Linux

Contact Mathias Waack. He can probably give you plenty of resources.

[email protected]

He manages the only successful Linux based infrastructure in governmental institutions in Germany.

Microsoft are deep into the government with exchange and Active Directory with most being migrated to Microsoft365 and Azure.

Add in MS Teams, SharePoint, MS SQL, 30 years of business rules living in old excel macros that ends up running the entire company.

Windows enterprise licences would be a tiny part of their spend and far too costly to mitigate away from. Most large corporations are virtualising old windows version just to keep their existing legacy apps runnings.

I am a pretty big fan of Open Source and have used Linux myself since the early 90’s. Most governments are not going to save money switching to Open Source. At least not within say the term of a politician or an election cycle. Probably the opposite.

This kind of significant shift costs money. Training costs. Consultants. Perhaps hardware. It would not be at all surprising if there are custom software solutions in place that need to be replaced. The dependencies and complexities may be significant.

There are quite likely to be savings over the longer term. The payback may take longer than you think though.

I DO believe governments should adopt Open Source. Not just for cost through. One reason is control and a reduction of influence ( corruption ). Another is so that public investment results in a public good. Custom solutions could more often be community contributions.

The greatest savings over time may actually be a reduction in forced upgrades on vendor driven timelines. Open Source solutions that are working do not always need investment. The investment could be in keeping it compatible longer. At the same time, it is also more economic to keep Open Source up to date. Again, it is more about control.

Where there may be significant cost savings is a reduction in the high costs of “everything as a service” product models.

Much more important than Open Source ( for government ) are open formats. First, if the government uses proprietary software, they expect the public to use it as well and that should not be a requirement. Closed formats can lead to restrictions on what can be built on top of these formats and these restrictions need to be eliminated as well. Finally, open formats are much, much more likely to be usable in the future. There is no guarantee that anything held in any closed format can be retrieved in the future, even if the companies that produced them still exist. Can even Microsoft read MultiPlan documents these days? How far back can PageMaker files be read? Some government somewhere is sitting on multimedia CD projects that can no longer be decoded.

What about in-house systems that were written in proprietary languages or on top of proprietary databases? What about audio or video in a proprietary format? Even if the original software is available, it may not run on a modern OS. Perhaps the OS needed is no longer available. Maybe you have the OS too but licenses cannot be purchased.

Content and information in the public record has to remain available to the public.

The most important step is demanding LibreOffice ( or other open ) formats, AV1, Opus, and AVIF. For any custom software, it needs to be possible to build it with open compilers and tools. Web pages need to follow open standards. Archival and compression formats need to be open.

After all that, Open Source software ( including the OS ) would be nice. It bothers me less though. At that lobby, it is more about ROI and Total Cost of Ownership. Sometimes, proprietary software will still make sense.

Most proprietary suppliers actually do stuff for the fees they charge. Are governments going to be able to support their Open Source solutions? Do they have the expertise? Can they manage the risks? Consultants and integrators may be more available, better skilled, amd less expensive on proprietary systems. Even the hiring process can be more difficult as local colleges and other employers are producing employees with expertise in proprietary solutions but maybe not the Open Source alternatives. There is a cost for governments to take a different path from private enterprise. How do you quantify those costs?

Anyway, the path to Open Source may not be as obvious, easy, or inexpensive as you think. It is a good longer term goal though and we should be making progress towards it.

French gendarmerie moved to Linux like a decade ago. They certainly have something about it.

It’s shameful that I feel the need to preface this by saying that I’ve used Linux for 26 years now:

The consensus is that it’s a massive cost increase rather than savings.

You would have to calculate it assuming that msft wouldn't deliberately make the process more difficult and impractical, which they have demonstrated they are willing to do.

(Refer to the section labeled "The Microsoft Playbook": https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html)

I hear it didn't go well in the German government, something about the cost of training and skyrocketing tech support calls for basic tasks.

Less than you think. Existing staff needs to be dragged kicking and screaming to learn the new systems.

Increasing the size of the helpdesk due to the increased call volume, more experienced non helldesk IT staff to babysit data migration and legacy systems. Now you have the administrative burden of all those new staff members.

