Comment by redoh
7 hours ago
The difference between this and Munich's attempt is that France has been building up gradually. They already run Tchap (Matrix-based) for government messaging, and the gendarmerie switched to Linux years ago with over 70k desktops. Munich tried a big-bang migration without enough internal expertise and caved under political pressure when MS moved their HQ there. Schleswig-Holstein in Germany is taking the same incremental approach now and seeing better results. The pattern is pretty clear: governments that treat it as a multi-year capability build succeed, those that treat it as a licensing swap don't.
> Munich tried a big-bang migration without enough internal expertise and caved under political pressure
Almost sounds planned to fail...
If anything, the lesson to learn from the LiMux failure has nothing to do with technology or with project planning + execution, but with politics. If you extort millions from government as a for-profit business, most of which ends up as pure profit, there is an “emperor's new clothes” dynamic. It aligns the interests of government officials with yours in driving a narrative that there was good value generated for the taxpayer from that taxpayer money you got. Also: You now have those millions in a war fund, which you can use as negotiation mass. (In the case of LiMux and Munich, Microsoft relocated their corporate HQ to Munich as a quid pro quo for the City of Munich abandoning the LiMux project, which directly benefitted the City of Munich because it now got to tax Microsoft in a way that it didn't previously get to do). … these kinds of strategies game theoretically dominate any kind of play that's possible through open source.