending a lot on new licenses to upgrade to a new release, and public administrations were encouraged to seek open-source solutions. The underlying server infrastructure was solid, but the VM with Exchange was now old. The entire setup would have needed to be redone. The second paragraph, on the other hand, says that the quote was "acceptable" for them, knowing the average costs for that service. But it was also very high, even in the opinion of the IT manager.

This isn't AI slop. These are real-life experiences. The goal is to raise awareness that open source doesn't always and necessarily mean freedom: lock-in exists.

Makes sense and thank you for explaining and improving the article! Apologies for jumping to conclusions. It might be worth adding a tidbit directly to the article on why Exchange couldn’t be updated and how it was irrelevant to the “solid” infrastructure (I.e. something like “while Exchange was sorely out of date due to the hassle and cost of upgrading, the underlying infrastructure of the in-house servers it ran on was solid”), but defer to you and other folks here. If I’m the only who was bothered by that then the fault is mine!

> The goal is to raise awareness that open source doesn't always and necessarily mean freedom: lock-in exists.

This lock-in was legal and political, not technical. The lesson I would take away is "don't do business with parties that you don't trust".

Yep, there's at least a dozen "AI writing" red flags across the text.

Low coherence sentence to sentence, stray emdashes, loads of those LLM-was-trying-too-hard writing turns.

If it wasn't written by an AI entirely, then at least it was edited to shit by one.