Comment by 2000UltraDeluxe
1 day ago
30 people managing the hardware? Sure, if you get good deals on the hardware itself, the employees stay healthy, and you have everything so centralised you don't need multiple people on call.
Centralising things to that level and supporting the users of the entire government structure of a country the size of France -- one of the countries the sun _never_ sets on -- while it's transitioning from decades of Microsoft dependency to an open source ecosystem? Heh, no.
Hetzner exists.
The claim above of 30 is not particularly important, the point is to lean on the community. Millions a year would get you incredibly far. Many are already helping for free.
24/7 linux webservers existed already by the late nineties.
"Helping for free" doesn't cut it when dealing with governments. Even if everyone had gone the Linux route 20 years ago we'd still have an entire ecosystem of commercial businesses selling and operating it; imagine what Red Hat would look like with Microsoft actually out of the picture.
We'd have just as many consultancy firms and layers of beuraucracy without Microsoft, and France wouldn't be operating their entire government IT stack, all the way down to individual workstations, that much cheaper than it is now.
The difference is that because of open-source there would be competition in those services. And they could take any of it in house at a discount with reasonably priced govt workers. IOW, they'd have choices instead of handcuffs.
They'd be in better situation on all counts. It pays to think ahead to the future and remove dependencies. Where do you want to be in five years? Still in an abusive relationship?