Money transfer from the German Federal Administration to Microsoft:

[jesusmargar@mastodon.social]

@kirschner Seeing this only as an open source /free software issue is missing the football, in my opinion. Most of that money won't be on software but on cloud services, servers and support. You may replace MS for open source versions but I doubt the costs would go down considerably and I am not sure how many companies would be able to step in at that level. The Government may have to do it by itself (which is possible, but would take time and serious investment).

[jesusmargar@mastodon.social]

@kirschner In an ideal world, you'd see the EU pulling resources together to replace it with an EU-based alternative, ideally publicly run and serving all 27 nations with possibility to export elsewhere, but that would take a few years to develop. I don't see it happening.

[alterelefant@mastodontech.de]

@kirschner And Microsoft will obviously not lower their prices now they have the customer onboard in their system. When it is extremely difficult and costly for your customer to leave you can basically ask any price you want.

[mray@social.tchncs.de]

@kirschner A more visual representation of how #DigitalSovereignty is going:

[purrperl@noc.social]

@mray @kirschner

EpsteinGate might bring Microsoft down.

https://rant.li/ashwin/castles-made-of-sand

[zygoon@fosstodon.org]

@kirschner then extrapolate to all of EU and see the sheer power there

[pmfl@masto.pt]

@kirschner 🤯

[grishka@mastodon.social]

@kirschner ReactOS would've been finished AND caught up with Windows 11 in terms of compatibility

[adardis@mstdn.social]

@kirschner With 1T Euro you could build a lot of infrastructure, subsidize a lot of free/open software projects. It would not be an easy transition.

[daniel@masto.doserver.top]

@kirschner @Gina

What the actual Dickens??!!

[fds@mastodon.social]

@kirschner I think it has no choice but to to continue unless there people are forced to switch. Otherwise they will naturally go with what they know.

The downside to open hardware is that I think it will always favor whoever has the most money despite ideas that it will produce innovation. At this point I think the only way to combat that would be for governments to give an equal amount of the MS costs to legitimate open source developers.

[fds@mastodon.social]

@kirschner Not to say that we should go back to closed system but tech monopolies have been allowed to go on to long. Ex: opening up the iPhone to other browsers will likely just add to the Chrome dominance which is worse than the Safari lock-in imo.

So, I think we just need to accept the only likely way to fight the dominance is money at this point.

[kolorafa@mastodon.com.pl]

Też bym szukał alternatyw jakby mi opłaty stałe tak szybko rosły...

[kirschner@mastodon.social]

@fds The problems with monopolies is also the reason why we are in front of the European Court of Justice against #Apple: https://fsfe.org/activities/apple-litigation/apple-litigation.en.html

[kirschner@mastodon.social]

@jesusmargar it is often the argument when dealing with monopolies that they are too big to be replaced by another company. That is exactly the problem, and you have to start implementing strategies so there can be more competition by splitting up different components.

[jaypeach53@mastodon.social]

@jesusmargar @kirschner Jesus, and those expenditures would hopefully be done by EU companies paying EU taxes with EU employees. And if the software is open source, even if they were paid handsomely, the fees would probably be 10% of what M$ gets for enshittified software. M$ makes crapware, face it. Or are you just M$ troll?

[rrustema@mastodon.social]

@kirschner @Gerbsen and if Germany would have spent that on free software the rest of the world could have saved also a lot of public money because that software would likely be also useful in other countries.

[pbog@mastodon.social]

@kirschner Maybe someone knows how much money Poland spends.