[HN Gopher] The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently rely...
___________________________________________________________________
The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open
source
Author : doener
Score : 486 points
Date : 2025-12-07 13:21 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.heise.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.heise.de)
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all
| national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic
| sovereignty. I'm sure Microsoft, under orders from the U.S.
| government, could disable all computers in any country or
| organization, at the flick of a switch.
|
| Imagine how Open Source Software could improve if a consortium of
| nations put their money and resources into commissioning bug
| fixes and enhancements, which would be of collective benefit.
|
| Apart from a few niche cases, the needs of most government
| bureaucracies would be well served by currently available OSS
| word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and graphics software.
| jll29 wrote:
| The sabotage scenario is perhaps less likely than the
| alternative scenario of industrial and political espionage.
|
| There are also practical advantages: the ability to fix a bug
| _in-house_ instead of waiting for a technology giant from
| another continent.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > the ability to fix a bug in-house
|
| Yes, but bureaucracies make this impossible. If you have
| worked at a bank before, you'll know how difficult it is to
| make a change to some in-house piece of software. And that's
| a bank, not a gov't institution. Think how much more friction
| there will be in the latter.
| grim_io wrote:
| The culture can only change when it actually becomes
| possible to make any changes to the systems.
|
| If all the software one institution uses comes in the form
| of proprietary binaries, there is simply no need to even
| think about making policies about fixing those systems in-
| house.
| nickff wrote:
| These institutions don't bother making fixes where they
| can, so it seems unlikely that giving them more options
| will change much. Ironically, things like windows auto-
| update being the default probably actually help their IT
| departments maintain some level of security
| grim_io wrote:
| Auto update is not rocket science. Linux distributions
| have it too.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Yeah and it is better. Most things can be updated without
| a reboot and even for the kernel, you can either live-
| patch it (not always possible) or reboot only the kernel.
| petcat wrote:
| EU bureaucracy is where optimism goes to die
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I wonder if it is in fact easier in a German region than a
| bank though. A bank has massive compliance complications,
| where the state insists on rules being met, so their are
| teams of people trying to make sure no rules being broken,
| and therefore anti-change. Germany is a Federal system, and
| the region has law making powers, a bit like a US state.
| Therefore it can set the rules to make sure migration to a
| new system happens. If big fixes are not allowed, they have
| themselves to blame. At a bank it is the state causing the
| friction.
| Terr_ wrote:
| It's funny, I was doing some budgeting stuff, and I ran
| into some corruption of payee-data in my bank's export
| files.
|
| Good: I already wrote a script to fix the exact same issue.
|
| Bad: It was in a pile of old stuff from 10+ years ago.
|
| Good: It worked anyway.
|
| Bad: The bank _still_ has the same bug.
| whstl wrote:
| Less likely? This is exactly what happened earlier this year.
|
| Here's an article from the same newspaper that showed up to
| me as "related" when browsing TFA:
|
| https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-s-
| emai...
| nroets wrote:
| So you point to one instance of highly targeted sabotage
| aka sanctions. But Snowden and others exposed many
| instances of espionage dragnets.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| I agree, but it also feels like it would be so difficult. It
| requires a ton of training, the UIs are not flashy so people
| are going to feel repulsed (I unironically found looks to be a
| big blocker when adopting open source tech) and finally
| Microsoft is going to lobby incredibly hard against it. I
| wouldn't put it past Microsoft to actively sabotage any
| adoption.
| whstl wrote:
| This excuse is as old as the hills and I've been hearing it
| since the late 90s, but historically there has been exactly
| zero training between versions of Office or Windows that
| changed a lot of the interface overnight. Office workers just
| kept using them like the rest of the planet.
|
| Not to mention companies who moved on to Google Docs or the
| web version of Office. Or companies who moved to MacOS 15-10
| years ago.
|
| In my state back home the entire workforce moved to
| LibreOffice and, according to my sister (a government
| worker), everyone is doing fine. Recently I saw a German
| government worker using Office to produce a document and she
| mentioned that she "barely knows how to use it" and "just
| knows how to load templates, fill and print".
|
| This hypothetical problem of "needs training" only seems to
| exist when you mention the words "open source".
| dietr1ch wrote:
| > - It requires a ton of training, the UIs are not flashy so
| people are going to feel repulsed (I unironically found looks
| to be a big blocker when adopting open source tech), and
| finally Microsoft is going to lobby incredibly hard against
| it.
|
| I think everyone agrees the costs are high, especially beyond
| monetary ones, but this stance on avoiding these costs is
| slowly pushing everyone into finding out how expensive is not
| having sovereignty.
|
| Through its tech industry the US has over time acquired too
| much power over critical digital infrastructure that has
| already compromised governments. We know of
| Presidents/PMs/Legislators spied upon through their phones
| and computers, and also Microsoft itself involved in revoking
| email access to the ICC's chief prosecutor as
| retaliation/defense against investigations.
|
| Sovereignty is too important for government, and since
| everyone needs to do it and get security right going for
| open-source with funded development and constant auditing is
| in my mind the only way.
| blibble wrote:
| not being able to be coerced by the US regime is a huge
| strategic requirement that no amout of lobbying by microsoft
| will be able to overcome
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| The employees don't care about software sovereignty. They
| just want to do their jobs and get their paychecks. Fail to
| win them over and the transition will fail as well.
| blibble wrote:
| you might be right if it was american employees
|
| germans have been quite riled up by US escapades
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| >UIs are not flashy
|
| Where did you see flashy UIs? Modern UIs are boring flat
| geometric monochrome shit and Microsoft is one of the worst
| there.
| al_borland wrote:
| Today when a government pushes for a backdoor we often see
| companies push back. The FBI publicly complained about iMessage
| encryption a lot, and currently Apple is also telling the
| government of India they aren't going to install their
| "security" software... those are just a couple examples.
|
| What happens when major OSS projects are controlled by the
| governments themselves? Will David still beat Goliath?
| hamdouni wrote:
| Fork the project.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Maybe. I highly doubt Apple or any other company isn't
| complying in some way.
|
| It's been widely speculated that there are gentleman's
| agreements where strategic bugs do not get fixed. To apple's
| credit, unlike say BlackBerry, they designed iMessage where
| many of the intercept methods are tamper evident.
| lucianbr wrote:
| How does anyone "control" an OSS project in the sense that
| you are talking about, so the ability to insert backdoors or
| activate kill-switches? Maybe Linus controls Linux, but can
| he "flick a switch and kill" any running kernels? He might be
| able to insert backdoors, but will they go unnoticed? Would
| anyone be forced to install them? Just patch the code to
| remove the backdoor.
|
| I feel that you wrote some words that only seem to make sense
| if we don't think about them too much.
| rocqua wrote:
| Linux is not a smart target. But OpenOffice, nextcloud,
| postfix, those are much easier targets for developer
| coercion to compromise widely installed software that is
| important for "linux on the desktop". Ah and ofcourse also
| the desktop environments, and perhaps systemD are all in a
| privileged position with much less eyes on.
| al_borland wrote:
| The thought was that the government would effectively
| become the largest employer of OSS developers who would
| then be compelled to follow directions or be out of a job.
| Would there be enough independent developers to review
| millions of lines of code, patch out any back doors, or
| fork and maintain an entirely separate projects, since none
| of the government protects can be trusted?
|
| Could the government also dictate the operating system and
| software people use to make sure it is the state sponsored
| one? If I'm not mistaken some similar actions have happened
| in N Korea and China.
|
| I'm not saying this is an inevitable outcome, but just
| trying to think of worst case scenarios. A lot of terrible
| things have started with good intentions.
