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German state moving 30,000 PCs to Linux and LibreOffice - The Document Foundation Blog
(blog.documentfoundation.org)
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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A good number of European cities and countries have tried Linux and open source software in the past. They use it for a few years and then they have almost always have quietly gone back to MS Windows and Office products.
As much as I enjoy using Linux, (and no, I don't use Arch), and open source for my own needs, I would be willing to bet after a few years, this German state will quietly move back to Micosoft products again.
The intense pressure from Microsoft doesn't have anything to do with it I'm sure.
It’s cheaper to find support
*at first
Its only cheap because its normalized in that domain. As more work is done to iron out bugs and get people in the office space the feature they need on Linux the more experience IT folks will get support.
Its an investment as always. There is no such thing as a free lunch
Society favours the short term and it will be a long time before Linux sys admins are cheaper than Windows sys admins
Or even asking random kid out of high school how to do x
Who else to start the trend than the government that was created for the public good in the first place.
You have too look at it at scale too, and most places should either be adopting some platform that already does or be planning on scaling some special service they do.
Every Podunk municple probally should have to have a AD expert, a security expert, a hardware/software lifecycle management person, etc etc
That's how o365 can be cheaper total cost of ownership then an army of siloed sys admins, even if the software is at no cost to them.
Its an investment in total operations of the organizations of the state, from the current state of 1990s tech most operate off of to a modern IT infrastructure.
Microsoft certainly tries it's best to keep you locked into their ecosystem by making it inconvenient but not impossible to leave though that's not the real reason, it's security. Businesses and especially governments are scared of nation state hackers contributing malicious code to open source products and falsely assume it's safer to use closed source software because those incidents aren't public. There's so much great software out there I'd love to use and the first question I'm asked when I bring it up is can you prove China hasn't contributed code?
Just a coincidence.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/
Linux and LibreOffice are really mature pieces of software, especially the Linux kernel. You have to understand that this is not just about saving taxpayer money, but more importantly about sovereignty. When the US government has a direct tap to the most sensitive data in a nation, that nation is not sovereign. The espionage that the US government is conducting in other countries is unprecedented in human history. Think about all the cloud services and telemetry. How the hell does it make sense for a foreign nation to just hand over all this data and at the same time pay a premium? Let me tell you, it makes zero sense for a nation that is sovreign and free.
Money that used to go to expensive $/user/month licenses to Microsoft can now go to funding local development of open source software and making jobs. You and I benefit from that too.
While I agree with you about open source software and wish this state success, I'm not blind to the fact that the road is difficult to do so and budgets only go so far in government. And they will end up doing what is easiest and cheapest to do. Sovereignty or not. It's human nature.
As far as espionage goes EVERY nation on the planet is doing so. So it just ain't the US to blame or fear. So don't blame just the US and then pat yourself on the back because you think you are above such things. You country is most definitely not and they are engaged in it, (against you also), even as we speak. And wherever do you think the US learned it from? European nations where spying on each other and their own citizens long before the US was even a thought. Everyone has just gotten better at it.
I don't disagree with you.