The biggest challenge with these kind of migrations is training users, especially government employees. Switzerland is relatively highly educated so this might be less of a challenge than in other countries but it won't be easy.

The technical part is probably relatively easy in comparison. Especially because the stakes are low (parallel run with the existing system, good will from everyone involved).

With a couple of exceptions, my guess is that these migrations are part of the commercial negotiation pack of government procurement agencies.

At a certain point I’d expect that tech sovereignty concerns will tip while governments out of the US-vendor mindset.

Not really - this is akin to doing a complete rewrite of your 30 year old codebase to Rust.

Every organization has their own hacks, bespoke tools, processes and hardware that has to be painstakingly replaced, reprogrammed and users retrained. In many cases, Linux alternatives don't exist so they either have to be written or processes/hardware replaced.

These are OLD organizations and none of them is really the same as any other. Legendarily, companies like SAP made their whole fortunes managing this kind of complexity.

It's just a lot of work with a lot of edge cases you've never thought of (or seen in your life) that takes years.

A lot of government software moved into some cloud-based, browser-accessible platform during COVID. It depends on the office and the government, but especially with how easily a vendor can modernize legacy software with an LLM, this isn't necessarily a dealbreaker issue. It might make more sense to modernize than rely in perpetuity on the one guy that should have retired 3 years ago and you can't let go because he knows COBOL.

And MS Office corporate licenses account for a significant part of MS's revenue stream. More than 400 million Office 365 licenses paid in 2024, not one-off Windows licenses. So a business might save $150 per person per year on a large group of staff migrating them to a FOSS alternative for email and a replacement for light users that only ever touch Word/Excel/PowerPoint. And they might never know the difference, functionally. That's also less of a tangled web than switching operating systems and network setups that would require work for any users of critical systems. I can see the logic in migrating the willing as a test out of Office, then a few more people every month until you have one pool of FOSS users, and one pool of must use Office 365 users.

That shift might not be nothing to a small business as well, and at scale, might also be significant to larger businesses. Even if 5% of Office 365 users moved over, that's tens of millions of users.

Their custom software probably runs fine under Wine? Also, if it's actual custom software, they might have the source and could even recompile it. And also, the software of the Swiss government is usually surprisingly good quality, so they probably have competent engineers who they could call upon to help with such porting.

I've written quite a few tools for the Swiss government in my time and 98% of them are part of the intranet or even external websites. It's all web anyway.

Porting software nowadays might prove easier than expected. Exactly how much custom software should one expect? Centralized web applications running on Java are probably the standard anyway, and they are not OS-dependent.

The point of migration seems to be data-storage compliance anyway. They can later migrate off Windows easily once openDesk gets them going.

The greater the dependence, the greater the risk.

I don't know the specific case of Switzerland but I worked in a University in Spain when I was student with servers and stuff and our serious software was never Microsoft's. It was from big Mainframes like IBM or Sun Microsystems servers. We ported that software to Linux and it took very little time, saving us a lot of money with small machines.

That was more than 20 years ago.

Half of our laboratory PC rooms used Linux or BSD and we had licences like Matlab for Linux early on. The other half used Windows and yes, we could get very good license prices from Microsoft precisely because we had so many Linux machines. It was almost free.

You could even say that Microsoft spent money on us trying to buy the University sales gatekeepers with things like free expensive travel to States' conferences, free laptops and stuff.

We were probably not a normal University as we were a technical University and regularly organised conferences inviting people like Stallman.(Our technical University also managed the servers of the Humanities side of the University).

It was not that hard. Today, with so many programs running in Webassembly, it should be much easier.

>Is it just political symbolic migration because they have anything better to do with tax payers money?

Usually when you replace privative software with open source you spend 10x or so less in licenses. The problem being that the open source software is not as capable as the privative.

I did not understood why instead of spending 10 times less with open source, you spend half and pay for the necessary capabilities improving the open source software.

I understood it later. In the past it was a scheme lots of politicians used for getting negotiation power against Microsoft. Digital sovereignty was very down the priorities list compared to getting a good price.

Now, after the Ukraine war, and Trump actively using the US dependence against Europe, digital sovereignty is a very real issue, even critical.

> but for government usage, wouldn’t they have to port every custom software they have built over decades to Linux?

Maybe not the case for everyone, but this has been the reason for making as much in-house software as possible behind a web frontend.

Custom software they have build over decades is pile of crap. Mostly could be replaced with web interface, gpg encryption, and batch processing of CSV files with bash or python.

It will fail because employees want "mouse point and click", "mouse point and double click" interfaces and are unable to use anything else.