Comment by Arch-TK
6 days ago
You know, I really do think governments should not be paying into Microsoft's bank accounts. But thinking about this from another perspective, if I was hired as a programmer at a company and told I could use vim on i3 on some Linux distro and then suddenly the company decided that everyone would be switched over to windows machines and forced to use VSCode then I would be rightfully pissed. Just like someone hired to do CAD in solidworks would be rightfully pissed if you told them they had to switch to another equally powerful but different CAD tool.
Not sure what the solution is there aside from offering incentives to retrain, offering the option to keep using the proprietary product, and hiring staff specifically advertising that you want people who are happy using libreoffice.
Mandating open and interoperable formats would be a good start. Moving off for a department becomes much less of a shift if it doesn't require coordination with everyone you might exchange files with.
I do agree there, although Microsoft will argue till the end of the earth that OOXML are already those formats.
It starts early : closed source software offers discounted or free licenses to schools to hook kids in early.
This is how matlab continues to have a hold in engineering fields.