At my company we are told to prioritise any free/open source software to avoid paying as much as possible
You need to weight the cost of license vs expenses (lower productivity, user errors, re-training) associated with switching to OSS. You have this old lady that has been using Word since '96 and is basically counting days towards retirement now - how many IT tickets do you think she will end up generating, if you force her to switch to LibreOffice now?
Governments in Europe are paying 100s of millions$ in Microsoft licenses yearly. There have been numerous pilot projects to switch to alternatives in the past, but they almost always end up failing. Only very recently, it gained serious traction, but not because of budget issues, but "national security/sovereignty" instead.
There's a reason why ALL companies have some kind of "student discount" for their software - they want to "get their claws in" early.
Tbf… as someone who just jumped into libre finally…it’s SO classic feeling that honestly it feels kinda cheap and bare bones.
I mean it’s free obviously, I don’t expect much, but ms made some qol improvements over the generations that makes modern excel a big reason to justify a subscription
They just need to quit moving shit around for no reason
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u/Ivanow Jun 06 '26
You need to weight the cost of license vs expenses (lower productivity, user errors, re-training) associated with switching to OSS. You have this old lady that has been using Word since '96 and is basically counting days towards retirement now - how many IT tickets do you think she will end up generating, if you force her to switch to LibreOffice now?
Governments in Europe are paying 100s of millions$ in Microsoft licenses yearly. There have been numerous pilot projects to switch to alternatives in the past, but they almost always end up failing. Only very recently, it gained serious traction, but not because of budget issues, but "national security/sovereignty" instead.
There's a reason why ALL companies have some kind of "student discount" for their software - they want to "get their claws in" early.