[draga79]

Updating Exchange would have meant spending a lot on new licenses to upgrade to a new release, and public administrations were encouraged to seek open-source solutions. The underlying server infrastructure was solid, but the VM with Exchange was now old. The entire setup would have needed to be redone. The second paragraph, on the other hand, says that the quote was "acceptable" for them, knowing the average costs for that service. But it was also very high, even in the opinion of the IT manager.

This isn't AI slop. These are real-life experiences. The goal is to raise awareness that open source doesn't always and necessarily mean freedom: lock-in exists.

[elijahcarrel]

Makes sense and thank you for explaining and improving the article! Apologies for jumping to conclusions. It might be worth adding a tidbit directly to the article on why Exchange couldn’t be updated and how it was irrelevant to the “solid” infrastructure (I.e. something like “while Exchange was sorely out of date due to the hassle and cost of upgrading, the underlying infrastructure of the in-house servers it ran on was solid”), but defer to you and other folks here. If I’m the only who was bothered by that then the fault is mine!

[bigfishrunning]

> The goal is to raise awareness that open source doesn't always and necessarily mean freedom: lock-in exists.

This lock-in was legal and political, not technical. The lesson I would take away is "don't do business with parties that you don't trust".