$1 million to implement the features sure, but what about actually hosting and administering the open source software? On call engineers aren't cheap and it's going to break on finals week.

As someone who had a university IT dept as a client, it's honestly much better for the school. University IT is almost universally a disaster and bottleneck.

I've noticed even the strapped for money TCUs have hosted LMS more often than not. We went against the grain on that one.

Office365 is just so cheap for students (The e-mail is free if you just use that) that it makes total sense to pick that.

Source: I work for a leading supplier of those solutions.

You have to spread the costs across multiple orgs and hundreds of programmers. You can do that by paying a centralized institution for proprietary software or by joining an open-source project.

If there is no open-source project, you have to create one, and then you're potentially years away from getting something that's a true alternative.

If schools don't like proprietary licenses, they should bargain together for something better.

so how come the university i've been (Bordeaux, ~55k students / 3k staff) almost exclusively uses Linux and free software and does not have a computing budget in the hundred thousands ?

I was responding to someone who suggested that schools should build their own critical software. If there's a good FOSS option already, they should absolutely use it. But there isn't always that option.

Also, I guarantee that the school has at least 5-10 tech people, which means computing expenses are approaching $1M when you factor in benefits. Free software requires a larger in-house staff to customize and maintain it, even if the initial cost is low.

which critical software are those ?

We are still waiting for Teams to support features that Lync/SFB supported on day 1. But that does not prevent them from trying to force Teams onto O365 users (by all but abandoning SFB).