This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The idea that a state government is unnecessarily at the mercy of any corporation is hard to comprehend. Especially, as in this case, a foreign corporation.
Open source shouldn't only be the standard for governments. It should be the minimum requirement.
IMO it should be further than that.
Open source software is, more often than not, used as digital infrastructure.
Governments around the world should absolutely be investing in open source software and actively contributing to it.
There is a FSFE campaign that claims all publicly-funded institutions should only use Free Software.
Good, we need to stop supporting products that try to strong arm you into a perpetual subscription.
If governments actually employed most of the development teams who build their services, and cut out most of the private middlemen consultants, managers, sales staff etc they could 1) build an engineering and cybersecurity capability without surveillance capitalism, focused on data security and privacy 2) save money 4) create productivity multipliers by unifying and sharing code for common functions across governments around the world 5) return our tax dollars to us through FOSS software that benefits us, instead of enriching big tech corporations who are already richer and more powerful than most nation states.
For example, covid tracking apps — instead of every dumb cunt government paying tens/hundreds of millions for consultants to reinvent the wheel or reskin someone else's code, they could have had in house devs coordinate common FOSS codebases and collectively saved 80+% of the cost. This is the same for most standard or common services using bespoke or proprietary software and systems.
Politicians are criminally corrupt idiots though, so they'll continue enriching big tech and surveillance capitalism at the expense of civilisation.
If governments actually employed most of the development teams who build their services, and cut out most of the private middlemen consultants, managers, sales staff etc
You mean this? They've been working on it for a while, this is about adopting stuff they've already done.
For example, covid tracking apps
Germany's is open source. Developed by Telekom and SAP, most of the money didn't go towards development (it's simple enough of an app, after all) but infrastructure and end-user support. You can't just tell random FLOSS people to deal with 80 million DAUs.
Let me tell you a story about proprietary software:
The German police force have a contract with a software firm that wrote their program to file and archive emergency calls. Basically just a form that goes to a database. Now, one day, an update got pushed. The problem with that update was that the hotkey for quitting out of the current form (q) now also fired when inside an editing field. The software firm did not acknowledge that as a problem and it took months of complaints to fix and it cost the taxpayer around 300,000€ in "maintenance fees".
As someone who works with government agencies as a software developer: they are absolutely awful.
You'll get no specification at all, those you do get will change at least three times and every stupid little decision needs at least 20 people from different states, cities or agencies to agree.
Yes, the bug is pretty bad, but I'm also very sure that what you're describing is not the whole story.
This isn't going to happen.
This headline comes up every year that it's time for the government to negotiate contracts with Microsoft. Once they get the best price they think they can, they will accept it and issue a news release that "we're staying in Windows after all".
It's lame, but it's what is going to happen.
I remember some city in Germany actually doing it some years back and then eventually giving up and switching back.
googles
It's a little unclear exactly what software was and wasn't switched, but sounds like it's Munich, and now they're back on LibreOffice again.
By 2006, the city had started a concerted effort to move away from Microsoft products and onto Linux. Fast forward to 2013 and 80% of all workstations in the government and related organizations were running LiMux. However, Microsoft’s Windows and Office services were still used.
As we reported back in 2017, the government made a controversial decision to abandon open source and return to Windows.
A newly elected government in Munich, Germany has said it will aim to use open source solutions in its offices. In doing so, the government is moving away from Windows and Microsoft Office despite committing to the products several years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
LiMux was a project launched by the city of Munich in 2004 in order to replace the software on its desktop computers, migrating from Microsoft Windows to free software based on Linux.[citation needed] By 2012, the city had migrated 12,600 of its 15,500 desktops to LiMux. In November 2017 Munich City Council resolved to reverse the migration and return to Microsoft Windows-based software by 2020.[1][2][3] In May 2020, it was reported that the newly elected politicians in Munich, while not going back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux wholesale, will prefer Free Software for future endeavours.[4]
EDIT: I guess I should have just read the other comment responding to the parent, which mentioned Munich.
Amd just after Munich announced it will go back to Windows, Microsoft decided to move its German central to Munich. What a coincidence.
Munich did exactly that in 2017, so let's see how far Sleswig-Holstein is willing to go, hopefully they won't be falling for Microsofts sweet talk.
The reason Munich switched back to Windows, when users were just fine working with Limux, was a corrupt politician who ordered the return to windows, probably pocketing a hefty bribe in the process.
This is the sexiest thing Germany has done since that German couple that drives the Porsche in Super Troopers.
Good!!! I hope other governments follow.
I genuinely hate AI art
This one is terrible because it's like a montage of a penguin colony over a generic historic painting of a port city. Very little creativity and quality control. I'd just combine some actual photo of the Kiel port and penguins jumping out of water. (Not necessarily these two)
Unrelated to the question but on the picture:
The AI nicely drew a german city but ... put the naziflag on the ships Rather than the current german flag.
Why is that image even there? It's not in the original article unless my adblocker is removing it for some reason.
EDIT: before anyone states the obvious, yes, I know how OG metatags work. What I'm asking is why would they chose that particular image, with the penguins and all, to accompany an article like that, and not, say, just a regular stock image of a German city?
