|
> Since the options are 1), keep spending EU taxpayer money to boost Microsoft's and other US big-tech market cap, or 2), spend EU taxpayer money on FOSS and local companies implementing and maintaining that FOSS for local infrastructure, then the correct choice seems obvious to me. Didn't that happen in Germany, where they basically did a migration away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice and then basically switched back? Here's a more recent article about something similar that mentions that case: https://www.zdnet.com/article/german-state-ditches-microsoft... > If some of this sounds familiar, congratulations on having a great memory. Munich, the capital of Bavaria, Germany, switched from Windows to Linux in 2004. That move lasted for a decade before Munich returned to Windows -- in no small part because the mayor wanted Microsoft to move its headquarters to Munich. Either way, to me it feels like both having that additional bit of options/leverage is a nice thing, as well as using open source in the first place. I've built systems both with the likes of Oracle and PostgreSQL and while both have some nice features, in most cases I'd lean towards the latter because it's just nicer to use, regardless of whether you need to operate an instance for some environment, launch a local instance or even have short lived test instances that are spun up for your CI pipeline; it's like suddenly your hands are no longer tied up in licensing and layers upon layers of complexity and restrictions. In my eyes, it's the same for using some variety of GNU/Linux on the server side, instead of Windows Server. That's not to say that tech coming from big orgs itself is the problem, I have nothing against JDK, Java, MySQL, .NET, ASP.NET etc. Rather, it's that permissively licensed solutions with communities around them are usually pretty nice to use. Plus, there's way less friction during development, too., you don't even need to check whether you have the Kendo UI license but instead something reusable is an npm install away. That said, in regards to established software like Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice, it's likely that there will never be full feature parity, but that's probably not some absolute dealbreaker for most. |
At least for finance and insurance industry, the feature differences between Excel and LibreOffice Calc are are deal-breaker (users in these industries are often power users of Excel). I can also easily imagine that the same holds for Powerpoint vs LibreOffice Impress for the consulting industry.