| p2detar wrote:
| > Would there be enough independent developers to review
| millions of lines of code, patch out any back doors, or
| fork and maintain an entirely separate projects, since
| none of the government protects can be trusted
|
| That's not far from how it is right now in OSS, even
| without governments in the chain. For example: how the xz
| back door was found:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
| lolc wrote:
| You're saying that a state can upstream patches with
| planted backdoors. Thruth is, this is possible in all
| software. It's not specific to state-sponsored open
| source software. So your scenario is a reality whether
| you want it or not. And open source is not particularily
| vulnerable either. People forget this.
|
| Now a lot of people would be angry if my state decided to
| spend money on security flaws. I imagine an elected
| representative try to explain how they wanted to misspend
| funds allocated to improve software and plant flaws
| instead. That would not go down well here or in Germany.
| Try to hire people for this in Germany and see how long
| you last till your little op is public.
| LexiMax wrote:
| > How does anyone "control" an OSS project in the sense
| that you are talking about, so the ability to insert
| backdoors or activate kill-switches?
|
| A government can control a piece of open source software
| the same way a big tech company does - with economies of
| scale. In other words, by throwing more money, resources,
| and warm bodies at their open source projects than anybody
| else.
|
| The code itself might be under an open license, but project
| governance is free to remain self-interested and ignorant
| of the needs of the "community."
|
| Any pull request accepted from outside isn't a mutual
| exchange of developer labor for the benefit of all, but the
| company successfully tricking an outside developer into
| doing free work for them.
|
| Any pull request that runs counter to the interests of the
| company can and will be ignored or rejected, no matter how
| much effort was put into it or how much it would benefit
| other users.
|
| Any hostile forks are going to be playing a catch-up game,
| as community efforts cannot outpace the resources of most
| large companies.
| notpushkin wrote:
| As long as upstream is open source, forks can just keep
| syncing. At some point, the upstream will then usually
| switch to open core, or some sort of delayed open source,
| but often that leads to people leaving for the open
| forks, hopefully donating to them, too.
|
| (Gentle reminder to subscribe to donate to a FOSS project
| or two that you use.)
| belter wrote:
| Apple sit behind the most corrupt US President in history at
| its inauguration, donated to a ball room and millions of
| dollars for other unspecified purposes. Is your argument that
| they will not fold...or that the backdoor is already in place
| ? :-)
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "the needs of most government bureaucracies would be well
| served by currently available OSS word processing, spreadsheet,
| presentation and graphics software."
|
| wait until they found out that there is no "customer service"
| in OSS, sometimes the project is fine but people need "someone"
| to be held accountable in some ways
|
| that's why a lot of OSS project never take flight
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| There absolutely can be "customer service" in OSS. You can
| usually find someone to pay for it.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Customer service is how OSS companies make money.
| newsclues wrote:
| I feel like there should be an open project to manage and
| support this.
|
| I think governance (both public and private) would benefit from
| open tools to manage communities at scale via technology.
| rocqua wrote:
| I doubt that Microsoft has a kill switch. Though through
| automatic updates they still have pretty strong sabotage
| capabilities.
|
| But the OS is not where Microsofts power lies. Its in exchange
| (almost everywhere cloud managed, including for many
| governments) and SharePoint, with a small amount of teams,
| where Microsoft is truly a scary prospect for sovereignty.
| smodo wrote:
| The kill switch is M365 account management. You take that
| offline, many SME's and local governments just stop working.
| At least for a while.
| codedokode wrote:
| They have the kill switch, it is called a "cloud account".
| Nowadays you need a valid cloud (MS-controlled) account to
| log into your computer.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Haven't used Windows in almost a decade, has it gotten that
| bad?
|
| I can't log on to a windows computer if the cloud account
| don't exist? What if there's no internet?
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > What if there's no internet?
|
| Surely that is something only criminal would say.
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| It caches your credentials so you can still login
| offline. But you do need to be online when you're logging
| into your PC for the first time, post-install.
|
| There are some unofficial hacks to bypass the online
| account requirement, but MS have been actively stamping
| these out. Now the current situation isn't like it's
| impossible to bypass this, mind you (as far as I'm aware
| there's at least a couple of workarounds), but normal
| users won't know/care and will end up just creating an
| online account.
| sirjaz wrote:
| If you have pro or enterprise you can still setup a local
| account. It is home edition that is the issue
| karussell wrote:
| > pretty strong sabotage capabilities
|
| Via updates they can install and run anything they want ...
| aka 'kill switch'.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| They absolutely have. They force upgrade computers to Windows
| 11, which then won't boot, because the system doesn't
| actually support it. I guess they also have a smoother way to
| achieve that. They are also cases where an update broke the
| booting process, so the bitlocker key was lost. Everything is
| encrypted with it by default, and the only copy sits on a MS
| server connected with you MS account. Guess what happens when
| they say sorry, we can't just give you that key...
| consumer451 wrote:
| I have a possibly strange take.
|
| Isn't the code of law the original open source, for very good
| reason?
|
| As law becomes more and more enforced by software, should it
| not all be required to be open source?
| graemep wrote:
| Governments have more to gain from being able to work with a
| few big companies on things like surveillance than they do from
| sovereignty - which many of them regard as an out of date idea
| anyway.
|
| Despite all the talk about sovereign cloud the actual
| governments are actually going the other way.
|
| 1. The Online Safety Act in the UK pushes people to use big
| tech more rather than run stuff independently - the forums that
| moved to social media. 2. EU regulatory requirements that help
| the incumbents:https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/27/cispe_eu_
| sovereignty_... 3. ID apps in multiple countries that require
| installs from Google or Apple stores, and only run on their
| platforms. 4. The push to cashless which means increased
| reliance on Visa, Mastercard, Apple and Google.
|
| To be clear I do not not think that any of these things are in
| the public interest. However the government is not the public,
| and the public (and probably a lot of the government) has
| deeply ingrained learned helplessness about technology.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Prudent to assume that the same is possible with Linux.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Similar opinion and source of income.
|
| Linux for starters, however even that has too many US
| contributions.
|
| In general, we need to go back to the cold war days, multiple
| OSes and programming languages governed by international
| standards, with local vendors.
|
| If sovereignty is desired, it can't stop at Office packages.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| I wonder what they use for Microsoft Office. My office license is
| renewing in 2 weeks and I have been looking at alternatives but
| they all have their own catch.
| cl3misch wrote:
| I find Onlyoffice to be the closest alternative. It presents
| itself as a hosted office platform but you can actually install
| it locally and it feels just like an office program.
|
| It's not the most efficient, being effectively a webview. But
| its UI and compatibility is imho much better than LibreOffice.
|
| https://www.onlyoffice.com/
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Thanks! Works quite well.
| eloeffler wrote:
| The catch depends a lot on the context that you're considering.
| Trying to replace Microsoft Office as a whole by a drop-in
| replacement like LibreOffie may work better or worse depending
| on who uses it.
|
| I've never used anything but OpenOffice / LibreOffice for
| writing academic texts in the humanities and never missed
| anything. The "catch" whenever I tried Microsoft Word was the
| menu that had the most important functions (for me) hidden away
| much deeper than in OO and LO.
|
| I've never been a big user of Spreadsheets but I've heard only
| good of Excel and trust the widespread opinion that it is
| unchallenged in its domain. In sociology you wouldn't use it
| because you've got specialized statistics software such as R
| and SPSS (PSPP being an attempt at an Open Source Alternative
| to SPSS).
|
| Looking at administration, Excel ist probably quite important
| but when you get rid of it, not one but various solutions might
| take its place, depending on who uses it. If you want something
| like a browseable database in a colorful table for office
| clerks, LO Calc might be enough. But the things Excel gets
| praised for a lot (I never know what exactly people mean) would
| probably have to be tackled another way.
