My city has a budget shortfall of $400,000 and they're looking at cutting firefighter positions, arts funding, and parks funding to make up the shortfall. They also, incidentally, spent over $400,000 on just Microsoft office licenses last year, which doubled in cost from the previous year. My goal is to fix the budget shortfall, or at least take a big bite out of it, by switching all users who can't specify what advanced (see: VBA) features they use from MS Office onto LibreOffice, since it provides all the same basic functionality and interoperable file formats. As a stretch goal, I'd love to persuade them to get on Linux, but that might be a bridge too far for most folks at the city.
Does anyone have any advice to help me persuade the city to cut bullshit MS office licenses instead of firefighters? The city does have an IT dept that I've considered reaching out to, but I'm worried that they may fight that proposal because:
A. I hear that MS lobbies city IT relentlessly
B. They may not have the capacity to do the switch.
As for Linux, I'd love to get the machines that are W10 dependent switched to Linux, but that feels like a big reach. People tend to have a "NERD!" reaction to Linux, like mentioning tabletop gaming.
Yeah, it's a classic of locking you in and hiking up the prices, and the people capable of porting those sheets are probably way too overworked dealing with supporting the vast majority who have no idea how they work to spend time on it (or getting fired by Elon for not doing anything while being the single block that supports the tower)
It sucks, but I wouldn't give up on trying to get them to convert, just be aware that it's very possible that this will be one of the biggest technical (as opposed to administrative) blocks.