Germany gives €204.5 million to Microsoft annually while European open-source projects need investment. Redirecting these funds could strengthen data sovereignty and create good local jobs

There is of course no short term solution, but with an annual budget of $200Mio. there can be an open source solution after a few years.

Btw. that is only Microsoft we are talking about, of SAP and others are reevaluated as well, the budget is much higher.

And yes, a lot of companies go all in on Microsoft. One of our customers only wants their products for all their infrastructure, but if Microsoft is made pricier e.g. through taxes then those companies also have to act.

It would definitely be a long time win.

like i said. nontechnical

It's the operational reality of a herd mentality in the C suite across every major and semi-major software company, a C suite that cares much more about bullshit Gartner reports than what their underlings say, coupled with high-ranking marketing people who are addicted to Outlook and think everyone should be.

Also, you pay Microsoft to move lots if liability off yourself to Microsoft.

A C-suite level person gets lots of guarantees for all sorts of things from Microsoft that they can blame almost regardless of what goes wrong.

This is Microsofts biggest advantage, they sell a fall guy.

There are only two possible email providers in the world (apparently) and Red Hat is using Google, so they couldn't possibly go for that. :)

In any case, if any Suse exec talks to you about digital sovereignty, be aware they don't believe their own spiel. (The more traditional Linux dev folks think differently, to some degree. But, as elsewhere, the culture wars over that were largely won by the "business" part of the company.)

It's the operational reality that even in an org that does a lot to support Open Source, like all orgs, they require a lot of non-technical people to keep the thing going


You don't want to know how much Suse itself spends on MS365 and Windows licenses. :) All email to/from at-suse-dot-com is going through Exchange 365, and the majority of employees use Mac and Windows systems as their primary work systems, that's true even for certain groups of developers.

I believe your wording is a bit poor. The government doesn't "give" that money to Microsoft, but instead buys and rents various products and services. While I agree that the public sector in general, especially here in Europe, should try to set an example by trying to make use of open source software if possible and feasible, I know from experience at my own company that Microsoft is so firmly entrenched that there's no short term solutions here.

Makes sense when Suse is just sitting there