|
| Governments going down that need to invest into finding those
| solutions by providing staff that is qualified to find them or
| even develop them. The state of Schleswig-Holstein considered
| in its Open Source initiative strategy that it may be
| challenged by a future legislation and put a focus on the
| reasons for acceptance of Open Source solutions. I wonder if
| that is put into action well to find solutions with the least
| "catch" that may even excel over Microsoft products depending
| on their context :)
| analog31 wrote:
| Immerse yourself in a workplace setting where Excel is the
| first thing that people grab for anything but text editing.
| You'll see how insanely productive people are. Now actually
| try switching to LO Calc.
|
| I've done this several times during my career, to see if LO
| Calc would ever come up to the performance of Excel. To be
| fair, I haven't done so since I switched to Python.
|
| Here's the experiment I would conduct. Generate a column of
| 5000 numbers. Now graph them. Now make a few token changes to
| the graph such as modifying some of the aesthetic parameters.
| The difference in processing time was profound, last time I
| tried it. Also, there was a noticeable "latency" between
| clicking something, and seeing something happen, that made it
| quite un-ergonomic if not physically painful to use. I'm
| sensitive to this because I get eyestrain headaches easily.
| Lapel2742 wrote:
| there is some information in the following article:
|
| https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-s...
| tcfhgj wrote:
| what are your use cases and what's your scripting knowledge?
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Super basic use cases, like having a CV in Word and a Budget
| Excel. But I switched to Onlyoffice now. I am not a huge fan
| of scripting in excel anyways.
| pards wrote:
| Is there a link that doesn't require me to agree to give up my
| first-born?
| looperhacks wrote:
| https://archive.ph/Cr3H2
| versavolt wrote:
| What if you have an excel workbook that relies on a bunch of
| custom formulas. I would be upset if this happened in my
| workplace. Datasets have been far easier to handle with lambda,
| vstack, byrow, and the rest. I would not like this move and would
| have to remain a holdout. That would also frustrate me because of
| the division.
| DanOpcode wrote:
| Are we gonna accept being forever locked in to Microsoft
| because of custom Excel workbook formulas? Forever paying
| Microsoft a license fee, because we don't want to covert said
| formulas or invest in open source software to make it reach
| parity with Excel.
| CerryuDu wrote:
| The problem with this is that the decisionmakers fucked up
| 10-20 years ago, and now when those decisions are being
| righted, some poor public servant is paying the price.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| And 10-20 years ago it would have also been a public
| servant paying the price. You are just salty it's now you.
| At least be happy your work is impacted for a noble cause.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Will you get upset if Microsoft will charge 500000000 USD
| (because more copilot value added every month) per year? That
| is way more upsetting imho. And if all fails there is still
| some SAP solution to everything in life :P
| CerryuDu wrote:
| I must agree, unfortunately, and do so due to a reason that's
| way more mundane than "custom formulas": UI.
|
| Language, form, muscle memory (call it what you will) is
| difficult to separate from thinking and working. I'm very picky
| when it comes to desktop UI: I use Linux exclusively, and I
| can't tolerate most _Linux_ distros ' default desktop
| environments. Someone who's been productive for a decade or
| more with Windows applications -- well, to the extent we're
| willing to ascribe "UI stability" to those applications' own
| updates -- will probably hate Linux with a passion.
|
| I don't think such a transition can be made seamless. They
| should have thought about becoming Microsoft's hostage two
| decades ago (I guess).
| YY783648736 wrote:
| Unfortunately, we have to be willing to make compromises and
| even learn a new thing or two if we want to survive and
| protect our sovereignty. And it really is a matter of
| national survival - Microsoft has made it clear that they are
| fully controlled by the whims of whoever is in charge of the
| US government on any given day and will comply with the
| orders that come down to them. So yes some people will have
| to re-learn how to use a spreadsheet program, but it's a
| transition that's worth making.
| majkinetor wrote:
| In that case, keep your MS license where there is a migration
| problem, simple as that. There is no need for the entire gov
| sector to pay so you and your team can use custom formulas.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Formulas exist in other software too. LibreOffice has better
| compatibility with older Excel files than MS Excel itself.
|
| When you migrate anyway you could choose that to use a proper
| database and SQL if that makes sense instead.
| glimshe wrote:
| We've been seeing variations of the same article every week. The
| answer has been the same for a long time: this is great but
| unfortunately there are advantages in using Office and that's the
| reason we shouldn't expect mass migration anytime soon.
|
| Excel, in particular, hasn't been unseated despite billions in
| investments from competitors over the years. Parity will happen
| someday, but it's at least a decade away.
| hollow-moe wrote:
| Arriving first (ye ye Lotus 1-2-3 existed we know) and early
| extreme lobbyism sure stands strong.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| You acknowledge your first argument is invalid, handwave that
| away and then your whole idea of Microsoft's office suite's
| dominance is "lobbyism"?
|
| Good lord.
| nhatcher wrote:
| > We've been seeing variations of the same article every week.
|
| Time has come. Over the last few years there is more and more
| interest from goverments and private organizations to have
| relieable software that does not depend of foreign entities.
| Software sovereignty is becoming a necesity rather than a nice
| to have for both nations and enterprises.
|
| > Excel, in particular, hasn't been unseated despite billions
| in investments from competitors over the years.
|
| Excel, like many other technologies in the past can be
| disrupted. Like mane other commenters say, it won't come cheap.
| Saving costs shouldn't be the the goal here.
|
| > Parity will happen someday, but it's at least a decade away.
|
| Challenge accepted!
| glimshe wrote:
| This is the year of LibreOffice on the government? I'd love
| if you were right, but I doubt it. The chasm is enormous, and
| maybe you don't use Excel enough to realize it.
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| The chasm is enormous, but Calc doesn't need to implement
| 100% of Excel's functionality when most people - even
| business/power users - don't use all of its features.
|
| What major commonly used features do you reckon Excel has
| that hasn't been implemented in LO Calc yet, that would be
| a deal-breaker for most businesses?
|
| To my knowledge, Calc has implemented most of Excel's
| formulae (well over 500 in total count), so at least for
| typical spreadsheet functionality you wouldn't missing
| anything.
|
| The biggest limitation I can think of is the limited
| support for VBA, but Microsoft have already announced VBA's
| deprecation[1], so no one should be relying on it even in
| MS World.
|
| And whilst LO's own Basic scripting is... _basic_ , it also
| supports rich scripting and full automation via Python and
| Javascript. It even has a full-fledged SDK for developing
| addins/extensions using a high-level language like C++/Java
| etc[2], so businesses who're dependent on some random
| proprietary excel COM addin or something could invest in
| development effort to port it over.
|
| Heck, if businesses are so inclined, they could modify the
| LO source itself and build a custom version to add the
| features they want - that's the beauty of FOSS.
|
| [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/microsoft365dev/how-to-
| prepar...
|
| [2] https://api.libreoffice.org/
| nhatcher wrote:
| No, I don't think LibreOffice is the answer. And I am with
| you here, I would love to be wrong. One issue is that it
| doesn't really work well online. The folks from
| Collabora[1] have done an amazing job at wrapping
| LibreOffice for the web and maybe that is a way to go?
|
| As a sibling comment says you don't need to implement
| absolutely everything Excel does to _disrupt_ Excel. But
| you do need to provide a fantastic tool that is easy to use
| and solves 99% of the problems. If governments start
| putting their money were their mouth is I am very convinced
| we can create tools that supersede Excel, Word,...
