[HN Gopher] German state gov. ditching Windows for Linux, 30K wo...
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German state gov. ditching Windows for Linux, 30K workers migrating
Author : rbanffy
Score : 29 points
Date : 2024-04-05 21:29 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| pndy wrote:
| That's what whole Europe should do already years ago because
| considering all the data mining Microsoft conducts in their
| products it become quite dangerous to use anything they released
| in nearly a decade.
|
| In 2015 Munich reverted their decision from 2004 about migrating
| to Linux (they opted for an Ubuntu derivative) and OpenOffice
| [1][2], so let's hope that the Schleswig-Holstein government will
| stick to open source solutions this time for good and that will
| become a trend worth following.
|
| [1] - https://onmsft.com/news/german-city-that-ditched-windows-
| for...
|
| [2] -
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150821225906/https://www.techr...
| netsharc wrote:
| The first article seems to be very pro-Microsoft and doesn't
| mention how Ballmer lobbied Munich hard to return to the
| Microsoft system, including offering steep discounts and
| promising to open an MS headquarter in Munich. I wonder how
| nice the dinner the 2 mentioned politicians got.
|
| This site admittedly looks like a conspiracy site, but it says
| onmsft.com is a bogus site:
| https://techwrongs.org/o/2015/08/24/sabine-pfeiler-and-otto-...
| pndy wrote:
| I do remember this story about Munich going for open source
| and then switching back but I don't recall any side story
| about MS lobbying for opening headquarter in the city or
| offering discounts. That's what brave search served me when I
| enter the keywords so excuse me for choosing the source -
| sadly, the sites that do PR for the companies pretending to
| serve news, leaks, reviews are all around us.
|
| And honestly, it's not really surprising that MS lobbied -
| they managed to do the same in Poland too many times in the
| past. My sister starting computer classes in the high school
| was given a pamphlet with instruction how to register an
| account in (back then) Windows Live ecosystem, how to use
| mail and create a blog there, and how great SkyDrive is for
| storing your files.
| johnea wrote:
| This is also related to M$ providing windoze source to
| China, in order for china to be able to implement their own
| encryption (allowing gov backdoor).
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/china-to-view-
| window...
|
| In addition ot governments' concern for security, I'm am
| amazed that corps happily use s/w tools that routinely
| exfiltrate data. This includes gmail, outlook, teams, ST's
| CubeIDE, cloud storage and many many more.
|
| If you were a company that was a majotr competitor to M$,
| would you be OK hosting your executive strategy meetings on
| a M$ or Goggle meeting platform? When the EULA says they
| can mine your meeting?
|
| And offering these tools in schools (where "free" licenses
| are provided) only locks the next generation of users,
| including s/w engineering students, into the M$ platform.
| It's basically tax payer funded M$ training. I'm shocked
| (shocked I say) at the number of young s/w engineers I work
| with who are hopeless outside of a windows desktop.
|
| As you mention, I also certainly hope that the current
| conversion away from M$ will sustain, and influence other
| agencies and companies to migrate away...
| CapeTheory wrote:
| > hleswig-Holstein is also developing an open source directory
| service to replace Microsoft's Active Directory
|
| Colour me intrigued - but don't we already have this with
| FreeIPA?
| sorieus wrote:
| Yeah, I don't see what this is going to different. I mean at
| the end of the day, we have LDAP then you just package all the
| other fun bits around it kerberos, sssd, dns, cert management
| etc.
| patrakov wrote:
| In the meanwhile, in the Philippines, I had to buy Microsoft
| Office for my company's treasurer who, so far, used LibreOffice
| successfully. The reason is that the only officially approved
| application for submitting the "alphalist" of withheld taxes to
| the tax agency (BIR) has a hard dependency on Excel for printing
| (instead of printing, it launches Excel with some pre-populated
| spreadsheet), and auditors require a hard copy.
|
| P.S. Without this "export to Excel for printing" functionality
| (EDIT: and maybe something else, too, I have not tested all the
| buttons), the app also works in Wine.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Not the first German government to do this. Here's something
| about Munchen in 2020, I think there's been others:
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...
| zeroCalories wrote:
| This is the kinda thing that makes me nervous. My brother asked
| me about my Linux workstation and said he wanted to try it after
| I explained why I like Linux. After a month, and tons of tech
| issues, he was back on Windows. I've only seen it work at tech
| companies and, for what it's worth, they were all using Google
| workspaces.
| winrid wrote:
| Specific hardware and software versions that you test first
| should be fine. They do the same thing with any other OS, so
| I'd hope they do that here.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Operating systems, and enterprise solutions, are complex
| ecosystems. You never know what you'll need, and find that a
| lot of basic stuff doesn't work properly. For example, with
| 30k people, you know they have graphic designers. Hopefully
| they don't get forced to learn inkscape and gimp, so they're
| already out. What about the millions of conferencing
| applications that people use? Personally, I've had many
| embarrassing failures with Zoom and Webex on Linux. What if
| you need to do an external presentation? Hope you don't have
| any compatibility issues with the projectors(real story T_T).
| Of course I still wish them luck as I would prefer a Linux
| based world, but let's not pretend this won't be a bumpy
| ride.
| johnea wrote:
| I'm not sure why your hoping that people won't use and
| support s/w that is developed FOR the end user, not for a
| corps profit?
|
| Your perspective is indicative of a very narrow view of the
| world caused by being raised in a M$ ecosystem...
| sschueller wrote:
| Now with the money they are saving on licenses they should spend
| that to improve those open source projects.
|
| Also public money, public code.
| internetter wrote:
| > Schrodter also claimed that the move would help with the
| state's budget by diverting money from licensing fees to "real
| programming services from our domestic digital economy" that
| could also create local jobs.
| wruza wrote:
| It's nice to see that they looked at previous attempts and do not
| underestimate (or at least are aware of) the _insane_ complexity
| of this move. I'm really curious about their migration plan
| details, knowledge bases and all other supportive structures
| involved. Documenting this openly could be an immense help for
| both this and future migrations.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe] why wasting our time OP?
|
| Lots of earlier discussion on the official post:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928173
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