This is what the government gets to farming literally fucking everything out to third parties whose goal is profit instead of making government agencies that exist to do the same job whose goal is to serve the people.
Like, no shit, Sherlock.
Right. This isn’t an issue with Microsoft, it’s an issue of getting a third party to do work when you have very different priorities. Microsoft’s priority is to make money, as all companies do. The governments priority is to have a safe and secure service. The two don’t match, so the government should have created and maintained a safe and secure service.
The biggest issue is that people don’t want the government to over-spend on anything, so they don’t want the government to pay tech people tech salaries. So even if they did just do it themselves, you can’t trust it’s done by the best people because it’s only done by those who are willing to work at 30% of the pay.
So the issue isn’t really with Microsoft, it’s with the government for not being aware of priorities, and not being willing to pay for what’s important.
Government spending 101:
Paying private sector rates? unnafordable!
Paying a private company who pays their employees those same private sector rates plus a huge margin on top? totally reasonable!
you can’t trust it’s done by the best people because it’s only done by those who are willing to work at 30% of the pay.
I dunno, I think I’d consider having enough scruples to care more about what you produce than how much you get paid to be “The Best.” Some of “The Best” programmers I have seen are fully on the Free Open Source Software bandwagon.
Because I can’t trust that those who are profit-oriented are willing to bring “the best” without doing things exactly like in the article. “The Best” are busy nickel and diming you to death while hiding their best work from you. That’s not the best, that’s a selfish asshole who doesn’t give a flying fuck about the future of humanity, only themselves. That’s far from “The Best.” That’s just “Fuck you, got mine.”
You’re not wrong. If I said anything that made it seem like those who get paid less are worse developers, that’s on me. But there are many who are amazing developers who can’t take a government job because the pay is too low. It seems odd to rule those people out. If we’re fighting for better pay for everyone, government jobs should set an example.
The Pentagon needs to have Elon Musk sit in on their Russia-Ukraine meetings because he owns 50% of all satellites in orbit and if he wanted to he could single handedly sway the war effort. Some guy with money literally bought his way into top level Pentagon meetings.
While this is bad, I think you’d prefer such a guy to a relative of someone important sitting there, and\or to somebody who schemed their way through bureaucratic institutions to be sitting there, or through acquaintances.
That’s the joke, no? You wouldn’t expect anyone to be able to bring their kids to work / nepotize into a top level pentagon meeting. Outright buying a seat on the other hand…
The problem is EVERY org has that problem. Its a rules for rulers problem.
The “people” are very far links in the chain of people that actually sign budgets and do the actual work for a lot of this. I even know people who switched from government to contracting with government because they felt like the incentives for the government side was to hire buerocrats and justify past choices and not actually help people.
Like no doubt most privatization schemes are just fucked because they just privatized the government ass kissing and also sometimes because what kind of fucking market were hoping for in the first place.
Its kind of funny to me that by pushing data harvesting of OS’s and office data then selling it to 3rd parties Microsoft has probably become the biggest security threat to the US government, maybe ever. And its all because the US refuses to pass basic consumer privacy protections.
Microsoft knows the government needs something, and is insistent on squeezing as many of your tax dollars from them as possible, or leaving us all vulnerable.
Capitalism is terrorism.
Once the government switched to Linux en-masse, Microsoft will have no leverage whatsoever, no solution they can possibly propose will beat free software.
LibreOffice is totally adequate for most government jobs.
It’s not like there’s no precedent, Germany’s government already switched to Linux
The only possible way to generate money is through the use of online document editing services, but Google Docs pretty much cornered the market here.
And, IIRC, it’s just a trial to see if it will work.
Edit: I should have read the article linked in a comment above…
“As spotted by The Document Foundation, the government has apparently finished its pilot run of LibreOffice and is now announcing plans to expand to more open source offerings.”
“In 2021, the state government announced plans to move 25,000 computers to LibreOffice by 2026. At the time, Schleswig-Holstein said it had already been testing LibreOffice for two years.”
So, it seems the trial may be over and they are migrating for good.
I’m honestly surprised the us govt hasn’t developed their own pos locked downed Linux os.
It seems the baddies are way ahead of the curve:
Back in 2000, there was something like that for the kernel with SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux). Which continues to live in various distributions’ kernels. Not a full O/S though, and not generally regarded as a PoS.
I always found it to be a real PITA… It felt like a parallel system to file permissions, which meant I had two things to configure instead of one and I never really saw the purpose. It seemed like it could be more granular than the default, but if it did anything more than that I never learned about it
Granted, I’m a dev, not an admin. I go back and configure the firewall after I shut it off because it was in my way… Eventually
Even if libre office didn’t offer those features, I’d be willing to bet the gov could donate 1/100 what they pay Microsoft in a year to have them implemented.
France is here a better example. The Gendarmerie has its own distribution based on Ubuntu called GendBuntu. The state developed Tchap, a messaging system based on matrix. And many are looking to Linux to simply cut the cost like the french army.
Side note: The app Fedilab has its package name based on the french government open source projects (fr.gouv.etalab.mastodon).
They can also just use Office online. That should be good enough to get people to switch without a huge disruption in efficiency.
Yeah, but there are alternatives, so it at least provides a smaller change than completely switching to something else.
Unfortunately, LibreOffice is still garbage. Microsoft it miles ahead in its apps compared to the Linux equivalent. There isn’t even a good OneNote alternative on Linux.
What is specifically broken or missing from LibreOffice?
As for OneNote alternatives, this one does a pretty good job: https://xournalpp.github.io/
Microsoft, an early example of enshittification. I read about the pay-to-play nickel and diming of security logs to cloud providers. Logs which would help identify intrusions. Theres just been so many examples of security failuers that highlight the company knows its embedded status within the US govt, and knows it can do less for more.
