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Minnesota Moving To Microsoft's Cloud
An anonymous reader writes "The State of Minnesota is apparently the first state to move into the cloud, agreeing on a deal to have their messaging and collaboration services delivered through Microsoft's Business Online Productivity Suite. The thing the article doesn't tell you in detail is that the agreement precludes the use of open source software, which could have saved the taxpayers millions of dollars. And once such a large organization goes Microsoft, it's difficult to go back. Isn't it interesting that these developments occur right before elections, as senior officials are trying to keep their jobs with a new incoming administration? What do you think, Slashdotters? Is this a good move for Minnesota? Or a conservative move that bucks the trend of saving money and encouraging open government and transparency by aligning philosophy and practice with at least the option of utilizing open source software?"
I think the summary is the most self-serving OSS trash that I've read here. What guarantee does OSS make that will save taxpayers millions of dollars? The cost of retraining government staff on inferior software? The cost of converting documents to another format and losing formatting? Which one?
In the submitter's blind emotion, they ignored the actual facts of the situation. Expect a bunch of Microsoft-bashing posts to follow, with most of them not reading the article or seeing your post. Nope, it's more important to have biased garbage like what we got in the article summary.