Schleswig-Holstein, one of Germany’s 16 states, on Wednesday confirmed plans to move tens of thousands of systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The announcement follows previously established plans to migrate the state government off Microsoft Office in favor of open source LibreOffice.
Isn’t this like the third time they’ve done this and it lamsts until Microsoft backs a dump truck of money up to the government?
Don’t get me wrong though. I hope it sticks! Fuck Microsoft.
Yes, but the last times it was just one city, this time it’s a state.
Good way to
extortget Microsoft to offer competitive prices. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯But yeah, it was the city of Munich that had a few goes at this. Now it’s the state of Schleswig-Holstein.
Linux has come a long way since then. And hopefully so the employees
Well, as the other person said, it was not a failing of LiMux. It was political. Munich had been ruled by one coalition throughout the lifetime of LiMux and after it went to a different coalition, they announced the switch back.
The manager of Munich’s IT department also publicly stated that they were surprised by the decision, because there are no larger technical problems and compatibility is resolved by providing virtualized MS Office, where necessary.
Coincidentally, Microsoft also moved its German headquarters from just outside of Munich’s tax region into Munich around the same time.
It’s not the competitive pricing that is the issue, it the forced upgrade cycle and invasive user policies.
(Except for system admin costs and Mail/File Hosting) a Linux-based solution is literally Free. I would assume that Mail and File hosting for Governmental Entities should be hosted in-house anyway.
More or less, yes.
Germany and France have been trying this for more than two decades.
But every time, there is pressure from the US government (the stick) and Microsoft arranges a short-term deal to make Windows cheaper than the cost of transitioning (the carrot).
But this time, the EU is serious about decoupling from the US, so I think it will actually happen.
I really hope it sticks. Then something decent will have come out of this shit (US) government.
Instead of mass migration, they should just institute small changes to small sections or areas or groups … just slowly erode the windows userbase over a period of about four or five or even ten years. Once it reaches a critical mass at some point … then you can just cut the cord altogether and change over everything and everyone.
That’s what they’re trying to do.
It makes most sense to switch the email+office users to Linux and reserve MacOs and Windows for users who really need to run specific applications.