if all goverment entities in the EU spent the money they pay for MS licenses on free software instead, they could fund hundreds of free software developers. How cool would that be?
Hundreds? I think you mean tens of thousands. Microsoft products are expensive and their costs are embedded in everything.
Need a replacement workstation? Add an extra hundred for the unavoidable cost of Windows.
Office and Teams are an ongoing subscription fee that costs about $100 per employee. Sharepoint licenses run over a thousand a year before you add in custom modules.
Microsoft’s Azure cloud host is now running most things like your company’s exchange server - so you pay for the Exchange service subscription AND the hosting costs.The list goes on.
if they actually spend it, instead of than celebrating the immense savings.
Very cool. Especially if their work benefits everyone. Maybe they can even fix kerning in LibreOffice for everyone.
It would be super cool, but a lot of that software requires hardware to be run on, so some of that budget would likely have to go there to cover formally/microsoft-hosted services.
Teams is dogshit. Every time they push an upgrade, it makes my job selling it so much more difficult.
Godspeed Germany, I hope you find a better solution shortly. It can’t be that difficult.
It is not. I am part of a small company (say 25 people) and we use combination of Rocket Chat, Jitsi, and Nextcloud (among other apps). It is literally unlimited licenses, forever, and it will keep working until the heat death of the universe, with no need to update ever until it stops working. Costs 60$ a month for a server to run these, plus Gitlab and tons of other services.
Yes, a fellow Jitsi user in the wild!
How is it treating you?
Apart from having to write a custom script to automatically upload recordings to Peertube, pretty good! Some people have issues connecting from their work network because apparently our domain is not on some allow list for calls. But everything works out of the box, quality is nice, Rocket Chat has an integration. The only thing I am missing is scheduling calls where the host is one predefined user, and everyone has to wait until they connect, and moderator being the first to connect. It is stable, streaming works, UI is partially crude and some features do not work out of the box when not configured separately. But hey, it is free and no big corpo is snooping around!
Many Bundesländer and cities are just embracing MSFT even more with Win 10’s end and hop onto M365 with Exchange Online, which locks them in even more. This is the outliner.
Which is true, however: if they pull it off, others will follow. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
I just hope that sme of those saved €millions head towards Linux / Libre Office
If you are interested in the Germans public sectors open source developments check out openDesk: https://www.opendesk.eu/en
If you want to know more, also take a look at openCode and ZenDis, the (kinda) government institution behind it.
Me too, Germany
For clarification, this just concerns Schleswig-Holstein, not the entirety of Germany.
Good, now dump bibis nazi terror state.
