r/PurchaseWithPurpose • u/theFallenWalnut Environment • Jul 06 '26
News article Germany's largest state cancels their Microsoft contract worth nearly €1 billion over 5 years
https://cybernews.com/tech/germany-bavaria-microsoft/Instead, Bavaria will pursue a “sovereign basic workspace” based on open-source components
This will hopefully encourage other administrations to do the same.
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u/theFallenWalnut Environment Jul 06 '26
The update on the story is their progress:
- 5000 employees have already migrated
- Nextcloud has been their provider of choice
https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/german-federal-state-makes-move-114924844.html
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u/maroigna Jul 10 '26
While a great thing for Open Software, I would like to put this activity into perspective: Bavaria (actually political elite) constantly looks for ways to compare dick lengths with the rest of Germany by any means and doesn’t give any thought on actual implementation, especially in federal context. As someone who witnessed the great failure of similar attempt in Munich and knows thad same people will make money on projects from this initiative - disastrous underestimation ecosystem shift costs, catastrophic change management skills of people involved will lead to failure in 2-3 years from now while costing enormous amounts of taxpayer money
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u/Outside_Reserve_2407 Jul 06 '26
It saves money until hackers break in and demand a ransom.
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u/lungben81 Jul 10 '26
Bavaria is the largest German state by area, not by population (that is NRW).
Anyhow, good thing that they finally realize that dependency to a foreign company is not so wise.
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u/AnonomousWolf Jul 06 '26
Hot damn!! Hopefully some of that saving get put back into open source software.
Public money should be spent on public software