17 companies sue Switzerland over Microsoft contract

[Squilliam]

Soleron said:

Squilliam said:

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But you couldn't exactly call it a straight up waste of money because they would have to have some personal gain for them to go ahead and sue the government. Also if Linux doesn't support one of the programs they want to run or requires training costs which are greater than the cost of the Windows Licences then they would be better off with Microsoft. Its quite likely that the cost per machine is $25 per year or so, which is probably not even going to pay for even one hour of training in Linux.

Yeah, Red Hat are suing because they think it'll get them a support contract. But in reality I think the government doesn't need one.

I don't think Linux requires ANY retraining for the average user. Most corporate users require office and e-mail, and they behave and look the same as the Windows apps for them. For the network admins you obviously need to replace Windows-trained ones with Linux ones but that's one employee in a hundred, right?

For compatibility issues that can't be resolved, in most cases all you would have to do is keep a few Windows workstations with the necessary app. If your company is one of the few where every computer needs such an app, then Linux is indeed not for them. But that's a minority, and shouldn't apply to any government.

This isn't a corporate license. They have specialised software for the police, hospitals, schools etc and it all has to work perfectly. So to transition to Linux at the very least they would have to convert all the branches software to work on the system. Office applications really do just scratch the surface here for the different software which needs to be run. I have never heard of a government making such a switch without a concerted effort to do so.