this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Okay, here are a few thoughts:
Unfortunately things are really poised and rigged against open-source solutions and anyone who tries to push for them. The "experts" who work in consulting companies are part of this as they usually don't even know how to do things without the property solutions. Let me give you an example, once I had to work with E&Y, one of those big consulting companies, and I realized some awkward things while having conversations with both low level employees and partners / middle management, they weren't aware that there are alternatives most of the time. A manager of a digital transformation and cloud solutions team that started his career E&Y, wasn't aware that there was open-source alternatives to Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 for e-mail. I probed a TON around that and the guy, a software engineer with an university degree, didn't even know that was Postfix was and the history of email.
My work for example, is pretty all-in on the MS ecosystem and it's a little annoying sometimes.
MS's proprietary alternatives to established FOSS counterparts, while well documented, are needlessly complicated and only really viable in Azure for the most part. They are also very good at not exposing the underlying tech to managers, preferring use of buzzwords.
MS then provides an educational portal to learn about all this stuff, which then creates further managerial lock-in...
Yeah exactly because managers don't care about tech, its all about hype and buzzwords. Microsoft has other reasons to keep their tech as it is probably something around of way I described in here.
Either way the truth is that the alternatives, less say, LibreOffice/OnlyOffice and NextCloud aren't really alternatives for most use cases. NextCloud is a shame, they should be ashamed of calling themselves an alternative to Office365 / Teams / OneDrive. They're pretty much like Tesla, if they didn't spend most of their time over-promising + under-delivering people would be surprised with the progress they've done instead of going for scrutiny.