I think about 20 people responded, willing to work on this initiative. They used different channels, so I don't have exact count. I'll sort it out over the weekend and start talking to everyone next week.

Your concerns seem valid. My hope is that the recent erratic and frankly hostile actions of the USA government will give business people enough fright that they might accept some hurdles. Once we form a team, the first order of business will be market research. Then we will know more.

[–] SrMono@feddit.org 1 points 3 days ago

We just discussed some services in our company. In some cases we put very much effort and money into tailoring the tools (almost no cloud solutions, but purchased products) and validated the resulting workflows for production. Non critical stuff (e.g. MS teams) can easily be replaced as long as other external partners play along.

Consulting companies must really factoring in the long run benefits, like leaving a walled garden and having more sovereignty. In the end of the day your folks need to tag that with a number and explain why people should invest more and what their gains will be. Many companies working as open-source advocates fail to persuade (otherwise there wouldn't be so many low effort low cost business standard [what ever that means] buyers).

I would be very much interested in following your approach. Please share links, when you are ready (I'll start stalking you on mastodon for that matter :-)