Following a successful pilot project, the northern German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to move from Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice (and other free and open source software) on the 30,000 PCs used in the local government. As reported on the homepage of the Minister-President: Independent, sustainable, secure: Schleswig-Holstein will […]
M$ charges 5M €. Libreoffice might be 1M € so they will give 1M € to OSS and waste the remaining 3M € on some overly expensive one-time crap like car infrastructure. Later they will realize that they had understaffed their IT department and will need extra 5M € paid by more state debt.
Why not both?
Let’s say MS charges $5M a year.
Their support contract, assuming they get one, for libre office might be $1M.
They could still invest another $1M in OSS and still save $3M
A $1M net gain for OSS and a $3M savings for the govt.
That’s called a pareto optimum
That’s still not how governments work
It would be nice if it worked like that, but we both know it doesn’t
In reality it’s gonna be something like:
M$ charges 5M €. Libreoffice might be 1M € so they will give 1M € to OSS and waste the remaining 3M € on some overly expensive one-time crap like car infrastructure. Later they will realize that they had understaffed their IT department and will need extra 5M € paid by more state debt.