|
| [1]: https://www.collaboraonline.com/
| chaoskanzlerin wrote:
| There's a history of German public administrations using Linux
| and other open-source software. In particular, the City of Munich
| has pioneered this with their 2006-2019 LiMux [0] project, which
| was ultimately cancelled in exchange for Microsoft moving their
| German offices to Munich proper.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux / Discussion at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15661372
| torusle wrote:
| Back then Microsoft was lobbying as hard as they could to turn
| that decision to move to linux over.
|
| They knew: If Linux makes it in Munich, it will likely spread
| over and they loose tons of contracts with other German states.
| qwertox wrote:
| - Sir, can we bribe you?
|
| - Of course, of course.
| tiahura wrote:
| _It may be that on paper 80 percent of workplaces have been
| converted. But far fewer than 80 percent of employees can now
| work with them properly... The initial difficulties in
| introducing the open-source programs have apparently led to
| ongoing frustration among some employees in certain areas._
|
| Sounds like management made a decision based on ideology, and the
| employees suffer.
|
| Libreoffice is junk. I, like most Fortune 500 companies, have
| tried converting to Star/Open/Libreoffice every few releases for
| 25 years now. It just isn't functionally there, and it lacks the
| polish of Word 95. Somebody needs to put a lot of $$$$ into the
| project before it's ready for prime time.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "Somebody needs to put a lot of $$$$ into the project"
|
| and that's the problem, people wouldn't invest that much into
| project no one use
| bgbntty2 wrote:
| I've been using LibreOffice Calc and Writer for years. I've
| used Microsoft Office Excel and Word, too.
|
| I can't say I've ever suffered from my choices or that I missed
| any features. As for "polish" - that's subjective, isn't it? I
| can access all the features I want quickly and efficiently.
| It's a tool, after all.
|
| There are some minor bugs with Calc that I'd rate 2/10 in
| importance - annoyances mostly. I haven't used Excel in a
| while, but it had annoyances, too.
|
| But even if Microsoft Office is more polished and feature-rich,
| I still think that the trade-off is worth it - we get data and
| software sovereignty, privacy and cost savings. The workers
| need to relearn how to access feature X in the menu or how to
| live without feature Y.
| Vespasian wrote:
| There is probably some (or even much) truth to it but it needs
| to pointed out that this statement comes from the political
| opposition and is therefore somewhat biased against this
| project.
| stefan_ wrote:
| It's 2025, maybe instead we can finally stop trying to emulate
| letters from the 1980s? If your business process today involves
| Word, you need to be retired so someone can come in that
| understands what computers are.
| rs186 wrote:
| I don't necessarily disagree with "Libreoffice is junk" but
| that's not actually a problem, or all the problem. As the
| article has stated, 80% of the licenses were dropped, while 20%
| of the use cases continue to be supported by Microsoft Office.
| To me that is already a big win compared to 100% Microsoft
| Office.
|
| You see, most Office users are not heavy/expert users and they
| only occasionally need the basic features that exist everywhere
| and do good enough of a job. I personally have only used Word
| maybe 3 times over the past few years, because almost all work
| documents live elsewhere, while Google Docs is good enough for
| my personal word processing needs (which could probably be done
| with Libreoffice as well). In the old days I used to install
| pirated Microsoft Office when I got a new laptop. These days I
| don't even think about it.
|
| Imagine every company starts to evaluate how many employees
| actually need Microsoft Office, and then drop licenses for
| those who would be ok with Libreoffice or nothing at all.
| Microsoft would be shitting their pants.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| It's not ideology. The US has started sanctioning European
| judges who serve on international courts, causing Microsoft to
| cut off access to its services.
|
| Given that the US has shown it's willing to wield sanctions as
| a blunt instrument against anyone and everyone, it's only
| prudent for European countries to reduce their exposure to US
| tech.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Its been a very long time since I was a Sysadmin, but I'm curious
| what managing a fleet of Linux desktops is like today? Has it
| vastly improved?
|
| When I last tried in a small pilot program, it was incredibly
| primitive. Linux desktops were janky and manual compared to
| Active Directory and group policy, and an alternative to
| Intune/AAD didn't even seem to exist. Heck, even things like WSUS
| and WDS didnt seem to have an open version or only had versions
| that required expensive expert level SME'S to perform constant
| fiddling. Meanwhile the Windows tools could be managed by 20 year
| old admins with basic certitifcations.
|
| Also, GRC and security seemed to be impossible back then. There
| was an utter lack of decent DLP tools, proper legal hold was
| difficult, EDR/AV solutions were primitive and the options were
| limited, etc.
|
| Back then it was like nobody who had ever actually been a
| sysadmin had ever taken an honest crack at Linux and all the hype
| was coming from home users who had no idea what herding boxen was
| actually like.
| finchisko wrote:
| I really don't get why there's always this group of people who
| feel the need to constantly manage everything for others--like
| sysadmins, for example. Sure, there are valid scenarios where
| management makes sense, like printing or shared drives, but
| most of the stuff is just over the top. As a developer, I'm
| sick of all the constant restrictions--broken VPNs, stealth
| monitoring, and antivirus software that slows everything down.
| These "security measures" are supposed to help, but they just
| kill performance and cause frustration. At the end of the day,
| I just want my system to work smoothly without constant
| interference.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > I'm sick of all the constant restrictions
|
| I think everyone hates it, but they're often legally
| required. Even when they aren't legally required, they
| usually are by insurance companies.
|
| Nobody wants to be on the news the first time Becky in
| Marketing opens an email attachment she shouldn't.
|
| *EDIT* I left out one of the biggest benefits: Dummies &
| Newbs. The world is filled with people who have never used a
| mouse before they started this job Last week and people who
| actually NEED the stupid warning stickers on their toasters.
| If you don't lock down their desktops your support costs will
| be astronomical and downtime will be constant. We know this
| because there was a time before these tools, and it largely
| sucked for everyone.
|
| Did you know that you can bypass the windows 98 login screen
| by just clicking 'Cancel' instead of 'OK' at the login
| prompt? Nice and simple, right? That stupid button not only
| wrecked security it caused 10's or 100's of thousands of
| hours in lost work because people forgot their passwords,
| clicked Cancel, and then would call the help desk wondering
| why network shares didnt work. It would sometimes take hours
| to figure that all they had to do was reset the password and
| login properly.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| This is my concern with all those "success" stories about Linux
| as an enterprise desktop OS. Run it for 10 years and show me
| the actual cost savings/improved productivity.
|
| Microsoft is trash and is getting worse day by day, but at the
| very least it's the same trash everyone has to deal with, so
| people mostly got used to the smell, and you can get economies
| of scale in tools used to deal with said smell. MS is trash
| because of incompetence.
|
| Linux is dozens of different flavors of trash, so you don't
| even get economies of scale dealing with it. It's trash because
| of _ideology_ - the people involved would often reject the
| functionality you mentioned for ideological reasons, and even
| for those who do accept them, won 't agree on the
| implementation meaning you now have a dozen of different
| flavors, and will take up arms if someone tries to unify things
| (just look at the reaction to systemd).
|
| Linux works well for careers where shoveling trash is already
| part of your work, in which case all the effort doubles as
| training for the job and experience makes this a non-issue. But
| for non-IT careers where the computer is just a tool that is
| expected to work properly, it's nowhere near there, and will
| never get there because everyone's instead arguing on the
| definition of "there" and which mode of transportation to use
| getting there.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Google gave its employees a Linux laptop option for well more
| than 10 years, but in the past few years they started
| steering everyone away from it, before formally announcing
| they want to scale it back.
|
| This is despite them being a tech company, and despite them
| having already invested in their single Linux flavor
| (gLinux). Wayland migration was also a pain.
| Lapel2742 wrote:
| I'm not an expert and that still might be the case but you
| have to understand that for many Microsoft as an American
| company is simply no longer an option for critical
| infrastructure. It's a matter of trust.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Most companies that I know that allow employees to use
| Linux laptops, IT washes their hands of any kind of
| support.
