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German state moving 30,000 PCs to Linux and LibreOffice - The Document Foundation Blog (blog.documentfoundation.org)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

According to the article it's all about the data, not the product, and how Microsoft 365 breaches EU data protection laws..

Which is really kind of funny, because if MS had left users' data alone and focused on the product instead of backend data brokering revenue, they'd probably be keeping this business and not losing it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

Yeah, I'm somewhat doubtful it will work - Germany tried that already, but had trouble with interoperability (read: MS Office vendor lock in) and moved back to Windows:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

Please note: the reasons for switching back were a little more nuanced than just Office.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I'm from Munich and followed that very closely when it happened.

The reality isn't lock-in. The reality is lobbyism. Ballmer literally interrupted his skiing holidays in the 2000s to offer the then mayor a better deal when that mayor started the Linux project. But Ude stood firm.

Then the next mayor came, and with him, a new opportunity. Microsoft was planning to build near Munich you see, and it would be a shame if that had to be cancelled. So they met the next mayor, Reiter, behind closed doors to talk about the building project, and a bit after that, the (by then already clearly successful) Limux project was undone.

Not cancelled, that would imply that they weren't done switching everything yet. They were. They just did the whole migration in reverse because Microsoft wanted them to.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

There were interoperability issues on the federal level, but I'm with you, lobbying must have played a major role in reverting the migration.

At the time, there were also press releases mentioning increasingly slow support response times and missing features, but since (at least according to my knowledge) no stats on that have ever been published, it's hard to tell how much of those were opinion pieces (with the interviews potentially being non-representative).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

The always are inter operability issues on a federal level in Germany, because of the strong level of individuality of each state. That has little to do with Windows vs Linux.

Any project that has to aggregate data on a federal level is technically challenging and accompanied by a ton of political sensitiveness. The states tend to see any attempt at standardization as an attack on their state freedoms.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I do, see related comments elsewhere in this post.

Also, just to be completely clear: I'm not doubting the feasibility of migrating government desktops to Linux, I'm doubting wether a German governmental institution will manage to pull it off this time.

I'm still rooting for it to happen, though.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

A corrupt state in Germany != all of Germany. It's like saying "the USA already tried X and it didn't work" when some town in one of the drive-through states made an attempt at something. Also, it's a federation. Just because one state fails at pushing back against lobbyism doesn't mean all will.

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