It’s kind of a bummer that there’s a bunch of these separate OSS initiatives in Spain, France, Germany and a few other countries..
Instead of everyone rolling their own subvariant of Nextcloud, Matrix, LibreOffice etc, imagine if there was an EU mandate set up and some serious money was budgeted to it.
You’d get a triple multiplier of more budget, less duplication of effort, and a self-reinforcing cycle where more use means the product becomes better through contribs which makes use even more attractive.
Speaking from the Matrix side: it would definitely be preferable to have a large reliable source of funding for public sector Matrix deployments rather than juggling between loads of small overlapping ones (especially when they end up failing to route any $ to the upstreams). That said, Schleswig Holstein is looking to route $ upstream in this instance.
This is a mistake at this phase. Right now, we europeans still didn't figure out what is the best way, so each country tries something different. With time, failures will be replaced with winners.
You are /s'ing, but the fact that it didn't spread out of Munich until 2020 is a success in itself: the failure got confined to a very small part of Europe, instead of getting deployed in the whole Bavaria, Germany or even Europe. Damages were limited, they had nearby neighbors to compare, they did the partial rollback (losing "only" 90 million instead of 900), analyzed the failures and fixed a lot of them just by going LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice.
The second attempt they had better outcome, and the German government agrees. Now they have the know-how from Munich, and can have a degree of confidence that things will be fine. You don't need an overwhelming success, just be on par with the Microsoft Office solution using free software, and you are already ahead. It's Microsoft who needs to be clearly ahead to justify the cost.
Still, it's better to have it limited to Germany while others watch for a year or two if it works as intended.
You are underestimating German federalism - there are several competing providers for each specialized software used by German municipalities, often with huge customisations. There is no way you could mandate a specific product. What can be done from above, in some cases, is specifying requirements (for eg data storage, privacy laws, code auditability...) and APIs (like APIs to federal agencies) and let the customers and providers create solutions. It might be messier, but in the end you are not dependent on a single product.
While your small projects with next to zero market share fight it out between themselves, Microsoft keeps swallowing more market share making more billions.
Who do you think is the real winner of your sandpit fight?
Keeping the separate projects at the national level also precludes the furious lobbying efforts against it that could target members of the union with... "friendlier ears". It also allows for smaller scale testing to work out kinks, in the same way that some US federal law started as laws in specific states.
You are right, we need to make a bloated project and need to pour in millions into it like we did with Gaia-X. Then it will be a big trash-fire with smoke visible from afar and not just some small sandpit.
Until you can bribe officials to the tune of billions the quality of your software won't matter. The only reason why ms keeps winning is that it keeps bribing.
MS also keeps winning because they have billions of dollars to pour into the UX of their Office suite. The FOSS community doesn't spend a lot of money on hiring professional UI designers, and it's "do-ocracy" doesn't handle UI design well because UI design isn't seen as "doing" so much as nitpicking the choices of the programmers who are "doing all the work".
MS bribery is a factor, but if we use it as an excuse to ignore our own faults as a community then we're just screwing ourselves over.
Centralization is about infrastructure, so no. This would be a monoculture, assuming nobody forks. But if it's a FOSS monoculture and nobody forks, that implies that everyone is fairly satisfied with it.
"The pricing page is a PDF" is right there in my post. I can get deeper but as we say in my language, "for those who want to understand, half a word is enough".
Very typical for Germany, they rather roll their own solutions than cooperating with other countries and pooling resources. But it's even worse than that, each state within Germany does their own bureaucracy differently as well, to varying degrees.
Instead of everyone rolling their own subvariant of Nextcloud, Matrix, LibreOffice etc, imagine if there was an EU mandate set up and some serious money was budgeted to it.
You’d get a triple multiplier of more budget, less duplication of effort, and a self-reinforcing cycle where more use means the product becomes better through contribs which makes use even more attractive.