When you consider that governments in Canada (at all levels) spend millions per year on Microsoft (and other US companies) products the economics of hiring Canadians to implement open source alternatives, with full Canadian control, makes it 100% doable... Microsoft lobbyists are the problem
Yeah, there are tons of open source alternatives for most things now. Very very strangely, they spend millions to make Microsoft shareholders richer but nothing on open-source 😂 How weird is that ? Just a bunch of thieves
Spending money on free software is a tough sell even when it makes sense. MS products work well* and come with better perks. * I know but speaking of marketing material here.
They don't mind using free software in the servers or the code ^^ Same for browsers. People use tons of free software without knowing they do. It's not "selling" it's corruption, they got freebies / lobby bribes. In Europe, free software is used more and more. It only make sense.
Teue. That does not make transitioning to free (as in free speech) software an easy task. It is not impossible either, but requires more planning than simply discontinuing use of Microsoft and hiring a team of experts to manage the transition.
Obviously, it require work, but it's not that difficult. Start by using open-source formats, it allow to switch tools easily. There is nothing Microsoft does that can't be done without free software and it will probably be better done (MySQL, Linux, etc)