It's especially funny that Microsoft has been swearing up and down that they can offer "sovereign" infrastructure in Europe, and yet the moment Trump comes calling they trip over themselves to implement his sanctions against the ICC.
Yes at least the Chinese government is pretty consistent. They don't change direction in a day because someone wakes up on the wrong side of the bed.
In the long term this is probably more of a risk because the Chinese strategy actually has long-term planning behind it while the American one is random and a lot of their actions harm themselves more than anyone else. China is the best in the world at playing the long game.
But in the short term the Chinese are more dependable.
People are tired of 25 years of European stories about this and that government branch or municipality switching away from Microsoft lock in to some open source solutions, and then coming back again, etc.
Stick with it for five (5) years consistently, then report on it.
I don't think I've ever seen an article here of that happening? I wouldn't be surprised if it goes but I think showing the effects now instead of in 5 years is helpful.
It's possibly part of the effort to push it so it sticks, else you may have people asking themselves why the government is relying on freeware instead of professionally made software, thinking it's just cheapening out. Open source may not have the good rep it has here, outside of these circles.
The harsh reality is that projects like ffmpeg and SQLite are wild exceptions to the rule. You need more than a handful of well engineered OSS components to run a complicated business like this.
In many cases when a government branch or municipality switches away from Microsoft, Microsoft throws money at the government branch or municipality.
For example, When Munich in 2013 migrated to Linux:
"In 2016, Microsoft relocated its German headquarters to Munich. "
"In 2018, journalistic group Investigate Europe released a video documentary via German public television network ARD that claimed that the majority of city workers were satisfied with the operating system, with council members insinuating that the reversal was a personally motivated decision by mayor Dieter Reiter. Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich."
I've seen this - I was part of a large company that threatened to move everything, not to open source, but to google docs, and MS sales team moved heaven and earth to reverse the decision.
It's not just that they don't want to lose a customer - they don't want lots of examples out there of how it can be done.
I think it's serious this time. Microsoft is definitely worried. The noises they've been making that they've neglected Windows and are making changes to fix this are telling.
They're the ones that probably have access to the most accurate statistics on Linux market share, and they're not liking what they're seeing.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 14.5 ms ] threadIn the long term this is probably more of a risk because the Chinese strategy actually has long-term planning behind it while the American one is random and a lot of their actions harm themselves more than anyone else. China is the best in the world at playing the long game.
But in the short term the Chinese are more dependable.
However turning this on reduces the feature set of m365 massively so almost nobody actually uses it.
Stick with it for five (5) years consistently, then report on it.
There would be very little to talk about.
The harsh reality is that projects like ffmpeg and SQLite are wild exceptions to the rule. You need more than a handful of well engineered OSS components to run a complicated business like this.
For example, When Munich in 2013 migrated to Linux:
"In 2016, Microsoft relocated its German headquarters to Munich. "
"In 2018, journalistic group Investigate Europe released a video documentary via German public television network ARD that claimed that the majority of city workers were satisfied with the operating system, with council members insinuating that the reversal was a personally motivated decision by mayor Dieter Reiter. Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
It's not just that they don't want to lose a customer - they don't want lots of examples out there of how it can be done.
The success stories are there but the failures seem to get more press. Which isn't all that surprising IMO.
They're the ones that probably have access to the most accurate statistics on Linux market share, and they're not liking what they're seeing.