It’s a shame that so much taxpayer money is flowing to US multinationals.
To save money, the solution IS NOT austerity
https://psacunion.ca/psac-statement-upcoming-federal-austerity-budget
To save money, get rid of waste.
Every province, every government department, should get rid of Microsoft and Adobe.
___
I mean, yes we should, in the long term, but there will be short term retraining costs, inevitable required exceptions for edge cases, and we’re not going to be able to get out of our contracts until they’re actually over.
Also, given that the austerity budget is being driven by our NATO funding requirements to the tune of 150B per year, I don’t think this is really the same order of magnitude discussion.
That is true with every change in software that any company makes. It’s even true in some instances with major version upgrades of the same software.
Occational and ongoing training should be an expected normal cost of doing business.
Changing user terminals from W10/11 to Ubuntu/Debian/WhateverOS should come with zero training, nearly everything is done in a web app now a days. That’s thousands and thousands of MS license fees saved per year.
I think the Canadian government can get out of contracts since I believe Microsoft has already told our government they cannot guarantee that our data is not going through US infrastructure. Based on this reason alone I think are grounds to terminate a contract. But hey, I’m no lawyer.