The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source

I hate when switches like these get advertised first and foremost as some huge cost-cutting measure, further solidifying open source ecosystem as some cheap knock-offs of their commercial alternatives.

How about instead you donate the same amount of money you would've paid to Microsoft anyways to fund open source projects you rely on? At least for one year, then drop it down to some arbitrary chosen percentage of that cost. That way you can still advertise it as a cost-cutting measure, and everyone would benefit.

You hate that, but what I hate that so many of my tax dollars are funnelled into bloated software run by awful foreign companies with massive lock-in scams, when better free software is available. I hate that lobbyists and consultants get these systems into place and can’t be unseated despite its utter unreasonableness.

It’s a tremendous mis-allocation of public resources. Hiring local people to tailor the free software which already exists and contributing those changes back to the world would spend fewer of those dollars and spend them locally, and be pro-social at the same time.

So I don’t hate this story. I love it and see it as a massive win.

That's a double-edged sword, though. Those tax dollars don't just pay for the license, but for ongoing development, responsibility for security issues, support contracts, emergency personnel, and so on. With a purely Open Source strategy, you'll have to pay multiple external consultants to take care of part of this, and/or cover these roles in-house. And suddenly, you've taken up a lot of tasks completely foreign to your business domain, such as new infrastructure and its maintenance, documentation requirements, software development, and so on. And we haven't even talked about the massive effort of educating your entire workforce on new tools and workflows.

Assuming you just replace a proprietary software ecosystem with an Open Source one and immediately get the same thing for free is a very naive view that will get you in trouble.

Having said that, as a German, I am very happy this switch happens and seems to have some backing in the local administration at least. But it's still a high-risk wager and I'm afraid it'll turn out like the LiMux project in Munich, which was eventually (and cleverly so) framed as the origin of all problems in the municipal digital infrastructure. In the end, it got swapped out for a new Microsoft contract in a wonderful example of lobbyism and bribery, and Open Source and Linux have been discredited, to the point no winning mayor candidate can ever bring it up again as a viable alternative.

> Those tax dollars don't just pay for the license, but for ongoing development, responsibility for security issues, support contracts, emergency personnel, and so on.

Maybe this was true at one point in time. But now, it just pays for AI/Copilot and your latest support chatbot.