I think the article should have started off different considering that it actually concludes with a semi-positive stance on how open source “is” an alternative to big tech. It’s an area we take rather serious here in Denmark. Now, I won’t get into the irony of everyone wanting to replace Chromebooks in our school systems because Google is evil when the replacement is very likely to be Microsoft who is as much of a snoop these days since Google actually sells similar forms of privacy to our education. What we do have as a real working alternative to both is locally developed education solutions which will work as well, if not better? Than Google’s Educational tools on Chromebooks. What we lack is a political leadership that will commit to this. Part of this is because we’ve only recently gotten a digitalisation minister, even though people spend far more time on computers than they do on their daily commute and we’ve had a transportation minister since basically forever. Another part is that many of the top advisors in public service tend to “job hop” between our leading industry companies and public service, leaving to many contracts heading toward closed software.

What our educational alternatives show, and they have been implemented in some places and in Greenland I believe. Is very much in line with what the article recommends at the end, as far as small incremental useful changes with clear and cut goals. What would you achieve with Nextcloud? Replacing everything you have in Azure AWS in one big step? Obviously that is going to go horribly. That’s not even how we migrated into Azure from on prem. What you can do, is to start by slowly moving your applications and services into moveable parts, by container rising them. Writing your run-books in Python rather than Powershell and so on.

Then there is the change management, which the article touches on, and which is always forgotten by decision makers. Partly because decision makers don’t know what IT is, well… I guess that is it really. Where in the past (and I’ve written about this a lot) SysAdmins and supporters were unlikely to want to leave their Microsoft training, I think we’re at a point in IT history where that is less of a case because so much is now done on Linux even if you’re deep into the Microsoft ecosystem. Similarity the Office365 platform is not in as much ownership of your employee base because many people under 30 will not have “grown up” with it. Where it would have been inconceivable to not use Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook 5-10 years ago we’ve entered a world where we actively have to train employees in Office products because they are used to iOS, Android and MacOS and not “PCs”.

Again, you should start by doing things in small steps. Our Libraries have switched to Ubuntu on every public PC, and it has been a non-issue because many library users are equally unfamiliar with Ubuntu and Windows, and since most things happen in a browser anyway, the underlying OS isn’t an issue.

That is how you do it. Slowly with small steps, and yes, some of those steps don’t need to be open source. If you want to replace Azure or AWS then it’s much better to head to Hetzner (or similar) rather than to try and do it with NextCloud or similar. Because then your SysAdmins will not really need much retraining as that is not very different from what they already do in many cases where moving into the cloud has really just been moving a bunch of VMs.