I'm Catalan. Catalonia has always been big on open source, and if anything I'm surprised this took so long to happen. The mindshare in universities and such is particularly high, and this isn't limited to computer science (my background). Even my high school did at the very least run a Linux server (running at least samba and squid) and had a few Linux workstations. This was 20 years ago. Back when I lived there, I worked in many companies, all of which had near 100% of workstations running Linux, something I now realize is not the case elsewhere.<p>A strong argument nobody's mentioned in the thread yet is that free software support for our language (Catalan) is very good, whereas Windows/OSX support for it is terrible when it exists at all. There's the fact that we do still remember a previous effort where Microsoft released some version of windows in Catalan, I'm not sure if it was 98 or XP era, which was very broken; Microsoft never handled the issues back then, or released any more versions in Catalan, and it left a very bad taste in our mouths.<p>We do care massively about our language, so it'll be very hard to sway anybody in here unless this fact radically changes.
I kind of amazed that Microsoft are still successfully charging SO MUCH for their absolutely run-of-the-mill OS and Office products.<p>Office, in particular, brings in something like $25bn/year revenue with presumably very healthy margins. For a product that has hardly changed in 20 years. It's a good product, sure. But a clean-room reimplementation of the bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more than $1bn.<p>The power of monopoly capitalism.
I once believed in open formats and the practicality of switching between closed and open source, but years of experience has convinced me that no two complex applications will ever really be interoperable for the long tail of complex documents that use a larger than average number of the applications' features. I waste too many hours trying to fix MS Word tables and embedded grapics so that they will render correctly in LibreOffice, too many nightmare experiences jumping between video editors, and vector graphics apps, etc. Programs like MS Office are so complex that only a Singularity-level AI will ever fix them.
So what will be the cost of deploying Linux, retraining on Linux, and then going back to Windows?<p>These people can afford to make stupid decisions because it's not their own money they are wasting.<p>The only reason this is happening is crony capitalism: they want to do a favour to the local open source businesses (there are a few of them) which are friendly to the local government. They will get lots of support contracts. It's blatant corruption.