The European Center for Nuclear Research is going to abandon all proprietary products in its work, and above all, Microsoft products.
In previous years, CERN made extensive use of various closed source commercial products because it made it easy to find experts from the industry. CERN cooperates with a huge number of companies and institutions, and it was important for it to facilitate the work of people from various fields. The status of a non-profit academic organization made it possible to obtain software products at competitive prices, and their use was justified.
But in March 2019, Microsoft decided to strip CERN of its “academic organization” status and offered to provide its products on a standard commercial basis, which increased the total cost of licenses by more than 10 times.
CERN was ready for such a development of events, and for a year now it has been developing the MAlt project: The Microsoft Alternatives project. Despite the name, Microsoft is far from the only company whose products are planned to get rid of. But the primary task is to refuse the mail service and Skype. IT departments and individual volunteers will be the first to move to new pilot projects. It is planned that a full transition to free software will take several years.
Source: linux.org.ru