[thomaszander]

This is a bit of a simplification, one that indeed not many will disagree with.

The wider problem is that when governments and (non-profit) organizations did create alternatives for Microsoft products, the governments themselves ended up showing they are corrupted and the internal rules quickly changed to stop allowing the competing (open source) offerings.

A good example here is the Munich Linux desktop efforts a couple of decades ago. The actual workers were much happier, the sysadmins were ecstatic (much less work) and there wasn't really anyone that had problems with Openoffice and kmail at the time.

Yet, the funding to companies supporting the features they wanted dried up. Requirements got written that disallowed upgrades to "dangerous" new open source releases and after some time they went back to Microsoft because problems were not getting solved. (duh!).

So, sure, we'd need a set of alternatives. But what we really need is not the end-products. What we really need is more honest bureaucrats that actually work for the benefit of the people. And those I have not yet found.

[vmfunction]

>The wider problem is that when governments and (non-profit) organizations did create alternatives for Microsoft products, the governments themselves ended up showing they are corrupted and the internal rules quickly changed to stop allowing the competing (open source) offerings.

Not just government, also corporations. How many times, has superior product being ignore because it doesn't have some MS/Google/Oracle (fill in the blank). Current politics in the world does NOT support meritocracy. Doesn't matter if in gov or corporate.