I don't know the specific case of Switzerland but I worked in a University in Spain when I was student with servers and stuff and our serious software was never Microsoft's. It was from big Mainframes like IBM or Sun Microsystems servers. We ported that software to Linux and it took very little time, saving us a lot of money with small machines.

That was more than 20 years ago.

Half of our laboratory PC rooms used Linux or BSD and we had licences like Matlab for Linux early on. The other half used Windows and yes, we could get very good license prices from Microsoft precisely because we had so many Linux machines. It was almost free.

You could even say that Microsoft spent money on us trying to buy the University sales gatekeepers with things like free expensive travel to States' conferences, free laptops and stuff.

We were probably not a normal University as we were a technical University and regularly organised conferences inviting people like Stallman.(Our technical University also managed the servers of the Humanities side of the University).

It was not that hard. Today, with so many programs running in Webassembly, it should be much easier.

>Is it just political symbolic migration because they have anything better to do with tax payers money?

Usually when you replace privative software with open source you spend 10x or so less in licenses. The problem being that the open source software is not as capable as the privative.

I did not understood why instead of spending 10 times less with open source, you spend half and pay for the necessary capabilities improving the open source software.

I understood it later. In the past it was a scheme lots of politicians used for getting negotiation power against Microsoft. Digital sovereignty was very down the priorities list compared to getting a good price.

Now, after the Ukraine war, and Trump actively using the US dependence against Europe, digital sovereignty is a very real issue, even critical.