1176
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2026
1176 points (99.7% liked)
Technology
88854 readers
4016 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Now if they also directed the license cost savings back toward funding their newly chosen oss projects, we'd be golden.
Imagine. Companies that instead pay X amount pay X*.25 or something. Small cost for the business compared to Microsoft and huge boost in revenue to improve OSS.
B-but a study funded by CCIA Europe (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta…) says EU cloud sovereignty rules would cost Europe up to €233 billion. (Conveniently, it doesn't count the benefits of not depending on them.)
So considerate of them, worrying about our wallets out of pure altruism.
The general message I hear among enterprise architects is that there's a price for IT sovereignty.
But that it's a price worth paying.
A price for switching.
Then it's simpler and cheaper.
It's even cheaper hardware wise in many cases.
I question if the price is really higher, once the transition costs are paid. Those cloud services by US big tech ain't cheap and are highky profitable.
The price could be in costs, but it could also be in reduced functionality.
A standard response that a lot of Microsoft trained IT ops people give is that the other products are inferior, harder to use, require more administration, etc. And it used to be that this would shut down a lot of discussions about moving away from MS.
But the message I hear nowadays is that this will be a price worth paying, and that disarms a lot of the usual naysayers.
Given the degrading quality of Microsoft products, I would not blindly believe statements that alternative options are rrally worse.
I'm not disagreeing with you on that :)
Personally I've been arguing for less Microsoft dependence within my organization for years, and have quietly been doing what I can without without making it too obvious.
In any case, my point is that counter-arguments like reduction in functionality, increase in expenditure, and so forth, no longer hold the same weight like they used to.
Here in the Netherlands, there's been a much stronger mandate given from top-down to look for more sovereignty. Because the risks that come with the alternative are becoming more clear with every passing month.
That is certainly the case. The big hurdle and investment is the transition. Once everything is up and runnung and mostly walked in, I would not be surprised if costs were lower while the software implementaion being actually better tailored to the specific needs. But it is not easy to get there and there are risks of course.
Even just a one-time monthly payment equivalent would be massive. I've seen companies that spend well over 60k a month on microsoft licenses.
Imagine they paid their licensing fees to a new FOSS project for a year, one which aims to functionally replace the core of these cloud suites. Like file sharing/hosting/email/chat all integrated similar to Google workspace and M365. That would be a huge win for the people.
I imagine most of those costs are probably redirected to implementation at first.
The Cyber Resiliance Act might actually do that. Because paying for support contracts covering every little piece of free software will be cheaper than the fines.