Even stranger, the filename in the URL implies that this was potentially even intended: https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/04/04/shutterstock_kiel.jpg Almost makes me wonder if some intern put an AI image there for shits and giggles to see if anyone notices.
Finally, where exactly do you see any Nazi flags? All I can see is a red, white, and black livery, which ARE the colors that the Nazis used, but not in that arrangement. There are no swastikas anywhere (as far as I can see), so it seems as if this rather the flag of the German Empire, which also used the same colors, but predates the Nazis by a good 60 years.
Wasn't it Munich who did that a few years back, only to backtrack sometime later?
Yes, it was Munich. And all things considered it worked quite well for a while.
After a while AFAIK the then new mayor called himself a "Microsoft fan" and tried to get Microsoft to build their new German HQ in Munich. So I am pretty sure there is no connection whatsoever between canceling Limux and switching back to Windows and Microsoft building a huge campus in Munich Freimann...
I fully expect this to get backtracked almost immediately. From my experience most government employees can barely handle a browser upgrade with a UI change, and they will 100% throw a collective fit if their Word and/or Outlook goes away.
It's not just office, SH and many other parts of the German government have been slowly replacing the entire O365 suite with OpenDesk, which is an open source product based on Matrix, Jitsi, LibreOffice, and a few other tools.
The goal is to have a fully integrated solution for calender, chat, calls, documents, cloud storage, etc.
My employer is developing parts of that solution and we recently switched our internal communication over to it, and tbh, it's working really well.
Now is the perfect point in time to do it, with the GDPR ruling regarding O365 and Microsoft fumbling the migration between old teams and new teams.
Which is good, since M$ Office is still one of (if not the) biggest security holes in all of software due to its macros and how no one uses them securely.
Also also doing things the OS way will lead to less changes in the long run since Microsoft can and will change their layouts as they please, but a well maintained FOSS-fork can stay one way indefinitely.
I love this, but having used ms office extensively for work, we all know it has many more features. Libreoffice isn't a drop in replacement, but maybe with the increased user base it can become one.
It really depends on the needs.
When my entire company (10k employees) switched to LibreOffice, it was almost fine. There was like 50 ppl who were frustrated at breaking changes. But many adapted and it was a pretty clean transition.
As for LibreCalc, fuck that. What a nightmare. Employees resorted to creating Google accounts to use Google Sheets instead. We still don't have a solution, and if one particular director gets his way, that whole department might switch back to Windows just for Excel.
Switching to an open-source project is easy, but the concern is more about the context in which they are used and how long they will persist in using these. It might be more convenient for the government to initially try Linux for some pilot projects that require less human intervention. This is because I’m not sure how familiar civil servants are with Linux and LibreOffice. On the other hand, open-source projects don’t provide after-sales services and may have technical or compatibility issues. It requires time for them to get accustomed to them.
According to the article,
I wonder what they will choose for their base. I was surprised LiMux was based off Debian since Suse is headquartered in Luxembourg City. I personally would welcome a large organization choosing Suse products as we need more competition for RHEL (which would be a huge boon in productivity since we won't need like 3 projects to spend a decent amount of time repackaging RHEL).
Maybe soon a unified CSV handling might be possible.
I can confidently say that CSV support is one of those problems that even the brightest computer scientists will be pondering for the decades to come.
Supporting CSVs sounds like an easy problem, but it's not. It's like a whole different complexity type. Time complexity, space complexity, and now, the dreaded subclass between spec complexity and organisational complexity.
You can't just make the users agree which delimiter to use and how quotes are supposed to work. That's nearly impossible. No no no.
Boom. Listen up NHS England.
Oh hey, I'm from Schleswig-Holstein! That's neat! I mean libre office looks like shit (they probably never saw a UX designer and high DPI scaling has been broken since like forever) but at least its not Microsoft. And if its functionally the same, why not? So yeah, good news!
Writer and Calc look almost identical to ms word and excel on my Debian 12 system... Congratulations by the way, you should be proud of your state!
As someone using LibreOffice at home and MS Office at work (both daily): nope, unfortunately, Calc is pretty shit compared to Excel. It's enough for my personal needs but I wouldn't want to rely on it professionally.
Good. This makes them less vulnerable to the malware that Windows innately is.
Hey, can you hear that? That's the sound of hundreds of IT support workers silently crying out at the thought of having to explain a whole new OS and new office software to some boomer.
Doubt it. Most users are point-and-droolers with no understanding nor desire to learn the base concepts behind the interfaces they're using. No IT worker has ever successfully explained a technical concept to an (l)user in the history of ever. By now we're smart enough not to try.
These people learn how to use computers at their jobs by rote, not by comprehension, and to them one word processor, spreadsheet, or browser is much the same as any other once they learn where all the buttons are that make it do what they want, and their interest in any of it stops precisely at that point and no further. There will be some grumbling about "the new system is so much worse than the old system," but that very same grumbling always happens whenever the "system" changes, regardless of whether or not the new one or the old one was actually the worse of the two.
Furthermore, these days I guarantee you the majority of the work they do is entirely within a browser via some ghastly intranet site which will not look or behave any differently on Linux vs. Windows vs. Mac vs. a Chromebook vs. a graphing calculator, etc.