|
| While anyone with macOS or Windows laptops can open support
| tickets, the hardcore Linux users get invited to join
| internal forums to help themselves.
|
| Thus naturally one needs to be really into it, especially
| when dealing with software that doesn't even exist.
|
| So we get our IT supported systems and run GNU/Linux either
| on servers or VMs.
|
| I sense only if there are changes imposed at governments
| level, would companies change their stance on this.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I think this comes primarily from trying to add a separate
| management tool on top, instead of leveraging the OS structure
| themself. There is a reason, why most directories are specified
| to be readonly. Also writable XOR persistent is mostly true.
| The only things required to be writable are /tmp, /var and
| /home. /tmp is wiped at least on every boot or is even just a
| ramdisk. /var can be cached or reset to the predefined settings
| on boot. /home needs to be managed, that is true. But you
| wouldn't want every users directory on every host anyway,
| instead you want to populate them on login. That is typically
| done by libpam.
|
| /usr is expected to be shared among hosts, host-specific stuff
| goes into /usr/local for a reason, and as a sysadmin you can
| decide to simply not have host specific software.
|
| EDR/AV is basically unnecessary, when you only mount things
| either writable or executable. And you don't want the users to
| start random software or mount random USB-sticks anyway.
|
| > Back then it was like nobody who had ever actually been a
| sysadmin had ever taken an honest crack at Linux and all the
| hype was coming from home users who had no idea what herding
| boxen was actually like.
|
| Unix has over 50 years of history of being primarily managed by
| sysadmins instead of home users. While Linux is not Unix, it
| has inherited a lot. The whole system is basically designed to
| run a bunch of admin configured software and is actually less
| suitable for home users. I would say the primary problem was
| accessing it with a Windows mindset.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > EDR/AV is basically unnecessary,
|
| No, its not and never will be.
|
| Even if it were technically unnecessary (in some hypothetical
| future where privilege escalation became impossible?), legal,
| compliance, and insurance requirements would still be there.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| The problem is that EDR is basically a rootkit, by using it
| you enable a huge attack surface instead of being able to
| have stuff e.g. immutable. That tradeoff only makes sense,
| when you don't trust and control the OS itself. This is
| more of a problem with proprietary OSes like Windows.
| Otherwise you would rather integrate this into the OS
| itself.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > That tradeoff only makes sense, when you don't trust
| and control the OS itself.
|
| That's totally accurate, but you're missing the fact that
| we fundamentally don't (and can never) trust the OS or
| any other part of a general purpose computer.
|
| In general purpose computing you have a version of
| Descartes brain in a vat problem (or maybe Plato's
| allegory of the cave if you want to go even further
| back).
|
| https://iep.utm.edu/brain-in-a-vat-argument/
|
| To summarize: We can't trust the inputs even if the OS is
| trusted, and if the OS is trusted can't trust the
| compiler, and even if we trust the compiler we can't
| trust the firmware, but even if we trust the firmware we
| can't trust the chips it runs on, and even if we trust
| those chips we can't trust the supply chain, etc. "Trust"
| is fundamentally unsolvable for any Turing machine,
| because all trust does is move the issue further down the
| supply chain.
|
| I know this all sounds a bit hypothetical, but it's not.
| I can show you a real world example of every one of those
| things having been compromised in the past. When there is
| money or lives at stake people will find a way, and both
| things are definitely at stake here.
|
| So what we have to do is trust, but verify, or at the
| very least log everything that happens and that's largely
| what those EDR products exist to do. Maybe we can't stop
| every attack, even in theory, but we take a crack at it
| and while we're at it we can log every attack to ensure
| that we can at least catch it later.
|
| There just isn't any version of this world in which
| general purpose computers don't require monitoring,
| logging, and exploit prevention.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Sure, that is why you trust a blackbox software from some
| random company running as a rootkit, whose concrete
| version you do not even control, because it is remotely
| updated by them.
|
| If you think the hardware works against you, then you are
| screwed.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > Sure, that is why you trust a blackbox software from
| some random company running as a rootkit, whose concrete
| version you do not even control, because it is remotely
| updated by them.
|
| It doesn't have to be "a random company". Microsoft, for
| example, now ships EDR as part of the operating system.
|
| Many companies prefer other vendors for their own
| reasons. Sometimes one concern is the exact issue you're
| describing. By using another vendor outside of MS they
| can layer the security rather than putting all their eggs
| in a Microsoft designed basket. We sometimes call that a
| "security onion" in cyber.
|
| I have no idea what the Linux version of that would even
| look like though. I imagine you'd just choose one of the
| many 3rd party EDR's from "random companies." It's
| another reason I asked the original question about how
| Sysadmins cope with Linux these days. MS has an entire
| suite of products designed to meet these security,
| regulatory, and compliance problems. Linux has... file
| permissions I guess?
| 1718627440 wrote:
| If your think of running some EDR software in kernel
| mode, then my point is indeed don't do that. That just
| sounds like less security. Use the OS and run the
| reporting in userspace.
|
| If you want integrity, first make everything executable
| immutable, the system is explicitly designed to work that
| way. That's why the FHS exists for. Then use something
| like Tripwire to monitor it.
|
| To log access use auditd
| (https://www.baeldung.com/linux/auditd-monitor-file-
| access).
|
| What else do you need to do?
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > make everything executable immutable
|
| How though? Presumably you mean we should trust the OS to
| do that?
|
| _Edit_ to be clear auditd has the same issue. We 're
| trusting it to audit itself. However, we know that we
| cant trust it because rootkits are a thing. So now
| what?...
|
| I guess we need a tool thats designed to be tamper proof
| to monitor it. We do that by introducing an external
| validation. A 2nd external system can vouch that hashes
| are what we expect, etc.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| So you have an OS of which you have the source, which is
| binary reproducible and you can compile yourself if you
| want to. You want to make that more trustworthy by
| injecting a random blob, you can not inspect and which
| updates itself over the network controlled by a third
| party. I do not understand your threat model.
|
| If you think your OS doesn't give you the correct answer
| to a read, than you need to run a second OS side-by-side
| and compare. If you think your OS is touching data you
| haven't told it to, you need to have a layer running
| below so you can check, i.e. virtualization, BIOS or
| hardware. If you think your OS is making network calls
| you haven't told it to, then you need to connect it via
| an intermediate host, that acts as a firewall.
|
| I don't see what injecting a random blob into the OS
| gives you other than box ticking. Now you need to trust
| the OS and that other thing.
|
| When your attacker gains control of your OS (so actually
| below root), than you are screwed anyways. Only having
| some layer independently will help you in that case.
| Having more code in your OS, won't help you at all, it
| will just add more attack surface.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > If you think your OS doesn't give you the correct
| answer to a read, than you need to run a second OS side-
| by-side and compare.
|
| I mean, that's _mostly_ right. IF the OS is already
| rootkit infected then installing an EDR won 't fix it, as
| it mostly won't be able to tell that the answers it gets
| from the OS are incorrect. That's why you'll sometimes
| see bootable EDR tools used on machines that are
| suspected of already being compromised. It's a second OS
| to verify the first, exactly as you describe.
|
| In practice that's not typically required because the EDR
| is usually loaded shortly after the OS is installed, and
| they're typically built with anti-tamper measures now. So
| we can mostly just assume that the EDR will be running
| when the malware is loaded. That allows us to do things
| like Kernel-level monitoring for driver loads, module
| loads, and security-relevant events (e.g., LSM/eBPF hooks
| on Linux, kernel callbacks/ETW on Windows).