I believe the question is missing somehow the main points... even if the switch cost the double or triple there are several strategic advantages that should take into account:

• use Linux allow to growth the number of high specialized professional workers, investing on local resources;
• invest in a local network of specialized companies, instead of financing the silicon valley with ours public money;
• be less dependent by abroad technologies, get a major control of the system used;

These are few that come to my mind...

What would be really interesting to know is the percentage of the investment that stay in the region/country following a linux-based/opensource IT infrastructure for public bodies vs the current closed M$|OSX paradigm.

Reminds me of the US swapping to the metric system.

Short to mid term would be miserable and confusing for people. Long term would probably work out better. Will it happen: never.

The issue with Linux is getting middle management to support it. I'm my experience is based on them laying you off and hiring somebody else. Linux is great but management needs support contracts.

What's the cost to rewrite all of the existing software to a Linux version?

Govts and large companies moving to Linux isn't about costs, security or studies. It is about plain simple corruption.

• Govts/companies like blame someone when things go wrong, if they chose open-source there's isn't someone to sue then;
• Buying proprietary stuff means you're outsourcing the risks of such product;
• Corruption pushes for proprietary: they might be buying software that is made by someone that is close to the CTO, CEO or other decision marker in the company, an old friend, family or straight under the table corruption;
• Most non-tech companies use services from consulting companies in order to get their software developed / running. Consulting companies often fall under the last point that besides that they have have large incentives from companies like Microsoft to push their proprietary services. For eg. Microsoft will easily provide all of a consulting companies employees with free Azure services, Office and other discounts if they enter in an exclusivity agreement to sell their tech stack. To make things worse consulting companies live of cheap developers (like interns) and Microsoft and their platform makes things easier for anyone to code and deploy;
• Microsoft provider a cohesive ecosystem of products that integrate really well with each other and usually don't require much effort to get things going - open-source however, usually requires custom development and a ton of work to work out the "sharp angles" between multiple solutions that aren't related and might not be easily compatible with each other;
• Open-source requires a level of expertise that more than half of the developers and IT professionals simply don't have. This aspect reinforces the last point even more. Senior open-source experts are more expensive than simply buying proprietary solutions;
• If we consider the price of a senior open-source expert + software costs (usually free) the cost of open-source is considerable lower than the cost of cheap developers + proprietary solutions, however consider we are talking about companies. Companies will always prefer to hire more less expensive and less proficient people because that means they're easier to replace and you'll pay less taxes;
• Companies will prefer to hire services from other companies instead of employees thus making proprietary vendors more compelling. This happens because from an accounting / investors perspective employees are bad and subscriptions are cool (less taxes, no responsibilities etc);
• The companies who build proprietary solutions work really hard to get vendors to sell their software, they provide commissions, support and the promises that if anything goes wrong they'll be there. This increases the number of proprietary-only vendors which reinforces everything above. If you're starting to sell software or networking services there's little incentive for you to go pure "open-source". With less companies, less visibility, less professionals (and more expensive), less margins and less positive market image, less customers and lesser profits.

Unfortunately things are really poised and rigged against open-source solutions and anyone who tries to push for them. The "experts" who work in consulting companies are part of this as they usually don't even know how to do things without the property solutions. Let me give you an example, once I had to work with E&Y, one of those big consulting companies, and I realized some awkward things while having conversations with both low level employees and partners / middle management, they weren't aware that there are alternatives most of the time. A manager of a digital transformation and cloud solutions team that started his career E&Y, wasn't aware that there was open-source alternatives to Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 for e-mail. I probed a TON around that and the guy, a software engineer with an university degree, didn't even know that was Postfix was and the history of email.

What gets me is that militaries use Windows, including North Korea

The city administration of Munich switched to Linux, migrated all data and users, trained them etc. for millions of Euros, and then eventually switched back some years later since staff productivity was way down, and users didn't feel comfortable in the OS environment.

You can't enforce a change. Linux is great, especially so for tech enthusiasts, but the average (or probably below average) user might have a hard time to adjust.

And when performance is measured in workforce efficiency, then you have to accept that it's simply not suited for every environment.

Doesn't Germany use a lot of Linux in their government?