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Free software and open source doesn't mean non-commercial. SUSE in Germany provides commercial support to their distro for example. Such a weird article, zdnet doesn't getting any better...
> Die Stadt München unterstützt die Entwicklung von Open Source-Projekten mit einem "Munich Open Source Sabbatical". Professionelle Programmierer*innen, die sich für drei oder sechs Monate ganz auf die Fortentwicklung eines Open Source-Projektes kon-zentrieren möchten, können sich dafür auf ein städtisches bezahltes Stipendium bewerben. Die Projekte müssen einen kommunalen Nutzen haben.
[1]: https://www.gruene-muenchen.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Dr...
I'm sure Canonical would happily hier some devs from Munich to make this look local.
I can't imagine any US party echoing the FSF's statement, even if just in a statement of political intent. It's impressive that the movement has enough public interest to make platitudes worthwhile in Germany.
Linux also has more market share in Germany than any other western country, I think.
This is a bluff that almost every government and municipality with huge contracts with MS does whenever they come up for renewal as part of their negotiations, nobody in MS is impressed. In other news: 2020 is not the year of the linux desktop.
They're already on Linux currently. A government change and Microsoft Germany moving their HQ to Munich made them reconsider. Now the government changed again. The actual migration to Linux went mostly fine and was largely a success as far as government software programs go, FWIW.
To this day eventually this attrition pushes many back to the more compatible and familiar solution.
I've seen (usually very small) companies going to Linux and other FOSS solutions without actually understanding this beyond "they're free". Migration went great. Later on I came back to do the migration the other way around once they faced that attrition and realized that support costs were dwarfing the license cost.
This is a bluff that almost every government and municipality with huge contracts with MS does whenever they come up for renewal as part of their negotiations, nobody in MS is impressed. In other news: 2020 is not the year of the linux desktop.
Do you assume it's bluff or is there more behind that statement? I understand that it has been in the news that MS spent a lot of energy on preventing people from moving away from Windows, and I think I remember steep discounts but it has been a while since I read about it, but while the government could be going "haha let's put out another statement and get more discounts" I would say it's more likely that there are…
Which in practice binds absolutely no one to absolutely anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're already on Linux currently. A government change and Microsoft Germany moving their HQ to Munich made them reconsider. Now the government changed again. The actual migration to Linux went mostly fine and was largely a success as far as government software programs go, FWIW.
From my personal experience most times the hardest part is to convince the users. You can throw a lot of resources at the migration, money, good technical experts, and get it done right. But making the regular users happy? That's a whole different subject. Truth is most users still run Windows at home and are familiar with it. Getting used to something else will meet some resistance. Then you have the minor compatibi…
Former actual LiMux team member here, so I can speak from experience (almost a decade ago though). The hardest part was convince users to be happy on utterly inadequate and aged hardware. No, 1 GB of RAM won't cut it when you have to have Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and some fucking Java crap open at the same time, and 1024x768 screens won't do so either.
This is a bluff that almost every government and municipality with huge contracts with MS does whenever they come up for renewal as part of their negotiations, nobody in MS is impressed. In other news: 2020 is not the year of the linux desktop.
Pessimistically, I agree with you. But that lends the question; what does it take to end the Microsoft monopoly on our governments? It can’t just be open document standards. I think it goes further than that; into our schools maybe. I don’t have answers, but it’s a serious question I have.
This is a bluff that almost every government and municipality with huge contracts with MS does whenever they come up for renewal as part of their negotiations, nobody in MS is impressed. In other news: 2020 is not the year of the linux desktop.
Pessimistically, I agree with you. But that lends the question; what does it take to end the Microsoft monopoly on our governments? It can’t just be open document standards. I think it goes further than that; into our schools maybe. I don’t have answers, but it’s a serious question I have.
Obviously that would disrupt quite a few existing business models in software industry, so do not take that as a completely serious proposal.