FRESH
Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker NewsHow about instead you donate the same amount of money you would've paid to Microsoft anyways to fund open source projects you rely on? At least for one year, then drop it down to some arbitrary chosen percentage of that cost. That way you can still advertise it as a cost-cutting measure, and everyone would benefit.
Imagine how Open Source Software could improve if a consortium of nations put their money and resources into commissioning bug fixes and enhancements, which would be of collective benefit.
Apart from a few niche cases, the needs of most government bureaucracies would be well served by currently available OSS word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and graphics software.
They should switch to open-source for sovereignty. Not "cost". The fact that they mention "cost" as motivation and to secure buy-in is very worrisome. If you really want to switch to open source permanently and secure your sovereignty, you should invest more (making LibreOffice Calc as good as Excel? One can dream, but it's not cheap). Cost-savings show a lack of seriousness. How long until another government switches back?
How to know when they're serious: when the federal government hires an in-house team of (well-paid) programmers, and sysadmins. Not consultants. Put them in charge of public-facing and internal-use digital infrastructure, serving both the federal and state governments. Make them work to tailor a distro, or LibreOffice, to government needs. Invest in workforce training to keep their productivity up despite the switch.
And then, one day (let's dream for a second), that team could also pick new projects that serve the public interest, like a vulnerability research team (like Google Project Zero), or helping out with all those underfunded core pieces of digital infrastructure out there with only a single maintainer. Creating public goods is the point of a government.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux / Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15661372
We mainly talked about the state's transition to open source. I tried to show him the outside perspective, how much international attention the move is getting and why many see it as a bold step toward digital sovereignty, how much positive (side) effects it has.
His reaction was not that enthusiastic: He described his everyday frustrations, which anecdotally align with the points made at the end of the article.
Especially at the leadership level their workflows are heavily email-driven, with the mail client acting as a universal everyday tool for e.g. team scheduling.
Migration from Outlook to Open-Xchange felt rushed, with seemingly limited upfront analysis of how officers actually use these tools and ensuring use cases were adequately covered. The idea of User Interviews was new to him or - if conducted - didn't reach anyone in his circles.
Initiated by the city of Munich, LiMux aimed to migrate public administration systems from Windows to a Linux-based OS to increase control over IT infrastructure and reduce costs. Despite initial success (announced at LinuxTag in 2014, I was there for the announcement), the project faced intense political lobbying by Microsoft leading to a reversion to Windows.
More examples in this note: https://lab.abilian.com/Tech/Linux/Sovereign%20OS%20-%20%22E... (in particular https://lab.abilian.com/Tech/Linux/Sovereign%20OS%20-%20%22E...)
Looks like what IBM tied. IBM allowed some people to stay on Microsoft Office, the 'some people' were VPs and a few 'important' people. That turned into a disaster.
Eventually almost everyone started requesting M/S Office Exceptions, and many were granted. Other people revolted. IBM then gave up and went back to M/S Office.
To do this correctly, convert everyone, from CEO, Board Members down to the lowest level of person. No exceptions.
I’ve run projects for a few different employers to look at doing this. The math doesn’t math unless you can segment your workforce. For example, at one place we had a field workforce that operated dispatch centers and field techs. That was all iOS + Linux or Chrome.
It is by now a trusty enough workhorse for large organizations.
Yes, it's not all the way there: I've filed hundreds of bugs against LibreOffice, and many are still open (not just feature requests); and yes, I have a lot of criticism of the governance. But it is proof that a huge, end-user-facing software project can sustain itself and improve within having to rely on the MS-bucks or the Googlebucks and such.
But a huge project needs a lot of support, and needs to renew its support from new people, so please help out!
https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org/
Filing bugs, contributing graphics, translating parts of the UI (which you would be a saint to do since the translation system is the pits), designing document templates, organizing an install-party, getting promotional material and putting it, and of course you can write write code (starting with easy-hacks) or contribute money.
----
Due disclosure: I'm a trustee of The Document Foundation, which manages the project. Going to speak at LOConf Asia 2025 in Tokyo later this month:
Guess someone decided "we need to make it sound like we have 80% anyway we can", who knows what the real percentage is.
I do have some burning questions though, 1. How are they saving their work to the cloud if they use LibreOffice ? I don’t think it offers the same functionality that M365 suite does. 2. How are they handling IT security? Are they using a different vendor ?
Excel, in particular, hasn't been unseated despite billions in investments from competitors over the years. Parity will happen someday, but it's at least a decade away.
Schleswig-Holstein completes migration to open source email
When I last tried in a small pilot program, it was incredibly primitive. Linux desktops were janky and manual compared to Active Directory and group policy, and an alternative to Intune/AAD didn't even seem to exist. Heck, even things like WSUS and WDS didnt seem to have an open version or only had versions that required expensive expert level SME'S to perform constant fiddling. Meanwhile the Windows tools could be managed by 20 year old admins with basic certitifcations.
Also, GRC and security seemed to be impossible back then. There was an utter lack of decent DLP tools, proper legal hold was difficult, EDR/AV solutions were primitive and the options were limited, etc.
Back then it was like nobody who had ever actually been a sysadmin had ever taken an honest crack at Linux and all the hype was coming from home users who had no idea what herding boxen was actually like.
You'd think Microsoft would be dead and buried by now, or that the readers would have realized how inconsequential these changes are. One or the other.