this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 20 hours ago

For clarification, this just concerns Schleswig-Holstein, not the entirety of Germany.

[โ€“] [email protected] 62 points 1 day ago (5 children)

if all goverment entities in the EU spent the money they pay for MS licenses on free software instead, they could fund hundreds of free software developers. How cool would that be?

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

The EU does fund the development of free software projects, the NGI Zero fund for example funds more than 1000 projects!

[โ€“] Mongostein 3 points 18 hours ago

It would be super cool, but a lot of that software requires hardware to be run on, so some of that budget would likely have to go there to cover formally/microsoft-hosted services.

[โ€“] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago

Hundreds? I think you mean tens of thousands. Microsoft products are expensive and their costs are embedded in everything.

Need a replacement workstation? Add an extra hundred for the unavoidable cost of Windows.
Office and Teams are an ongoing subscription fee that costs about $100 per employee. Sharepoint licenses run over a thousand a year before you add in custom modules.
Microsoft's Azure cloud host is now running most things like your company's exchange server - so you pay for the Exchange service subscription AND the hosting costs.

The list goes on.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

if they actually spend it, instead of than celebrating the immense savings.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Very cool. Especially if their work benefits everyone. Maybe they can even fix kerning in LibreOffice for everyone.

[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If you are interested in the Germans public sectors open source developments check out openDesk: https://www.opendesk.eu/en

If you want to know more, also take a look at openCode and ZenDis, the (kinda) government institution behind it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I see they will use libreoffice & Linux and it's all good but what are they replacing Teams with?

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Mattermost is phenomenal, but it doesn't do audio/video calls. Unless there's been a massive update that I missed lol.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Jitsi could fill this role, but I dont know if it integrates well with Mattermost

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago

They do have audio/screenshare and video is in the pipeline but yeah, not yet possible

https://docs.mattermost.com/collaborate/make-calls.html

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I dont know what teams offers that networked attached storage running and a self hosted rocket chat service couldn't do.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I dont believe they were saying teams is irreplaceable.
I would also be interested to know wa govt selects as an alternative.

[โ€“] [email protected] 36 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Excellent! Returning to software which goal is "how can I make this easier and better for the user", instead of software made by the philosophy "how can I force the user to buy more payed services and how can we mine more data about the user".

Hope more will follow as this will probably improve foss and make work life better for everyone :]

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Paid subscription services

[โ€“] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Teams is dogshit. Every time they push an upgrade, it makes my job selling it so much more difficult.

Godspeed Germany, I hope you find a better solution shortly. It canโ€™t be that difficult.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It is not. I am part of a small company (say 25 people) and we use combination of Rocket Chat, Jitsi, and Nextcloud (among other apps). It is literally unlimited licenses, forever, and it will keep working until the heat death of the universe, with no need to update ever until it stops working. Costs 60$ a month for a server to run these, plus Gitlab and tons of other services.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes, a fellow Jitsi user in the wild!

How is it treating you?

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago

Apart from having to write a custom script to automatically upload recordings to Peertube, pretty good! Some people have issues connecting from their work network because apparently our domain is not on some allow list for calls. But everything works out of the box, quality is nice, Rocket Chat has an integration. The only thing I am missing is scheduling calls where the host is one predefined user, and everyone has to wait until they connect, and moderator being the first to connect. It is stable, streaming works, UI is partially crude and some features do not work out of the box when not configured separately. But hey, it is free and no big corpo is snooping around!

[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago

I just hope that sme of those saved โ‚ฌmillions head towards Linux / Libre Office

[โ€“] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Teams is just a Trojan horse for SharePoint

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Office is a Trojan horse for teams

Windows is a Trojan horse for office.

The MS ecosystem is a hollow wooden horse matryoshka doll

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Iโ€™m actually almost entirely certain that teams is going to become the new outlook soon

[โ€“] [email protected] 25 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Many Bundeslรคnder and cities are just embracing MSFT even more with Win 10's end and hop onto M365 with Exchange Online, which locks them in even more. This is the outliner.

[โ€“] [email protected] 24 points 1 day ago

Which is true, however: if they pull it off, others will follow. Donโ€™t let perfect be the enemy of good.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ah thx, not a native as you can tell:)

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago

No judgement whatsoever. English words come from so many similar sounding roots!

[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago

Me too, Germany

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (3 children)

This post is vying for most reposted article on Lemmy

[โ€“] SplashJackson 7 points 1 day ago

Have you heard? Tesla stocks are plummetting!!!

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

It has it all!

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yea cause Lemmy users have a hard on for Linux and anything and everything Microsoft = terrible lmao its truly fun to read these comments at least.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Well. It is objectively true that everything Microsoft is in fact terrible

[โ€“] [email protected] -2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Yea they are so terrible they are market leaders with trillion dollar cap, absolutely the worse.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The mistake you are making is conflating profitability and quality.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

No the mistake yall are making is ignoring if a product was truly bad then EVERYONE would abandon it but they don't been doing IT for 2 decades windows is going no where.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Microsoft has very, very good salespeople and they let the sunk cost fallacy do the rest. Their products donโ€™t have to be good. They just have to check certain boxes for sales and be recognizable, especially since so many people/businesses are genuinely unaware that alternatives exist, or think that (due to marketing and sunk cost fallacy) those are alternatives are โ€œtoo complicatedโ€ or โ€œtoo risky.โ€

MS has been using aggressive anti-competitive practices for decades to secure and hold market share. Making good things that people genuinely enjoy is not part of their business plan.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

Good, now dump bibis nazi terror state.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Can we stop rehashing this story?