The petition is open to all EU resident. The goal is to replace all Windows in all public institution in Europe with a sovereign GNU/Linux.
If the petition is successful it would be a huge step forward for GNU/Linux adoption.
I feel like they don’t know the magnitude of that what means.
Very cool but unlikely to work
Could easily fork a distro and pay a government agency or independent entity the same amount as Microsoft is currently being paid to maintain the distro. Or they could put financial backing on any of the current commercial Linux solutions out there. It’s far from farfetched.
The problem is dealing with the application side.
Just one feature that’s massive - how many systems have automatic import/export using Excel file formats. Converting those processes will be a huge undertaking themselves, let alone how many other things that will require re-engineering. The scope and scale of this is staggering.
A better effort would be to convert a single, small organization in government, then the scope is limited, but you get to build the fundamentals, and gain the experience of interfacing with extant systems.
You realize the office alternatives have been able to save into native excel formats, even in various year varieties, for a long time, right?