|
| By then layering on some behavioral analysis we can
| typically prevent the rootkit from installing at all, or
| at the very least get some logs and alerts sent before it
| can disable the EDR. It's also one reason these things
| don't just run in userland as you suggested above. They
| need kernel mode access to detect kernel mode malware,
| and they need low level IO access to independently verify
| that the OS is doing what it says it is when we call an
| API.
|
| Your suggestion reminds me of the old 'chkrootkit'
| command on Linux. It's a great tool, if you don't already
| have a rootkit. In that case it just doesn't work. A
| modern EDR would have prevented the rootkit from
| installing an API hook in the first place (ideally).
|
| > Only having some layer independently will help you in
| that case.
|
| Sometimes it's more about detection, and sometimes it's
| more about prevention, but both are valuable. I would one
| day love to see a REAL solution, but for now I think
| EDR's are the least worst answer we have.
|
| A better answer would be a modern OS built to avoid the
| weaknesses that make these bolt on afterthought solutions
| necessary, but neither Windows or Linux come anywhere
| close to being that. They both have too much history and
| have to preserve compatibility.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| >> make everything executable immutable
|
| > How though? Presumably you mean we should trust the OS
| to do that?
|
| If you don't trust the layer controlling the hardware
| (aka. the OS) then you need to do that in hardware.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > the primary problem was accessing it with a Windows
| mindset.
|
| The early Unix systems you're talking about were mainframe
| based. Modern client-server or p2p apps need an entirely
| different mindset and a different set of tools that Linux
| just didnt have the last time I looked.
|
| When they audit the company for SOX , PCI-DSS, etc we can't
| just shrug and say "Nah, we decided we don't need that
| stuff." That's actually a good thing though, because if it
| were optional well meaning folks like you just wouldn't
| bother and the company would wind up on the evening news.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > When they audit the company for SOX, PCI-DSS,
|
| Maybe I am missing something, but that seems orthogonal to
| ensuring host integrity? I didn't argue against logging
| access and making things auditable, by all means do that. I
| argued against working against the OS.
|
| It is not like integrity protection software doesn't exist
| for Linux (e.g. Tripwire), it is just different from
| Windows, since on Windows you have a system where the
| default way is to let the user control the software and
| install random things, and you need to patch that ability
| away first. On Linux software installation is typically
| controlled by the admin and done with a single file
| database (which makes it less suitable for home users), but
| this is exactly what you want on a admin controlled system.
|
| Sure, computing paradigms have changed, but it is still a
| good idea to use OS isolation like not running programs
| with user rights.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| I just mean to say that while you absolutely should work
| to configure the OS to a reasonable baseline of security,
| you also still need a real EDR product on top of it.
|
| Even if security were "solved" in Linux (it's not), it
| would still often be illegal not to have an EDR and
| that's probably a good thing.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > you also still need a real EDR product on top of it.
|
| Well that's my point. You don't need third-party software
| messing up with the OS internals, when the same thing can
| be provided by the OS directly. The real EDR product is
| the OS.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| > And you don't want the users to start random software
|
| python ~/my.py
|
| wget | bash
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I guess you wouldn't install wget in that installation and
| patch programming languages to follow the executive bit or
| also remove them.
|
| Also you can't make it physically impossible for employees
| to not e.g. screenshot things and take them home. You can
| forbid it and try to enforce it, but some amount of trust
| is needed.
|
| Willing action needs to be taken for what it is, an
| deliberate action by that user. If that user is allowed to
| access that data, than I don't see what is wrong with him
| doing that in an automated way.
| msm_ wrote:
| >EDR/AV is basically unnecessary, when you only mount things
| either writable or executable
|
| Sounds good, except:
|
| * scripting languages exist. The situation is even worse on
| Linux than on Windows (because of the sysadmin focus). You
| need at least /bin/sh installed and runnable on any POSIX
| system. In practice bash, python, perl and many more are also
| always available.
|
| * exploits exist. Just opening a pdf file may execute
| arbitrary code on a machine. There is no way to avoid that by
| just configuring your system. And it will happen sooner or
| later, especially if nation states are involved.
|
| The idea that your systems are somehow unhackable because
| you... mount everything W^X is... not based in reality. Of
| course it's a _great_ idea, but in practice you need defense
| in depth, and you need to have a way to _Detect_ and
| _Respond_ to inevitable _Endpoint_ breaches. I don 't love
| EDR/AVs, but they mitigate real attacks happening in the real
| world.
| Lapel2742 wrote:
| AFAIK they use Open-Xchange, Univention Corporate Server and
| other specialized (maybe customized?) an open solutions for
| telephony, interoperability and other tasks.
|
| https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-s...
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| I've never used it. Does this actually replace AD and group
| policy effectively? Does it manage updates properly? Can it
| handle compliance tasks?
|
| I've used other things that claimed to in the past and none
| came anywhere close in practice. They all turned out just to
| be LDAP with some NT4 style policies for windows and very
| little at all for the Linux clients. It was like traveling
| back in time to the Windows 2000 era of management.
| einpoklum wrote:
| I would disagree with you both about the past and the present
| and what's "janky", but - that's actually beside the point:
|
| LibreOffice works just fine on _Windows_ - and that's what the
| majority of its users are running.
|
| So, Schleswig-Holstein can switch to Linux, or not switch, or
| let specific agencies or individuals choose.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Microsoft Considered Harmful
| fermigier wrote:
| Cf. "The rise and fall of Limux" (2017)
| https://lwn.net/Articles/737818/
|
| Initiated by the city of Munich, LiMux aimed to migrate public
| administration systems from Windows to a Linux-based OS to
| increase control over IT infrastructure and reduce costs. Despite
| initial success (announced at LinuxTag in 2014, I was there for
| the announcement), the project faced intense political lobbying
| by Microsoft leading to a reversion to Windows.
|
| More examples in this note:
| https://lab.abilian.com/Tech/Linux/Sovereign%20OS%20-%20%22E...
| (in particular
| https://lab.abilian.com/Tech/Linux/Sovereign%20OS%20-%20%22E...)
| yatopifo wrote:
| The political climate is completely different. The US is no
| longer an ally but a fascist regime actively supporting far
| right and nazi movements in Germany. What made sense 8 years
| ago probably doesn't make sense today.
| input_sh wrote:
| I _hate_ when switches like these get advertised first and
| foremost as some huge cost-cutting measure, further solidifying
| open source ecosystem as some cheap knock-offs of their
| commercial alternatives.
|
| How about instead you donate the same amount of money you
| would've paid to Microsoft anyways to fund open source projects
| you rely on? At least for one year, then drop it down to some
| arbitrary chosen percentage of that cost. That way you can still
| advertise it as a cost-cutting measure, and everyone would
| benefit.
| NeutralForest wrote:
| That's a really good point actually. If you're self hosting,
| you're already eating some cost by having people, probably in-
| house, doing the work but the price difference must be quite
| large and they should use it to support the project.
| Bengalilol wrote:
| I hope those are not mutually exclusive actions. Switching and
| contributing may be on the Schleswig-Holstein Administration's
| agenda.
| MrDarcy wrote:
| The idea is sound but the feeling of hate is perhaps strong.
| It's understandable there's no incentive to pay for open source
| software, and doing so would be seen as an unnecessary
| allocation of resources that could better be allocated
| elsewhere.
|
| Given this understanding, the best away to achieve the desired
| outcome is to get creative about aligning incentives at the top
| of org structures where resources are allocated.
| nickff wrote:
| > _"Given this understanding, the best away to achieve the
| desired outcome is to get creative about aligning incentives
| at the top of org structures where resources are allocated."_
|
| I really don't understand what this means; could you please
| explain it? It comes off as 'mushy' consulting-speak to me.
