Switzerland is paying $11 million to stop using Outlook and Teams
TechSpot
Switzerland is paying $11 million to stop using Outlook and Teams
Federal authorities of the Swiss Confederation recently launched a pilot program to replace Microsoft 365 tools with open-source alternatives. The Federal Chancellery's plan calls for investing 9...
Let’s hope the outcome is better this time. And i also hope the result can be leveraged by other nations.
IIRC in Munich the effort “failed” in good part thanks to Microsoft lobbying and bribes.
Yeah, talked to their CTO in 2012 when I wrote an article for heise.de (sadly, never released with his statements, only broad summaries) and he basically said the politicians were intentionally crippling support for Linux so that Microsoft IT support looked better. He specifically mentioned the WollMux form system as a failed software project.
Noooo, it’s just a coincidence that Munich switched off LiMux right after Microsoft moved their EU HQ there, and now has one of the highest IT budgets for a single city (500M€)
I think it failed because the Mail software they used had a bug that couldn’t handle very large E-Mail subjects. Then they were like “See? This linux thing is bad. Go back to Microsoft on everything right now”
hilarious when considering that Windows still cannot handle filepaths longer than 256 characters
It can’t? What the fuck?
yeah if you try to, say, open a pdf with a filepath that is too long, it just doesn’t do anything
many such cases.
this is a problem for our SharePoint/OneDrive setup because our own directory gets quite long once you dig down into dpmt folders in projects, then you try to access the contents of an uncompressed customer package that’s neatly organized by folders and has filenames that are 50+ characters long by themselves… it’s annoying
I think I ran into that problem once but there’s a registry key you can set to allow longer filepaths
The fact that they made 2004 Linux work untill 2017 was impressive.
Linux and OSS in 2026 is night and day compared to back then.
I’m sure they weren’t using a distro from 2004 in 2017. But what’s weird is that Linux was very mature in 2017. 2009 is my cutoff where I fully dropped windows while still being able to function in a 100% windows environment. If they made it past that point there would have been no reason to go back to windows once they migrated. Without a doubt there were hijinks involved.
What I meant is they went through the rough years of 2000s Linux when hardware support was really problematic and the office suite options were far really behind.
Server side was pretty good by then though.
Perhaps I missed it in the article, but I would be curious to see how much they currently pay and what they expect to pay over a given timeframe for Microsoft software and subscription licensing.
It was not in the article, but let me help you. Swiss bureaucracy is my speciality.
There were two procurements in the past years, where only the minimal amount of data is publicly available. By request, they would release more data, but that’s something that takes multiple weeks. So I can only share what I have found so far.
In those contracts it is not known how many licenses and which licenses were bought. So they will also include Operating Systems (client and server), and expensive licenses such as MSSQL Server. I’m sorry that I cannot share anything more useful right now.
Quite a few developers you can hire to solve your problems and better the world by working on open source software for 25 million a year
This is something I was also always saying. The problem is that they are not allowed to hire freely. There is a limit of how many heads you can hire, due to whatever complex yearly budgeting. So to fulfill the requirements, they are looking for third party providers, which also include support and warranty. Usually this route is more expensive and less flexible. For those public tenders, they are bound by WTO rules. However, in this case, they were able to contract Microsoft freely, which is a huge fucking questionmark. This way you basically shut the door to competition, be it smaller IT companies just reselling Microsoft licenses, or companies able to provide a full set of open source tools including developers for customizations.
Hopefully someone is going to investigate this whole mess.
This. The question is always how long it will take to break even. A year? 6 months? The big number is just for shock value.
Big number? It’s 11 million. That’s pocket change for something like that.
That’s probably pocket change compared to the subscription they’d pay to use it.
With an estimated 38,000 federal staff and a cost of $36 per month each for an enterprise license it looks like 12 million a year roughly.
So they pay two years this year to not pay anything forever? (I know this is not really how this works and I sure hope they will start/continue sponsoring open-source solutions as many governments seem to do.)
That’s an easy math question if I have ever seen one, even despite it containing infinity and larger/smaller relation!
Things aren't that simple, included in the microsoft licensing price are things like customer support - and not just for windows but other products like office, and none of that are part of the 0$ linux license. If you want customer support on linux (redhat, canonical...) it ain't free either.
I’ve met individuals willing to pay $11 million to stop using teams.
That’s pretty cheap, TBH.
A small price to pay for salvation.
Its only an experiment of the Bundeskanzlei with 3000 real employees. I am very hopeful, I heard an Interview with the one responsible, he seems very eager to really test it and give it a good chance, but also is aware of the everyday Susi in accounting who maybe isnt going to switch easily from Word to LibreOffice
It says how much it costs but how much will be saved in the end?
Probably 11 badrillion. When MS goes under in AI pop, the Swiss will be the only people that still have their mails.
Shit a decent sized org pays that much in licensing to use it.
A moral and strategic imperative.
WHY THE FUCK DO I NEED TEAMS EMAIL ME BITCH
Instant messaging is nice, but we could just run an IRC server for that.
Teams does much more than just messaging. The problem is that no one in the world wants to use any of those other features because they’re absolute trash. But they’re smashed in there and poorly implemented anyway.
Money well spent. It’d be cheaper to go back to receipt books, filing cabinets and snail mail now that the american tech bullshit has continually shown it’s true colours.
Open-source decentralized alternatives are good for distributing the concentrated power
On the plus side, this’ll be a reinvestment of tech knowledge because people get lazy with Windows.
Yeah, I can see the point. Moving away from Microsoft sounds good in theory, but actually replacing everything without causing problems is probably the hard part
The tech is ready, the training of people is the hard part.
Exactly. The technology itself is probably the easier part. Getting people comfortable with a completely different workflow is where things can get complicated
Honestly, for Office, Outlook and Teams you can find alternatives. But in the identity field (Entra), it gets more complicated. No all-in-one replacement options out there that cover everything Entra does, so you end up having to stitch together a bunch of stuff.
I’m all for ditching closed services, especially for governments, but there will be a couple of difficult years before investment in open-source software produce solutions that can match. So, no better time than the present, eh?
Partly. There is a lot of specialized software out there, which links into Microsoft Office in some way. Replacing all of those connections can be really hard.
Yeah, that’s probably the biggest challenge. It’s not just replacing the main apps it’s all those smaller integrations and workflows people rely on every day
Switzerland: Crowdfund this project and you’ll be inundated with donors desperate to stop using outlook and teams worldwide. Project can fund itself.
I’d love for them to give some of the saved licensing money to the FOSS projects. After all they’re now relying on them.
Good news, it’s time to open source