public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird)
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they will save 188,000 € on Microsoft license fees per year
ambitious plan
Good, good, but I guess it is only a plan to negotiate for lower prices.
But if they actually deliver without going back...
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I would guess a few thousand users.
That might be borderline - probably easiest (and most cost efficient) to work through a big provider (M$, Google, etc) to let them solve the problems for you, for a small fee, rather than tasking 0.1 FTEs on constantly whacking the moles.
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Yet they are fine with using Windows 11, which looks completely different to Windows 7 or XP. They complained in the beginning just as much but then they were fine with it. People get used to change, they just hate it in the beginning.
When they have no choice...
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Agreed. However, more users (personal, institutional or business) equals more devs focused on the OS.
We need enough, not more. The concept of "more" and "surplus" got us into this capitalist dystopia. I know this isn't the point you're making. I'm just making a separate point that I thought of reading yours.
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That might be borderline - probably easiest (and most cost efficient) to work through a big provider (M$, Google, etc) to let them solve the problems for you, for a small fee, rather than tasking 0.1 FTEs on constantly whacking the moles.
I don't know why it should be easier. I pay this provider and I get a working email account without problems.
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I don't know why it should be easier. I pay this provider and I get a working email account without problems.
If your provider is working for you, then all is good. I suspect they either A) have hundreds of thousands or more e-mail users in total, or B) they work through one of the big providers for you.
If your provider only serves 20,000 or fewer e-mail clients, the costs for them to independently play white-list, black-list, whack-a-mole, pleading to keep their legitimate users' e-mail working smoothly would be prohibitive - upwards of $10 per year per e-mail account just for the employee(s) tasked with negotiating (and solving) those issues behind the scenes for their users (including you), not to mention policing their users to prevent them from abusing the e-mail system.
It's basically a problem of prejudice - if any e-mail account remotely linkable to yours by any metric mis-behaves, some admin somewhere will block it along with anything remotely associated with it - including your e-mail service. Then it's up to you, or your organization, or your organization's service provider, to track down the offended party and somehow negotiate with them to restore the blocked services for the innocent users.
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they will save 188,000 € on Microsoft license fees per year
It would be nice to redirect a part of that money to support the development of used software. Thunderbird for example is constantly at risk of being shut down.
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We need enough, not more. The concept of "more" and "surplus" got us into this capitalist dystopia. I know this isn't the point you're making. I'm just making a separate point that I thought of reading yours.
And that's fine. I agree. Becoming consumist hoarders is what got us to where we're at. Or rather, what allowed companies and institutions to take us here.
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they will save 188,000 € on Microsoft license fees per year
That's 188k euro that can be used to improve the quality of open source software.
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LibreOffice is a great alternative for 99% of people, but there is that 1% of people who is gonna be disappointment.
This is a great step though.I use powerpoint all the time. Impress is very far behind in terms of usability and basic functionality. But I'm hopeful it will get better as adoption increases.