| manphone wrote:
| Make the execs bonus based on open source success and then
| it will be the most funded thing of all time.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| It's a mini-language that you don't have to learn unless
| you work with executive types. But it does mean something.
| In particular it means "activity at the grassroots is
| wasted effort when the real decision maker with the money
| is not aware or in agreement with the direction."
| MrDarcy wrote:
| "Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome."
| -Charlie Munger
| Terr_ wrote:
| Cynical read: "Executives are short-sighted and won't care
| unless the right thing somehow personally makes them
| money."
| bell-cot wrote:
| Yes. But budget decisions are made by politicians. Who know
| that one euro spent on things they _could_ get for free is one
| euro less for things that voters and other interests are
| endlessly asking them to spend more on.
| eloeffler wrote:
| An alternative would be to create jobs for people that take on
| part of the development of used software. They would be a close
| connection between their organization and the Open Source
| project in question. Paying money to the project would be one
| way to go. Providing development resources another. Both would
| be best :)
| ghaff wrote:
| That's very true in the case of private companies. I'm not
| sure to what degree employing developers who contribute to
| open source projects (probably for lower than private sector
| wages) works in the case of a lot of public sector entities.
| onion2k wrote:
| Why would it make a difference? Offering developers a
| salary to contribute to an open source project is a good
| thing. Leave the developers to be free if they want to work
| for the offered amount.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are often different incentives, constraints, and
| pay scales. Nothing against public organizations doing
| this obviously. Just don't see a lot of evidence that it
| works well in general.
| onraglanroad wrote:
| Might work as part of a job guarantee scheme. Rather than
| being paid welfare benefits you can get more money by
| working on open source.
|
| Edit: I mean from a society perspective you pay a tiny
| bit more for a real gain, without reducing labour from
| the private sector.
| croes wrote:
| Because in Germany the price is the only thing that counts.
|
| Building a new street? The cheapest bidder wins.
|
| Cuts to social security? As long it saves money in the short
| term in doesn't matter if the long term costs will be higher or
| if the cuts don't make sense.
| hanshenning wrote:
| You're not wrong, but this is actually what they're pursuing;
| the article just leaves it out.
|
| > The goal is not only to save costs, but above all to gain
| digital sovereignty.
|
| > [It's true] that open source is not necessarily cheaper, [..]
| it requires investment. But the money flows into internal
| infrastructure, into the further development of Nextcloud,
| LibreOffice, and other similar systems, instead of proprietary
| ones.
|
| > Schleswig-Holstein pursues an "upstream-only strategy,"
| meaning that developments flow directly back into international
| projects. The state does not want to maintain its own forks,
| but rather contribute all improvements directly to the main
| projects, thereby contributing to development for the benefit
| of the general public.[1]
|
| On a side note, the real key to the project's success is that
| it's supported by a coalition of the conservative and green
| parties. They actually value digital sovereignty and longterm
| cost savings. Contrast that with Bavaria, where the MS lobbyist
| managed to get them to sign a longterm Office 365 contract...
|
| [1]https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/hintergrund/Interview-
| Wi...
| k1musab1 wrote:
| Thank you for providing this valuable context. I am hoping to
| advocate for OSS transition in my workplace and these
| examples go a long way to help make my case.
| kuerbel wrote:
| I am thinking about opening my own shop, distinguished by
| digitally sovereign offerings, for instance, Stormshield
| over Cisco, Proxmox over VMware, Matrix/Element over
| Microsoft Teams, Nextcloud over SharePoint...
|
| I've been doing m365 and azure for more than three years by
| now and I just feel terrible. Especially regarding some of
| our customers, which are small gGmbH (kind of NGO). Instead
| of making a secure, privacy focused offering we just sell
| them the usual m365 package. We basically push them into
| the data industrial complex just to get some collab tools
| and mail.
| lormayna wrote:
| > Stormshield over Cisco
|
| Stormshield is a very good product but it's mainly
| designed for industrial scenarios and lacks some features
| that are essential for an enterprise NGFW (i.e. the
| protocol inspection covers very few protocols compared to
| PA/Checkpoint/etc). Unfortunately the enterprise NGFW
| scenario is dominated by US or Israeli companies, even if
| some niches brands like Stormshield for OT and Clavister
| for telcos are Europeans
| Terr_ wrote:
| I wonder if there is some particular MBA/managerial jargon
| (in the sense it grabs _their_ attention) to use when
| talking about this stuff.
|
| Power differences, contractual leverage, vendor lock-in,
| motivation versus costs to make changes, etc.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Vendor risk management. It's the process of identifying,
| assessing, and mitigating the risks associated with
| engaging third-party vendors or suppliers.
| luc_ wrote:
| ++ When an EU outlet says, "Given the annual savings, this
| sum will pay for itself in less than a year. In the past, the
| state transferred millions to the US company Microsoft,
| primarily for the use of office software and other programs."
|
| You know they want sovereignty.
|
| WRT the criticism on this move by "the opposition" saying,
| ""It may be that on paper 80 percent of workplaces have been
| converted. But far fewer than 80 percent of employees can now
| work with them properly.""
|
| I think this natural pressure will also be helpful for re-
| tooling IT infra and support companies to being more
| sovereign.
| alecco wrote:
| Many years ago some people proposed to move open source to paid
| licensing to guarantee income for core open source developers.
| But the self-righteous community attacked them like it was the
| end of the world.
|
| In the current cancel culture even if you use *GPL licenses you
| get attacked for not being MIT or similar. But mysteriously
| never a peep about Big Tech making billions off open source
| without giving back even a tiny 1% to the projects. Insanity.
| LexiMax wrote:
| "Open Source" has always been a play for Free Software from a
| pragmatic and business-focused point of view, as opposed to a
| community-focused and moralistic one.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso.
| ..
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| The sales pitch for FOSS to corporations in the 1990s and
| 2000s was " _free as in speech and free as in beer_ ".
| Reneging on that is a straight-up rug pull on the adopters.
| alecco wrote:
| Pretty sure it was "free as in libre and not as in beer".
| Source: I was there.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Both _gratis_ and _libre_ were talking points for FOSS
| advocates, with _gratis_ being leaned on heavily to
| persuade businesses who didn 't give a hoot about _libre_
| , which turned out to be almost everybody. Source: I was
| there too.
| atonse wrote:
| This has been my view too... all these years, all these
| organizations with collective billions, and didn't anyone have
| the vision to say, let's all pool some money together and
| actually get these open source alternatives to shed some of the
| papercuts, and maybe hire some UX/designers to make them look
| more polished?
| ryukoposting wrote:
| There are plenty of decision makers who will not be sold on an
| abstract concept like software sovereignty, especially when it
| requires _them_ to change. Tell the same crowd "$15 million
| saved" and more of them will listen.
|
| They're out of their minds if they're donating _nothing_ to
| Libreoffice, though.
| ho_schi wrote:
| True. Software and computers don't even exist to save money. A
| lot of problems stem from the weird idea of MBAs that a
| computer, digitalization or even cloud are there to save money.
|
| I hope Holstein prepared the switch well and kill off any
| Microsoft stuff as quick as possible. Nothing is worse than co-
| existence with something hostile which doesn't want to be
| compatible. * No Dual-Booting * No VM
| * Especially no WINE (your ducked with every odd update)
| * And by the love of god, hit everyone with a bat which tries
| to ship incompatible files (MS-Office, ppt, xls, pst...) to
| you. Links to "Microsoft Teams"? Hit harder and show no mercy
| :)
|
| What to do, minimal list: * Make plan.
| * Used standards wherever possible. * Switch file-
| formats and external platforms before. Use a standard
| distribution and DO NOT MAKE YOUR OWN DISTRIBUTION. If you have
| a big IT department with hundreds of employees, maybe an own
| repository with your custom software. * Enforce all
| suppliers hard to support Linux natively! If not? Drop them.
