Leave it up to Microsoft to find out ways to profit more during a pandemic, rather than open sourcing their software and platform to be used anywhere and everywhere. People forgot what hosting is like without these massively overpriced cloud services that nickel and dime for every feature. Want encryption which basically costs nothing? Oh, you'll pay an extra $0.10 per hour on top of your $.08GB of outbound traffic. God forbid you load balance your service.
Office (/Microsoft) 365 is a pretty good value for what it is. It isn’t free, but $20 per user per month for Windows + Office + Exchange + OneDrive + Azure AD and support is pretty good.
Microsoft saying “Ahh! Crisis! Here’s the Windows Server codebase!” wouldn’t help, since you’d have to still find a host and time to make sure your code works on this upstream variant without all of the licensed DLLs that makes Windows work.
Google offers the same for less than $12 a month with unlimited storage for large companies and $12 a month for everyone else. Plus you get an operating system that is based off Linux and open source. Windows is a giant PITA when it comes to deploying and setting up mobile device management.
Matrix offers free decentralized video/voice communication and there are lots of self-hosted alternatives that often provide better features than things like Teams. With NextCloud you basically get a free office solution that just needs to be deployed. With Kubernetes you can quickly deploy a Nextcloud cluster. These services should be free and open source because the goal should be helping build a better world, not building better profits through backroom deals with tax dollars.
You've just named and listed the services. Odd why people would choose Office365 instead of hosting their own nextcloud distribution cluster in their own colocation space.
Microsoft made Office 365 and Teams free for six months [1], made it free to UK NHS staff during the outbreak[2], Teams usage is up 12 million users in a week[3]. At a normal price of $5/user/month, they've given a third of a billion dollars of stuff away.
But yeah, it would be more helpful in these trying times if the NHS had the sourcecode to BizSpark, DirectX, and Office Graph backend. :|
I don't get how they are profiteering out of this. The prices haven't changed from before the pandemic.
What's happening now is unprecedented. Without public cloud providers, most businesses would not be able to run this giant work-from-home experiment. If they were hosted on-prem then they couldn't scale either.
