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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
The EU does fund the development of free software projects, the NGI Zero fund for example funds more than 1000 projects!
if they actually spend it, instead of than celebrating the immense savings.
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.
Very cool. Especially if their work benefits everyone. Maybe they can even fix kerning in LibreOffice for everyone.