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Seems the most important thing to be big in software in europe, is to foremost be not german ;)
This is the kind of story that would have been cheered on on Slashdot twenty years ago. But here we are in 2021 and a major organization having the temerity to not pay the Microsoft tax is newsworthy. This is not what a free market looks like.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Seems to be a running trend in Germany to move toward open software. Yeah, until the Ms sales guys wine and dine some German politicians and promise to build a new campus in $BIG_CITY that creates ## jobs, then they suddenly decide to renew their windows and office licenses instead. Rinse and repeat.
Sure, it has nothing to do with overall better UX that the actual users of these computers require, it's all corruption.
The more we invest together, the easier it becomes. German states can help Spanish states, and Finnish schools, Danish universities, and French businesses, etc. - collaboratively investing so that everyone benefits and Europe can build its own Tech industry and have some independence from the US.
This is absolutely critical to move away from the dominance of "Big Tech" to FOSS solutions that independent, small co-operatives can maintain together.
This is the kind of story that would have been cheered on on Slashdot twenty years ago. But here we are in 2021 and a major organization having the temerity to not pay the Microsoft tax is newsworthy. This is not what a free market looks like.
This is the kind of story that would have been cheered on on Slashdot twenty years ago. But here we are in 2021 and a major organization having the temerity to not pay the Microsoft tax is newsworthy. This is not what a free market looks like.
This is great, but they seem to be missing the other part of it, which is that (at least some of) the money saved ought to go towards funding development of the open software. If that happened then Libre Office could hope to outcompete MS Office on merit sometime in the near future. As it is, it's unclear how much this really supports the free software.
OSS is dead.
Even Linux - I bet half installs nowadays are on AWS/GCP/etc., and they run custom distros, and one day Debian won’t have enough funding to fix all CVEs, and the only ones which will be constantly viable to run when you have liabilities (=all the time) will be cloud provider-maintained ones.
MS Office was so much more functional and nicer to use than libreoffice when I last checked.
That is possible. But apparently, people in Germany are looking for software based on attributes that reach beyond the elemental metrics like "nice to use" or "supports corporate integration". They might care more about the ability to audit the software's behavior and to easily make changes where necessary. They might also like to contribute patches back to the original LibreOffice community because they know that th…
And what would the patches be for? What use-cases do they have that are so unique that they need custom software?
Now switch to Linux too. The more we invest together, the easier it becomes. German states can help Spanish states, and Finnish schools, Danish universities, and French businesses, etc. - collaboratively investing so that everyone benefits and Europe can build its own Tech industry and have some independence from the US. This is absolutely critical to move away from the dominance of "Big Tech" to FOSS solutions that…