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.
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/
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).
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.
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.
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.
I cannot disclose any details but this article vastly undersells the risk and how exposed the US is. It is definitely goes well beyond government exposure.
It’s not like theres’s an NSA backdoor key called NSAkey in windows or something…
Windows is not the problematic Microsoft product. Not even close. If you understood how much of the US infrastructure and controls are consolidated under Microsoft cloud services, you’d never sleep again. Cloud was fine back when it was a product catering small and medium companies but when large corporations started migrating their critical infrastructures to cloud services to offload responsibilities, we really went off into the weeds.
Not only cloud infrastructure, tons of industrial automation devices are more or less open on the Internet. Best case that’s just a few minutes downtime in a factory, worst case someone fries the grid and destroys water treatment plants.
And even the actual applications being written for the government aren’t that great. The lowest bidder gets the contract, and security is really easy to cheap out on, if you’re doing just enough to not be legally liable - which isn’t hard.
The older I get and the more insights in the inner workings of the technical infrastructure I get, the more I’m surprised we’re not actively collapsing right now. It’s scary how abysmal security is and it’s scary how unprepared society is. Just as a hint: the European power grid spans the entire EU, Balkans, Turkey, Ukraine. There’s no plan how to restart the grid, if it shuts down entirely. None. Complete terra incognita.
No need to be quite so cloak and dagger mate, it fairly obviously to any one who pauses to think.
People have been calling out the problems of corporate oligarchy for more than a decade. This is merely part of that .
It’s systemic risk, not merely technical
Forgot about that one. Let’s share what Wikipedia has on it : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
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.
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…
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.
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.
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!
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.
The US at least has some degree of control over Microsoft. How much worse is that the EU is still not developing an own OS/distro?
There were grassroots movements like the Limux project (Munich using a custom Linux distribution). But that got shut down by Microsoft bribery (not confirmed, but MS did build a new headquarters in Munich…).
- SUSE is an in germany founded company (now in Luxembourg)
- https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/
- Not having a government directly develop a “blessed OS” is probably for the better
I am not talking about a OS for the general public, but specifically for the administration.
And this will work much better with a unified attempt. If the EU would be taking OpenSuse for this, this would basically be the end of OpenSuses independence… I’d like it to be GNU/Linux based though.
