“We can’t pay it,” her deputy, Leo, said. “The IMF will be here next month. They’ll force us to cut health or education.”
The previous government had signed a ten-year enterprise deal with a giant tech corporation. That deal was now expiring, and the renewal quote had tripled. The island had 75,000 public sector workers—teachers, nurses, tax collectors, librarians—all using a proprietary office suite. To upgrade them all to the latest version, plus the mandatory cloud add-ons, would cost more than the annual budget for the national university.
That was the cost of the new software licenses.
She remembered it now. A volunteer-driven, open-source office suite. Free. No licenses. No vendor lock-in. She’d dismissed it back then as a hobbyist’s toy. But at 3 a.m., with $12.4 million on the line, she downloaded it.
“I want to migrate the entire government to LibreOffice in six months,” Marta said.