| Search a honest company which gives you also the source.
| * Avoid the usual mistake like "this a local support company"
| or "their offer is cheaper" * Don't purchase shitty
| hardware. ThinkPads are a good start, but we speak about
| printers, NFC, label writers, scanners and so on.
|
| If your answer doesn't include either Debian, Red Hat,
| Canonical or Suse it is probably the wrong choice. You need
| support. The remaining 20 percent of
| workplaces are currently still dependent on Microsoft programs
| such as Word or Excel, as there is a technical dependency on
| these programs in certain specialized applications. According
| to Schrodter, however, the successive conversion of these
| remaining computers is the stated goal.
|
| A red flag. Soft migrations work only, if both side cooperate.
| If not, hard migration. Short pain is better than long
| suffering.
|
| PS: And don't repeat Munich! Munich is "HOW NOT". Three
| distinct IT-Departments. And the next major was "convinced "
| with tax money and a Microsoft Headquarters. Result, it is
| worse than before.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Apparently their tax administration has some extensive
| automation with Excel spreadsheets and VBA.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| >dependent on Microsoft programs such as Word or Excel
|
| This kind of suggests that they have a bunch of VBA scripts
| in the tax department and the legal team are dependent on
| sharing 'track changes' in contracts. It will do the world a
| favour if the VBA is forced out. Don't know what they will do
| about 'track changes', it is ubiquitous in the contract
| world. Hopefully they will force government suppliers onto
| the libre alternative.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| It should be what the kids these days call 'sovereignty', but
| ain't nobody got budget for that.
| ninth_ant wrote:
| You hate that, but what I hate that so many of my tax dollars
| are funnelled into bloated software run by awful foreign
| companies with massive lock-in scams, when better free software
| is available. I hate that lobbyists and consultants get these
| systems into place and can't be unseated despite its utter
| unreasonableness.
|
| It's a tremendous mis-allocation of public resources. Hiring
| local people to tailor the free software which already exists
| and contributing those changes back to the world would spend
| fewer of those dollars and spend them locally, and be pro-
| social at the same time.
|
| So I don't hate this story. I love it and see it as a massive
| win.
| 9dev wrote:
| That's a double-edged sword, though. Those tax dollars don't
| just pay for the license, but for ongoing development,
| responsibility for security issues, support contracts,
| emergency personnel, and so on. With a purely Open Source
| strategy, you'll have to pay multiple external consultants to
| take care of part of this, and/or cover these roles in-house.
| And suddenly, you've taken up a lot of tasks completely
| foreign to your business domain, such as new infrastructure
| and its maintenance, documentation requirements, software
| development, and so on. And we haven't even talked about the
| massive effort of educating your entire workforce on new
| tools and workflows.
|
| Assuming you just replace a proprietary software ecosystem
| with an Open Source one and immediately get the same thing
| for free is a very naive view that will get you in trouble.
|
| Having said that, as a German, I am very happy this switch
| happens and seems to have some backing in the local
| administration at least. But it's still a high-risk wager and
| I'm afraid it'll turn out like the LiMux project in Munich,
| which was eventually (and cleverly so) framed as the origin
| of all problems in the municipal digital infrastructure. In
| the end, it got swapped out for a new Microsoft contract in a
| wonderful example of lobbyism and bribery, and Open Source
| and Linux have been discredited, to the point no winning
| mayor candidate can ever bring it up again as a viable
| alternative.
| lenkite wrote:
| > Those tax dollars don't just pay for the license, but for
| ongoing development, responsibility for security issues,
| support contracts, emergency personnel, and so on.
|
| Maybe this was true at one point in time. But now, it just
| pays for AI/Copilot and your latest support chatbot.
| notpushkin wrote:
| This. Also, with FOSS, _you_ choose who you hire for
| support. From the article, it seems they're hiring
| developers locally, so it's also creating jobs in the
| region instead of outsourcing to MSFT. But I hope they
| donate a bit to the maintainers, too.
| ninth_ant wrote:
| > With a purely Open Source strategy, you'll have to pay
| multiple external consultants to take care of part of this,
| and/or cover these roles in-house. And suddenly, you've
| taken up a lot of tasks completely foreign to your business
| domain, such as new infrastructure and its maintenance,
| documentation requirements, software development, and so
| on.
|
| Yes, this is what I'm talking about. Hiring people and
| developing expertise instead of paying expensive
| consultants is a preferred use of my tax dollars.
|
| > But it's still a high-risk wager and I'm afraid it'll
| turn out like the LiMux project in Munich, which was
| eventually (and cleverly so) framed as the origin of all
| problems in the municipal digital infrastructure.
|
| While this may be true, there are also quite prominent
| cases where the massively expensive foreign consultant
| solutions have also lead to disastrous project overruns.
| nyankas wrote:
| The German government actually started and funded quite a few
| projects supporting FOSS development over the past few years.
| For example, ZenDis was founded in 2022 to develop open-source
| software for the public administration. They are the driving
| force behind openDesk, which is shaping up to be a great
| office- and collaboration suite. Also, there's the Sovereign
| Tech Agency, where open-source projects can apply for direct
| funding. The available funds aren't as big as I'd like them to
| be, but it's not as if there's no funding coming from the
| German government.
| VerifiedReports wrote:
| This is the first I've heard of OpenDesk. What makes it
| specific to "public administration," vs. regular business?
| nyankas wrote:
| ZenDis has the specific task of improving FOSS software for
| use by government agencies, so Germany's public
| administration is simply their primary focus in their
| development work. I honestly don't have enough experience
| with different collaboration suites to pinpoint any major
| feature differences.
| VerifiedReports wrote:
| Thanks. The software's homepage also cites its target of
| "public administration," so I'm curious as to what it
| might lack for private companies or projects.
| immibis wrote:
| Why would a budget-conscious institution give away money for
| free?
| boh wrote:
| It's crazy that organizations are willing to spend millions of
| dollars on Microsoft Office simply because people are used to it.
| There are literally no features most people actually use that
| aren't completely duplicated in open source alternatives.
| Whatever amount of time it takes the user to find the button
| they're looking for costs less than the permanent subscription
| cost for something that will only get more bloated and expensive
| with time.
| forinti wrote:
| Many times I've seen people state that they use Windows because
| they know it, but they can't do trivial things such as set up a
| printer or connect to WiFi.
|
| Most user's Windows ability is to look for apps on the desktop
| or Start menu.
| ozim wrote:
| One thing that is missing that nowadays you get O365 so also
| management of employees access and licensing in single env.
|
| You get backups, file synchronization, real time collaboration.
|
| Setting and running all of that is as simple as making O365
| account and clicking couple of buttons by one person.
|
| There is no OSS solution that does that.
|
| To replicate that with OSS you need 3 to 5 full time graybeards
| and it still will be annoying normal people that will not
| understand "why they can't just do X as in MSFT tools".
| bgbntty2 wrote:
| > You get backups, file synchronization, real time
| collaboration.
|
| Shouldn't backups and file sync be handled at a higher level
| of abstraction? Unless every employee is only dealing with
| Microsoft Office documents and nothing else (doubt it),
| shouldn't there be a separate backup&sync strategy already in
| place?
|
| There are a myriad of both FOSS and corporate backup/sync
| tools available.
|
| As for the real-time collaboration - I'm not sure how
| important that is. Writer/Word seem like useful tools for
| documents that have reached their final state before being
| prepared for printing. I think there are lots of better
| formats suited to real-time collaboration. Intuitively it
| seems like text-first documents (markdown, etc.) should
| better lend themselves to tools like diff or git, or any
| other collaboration tool, especially a real-time edit tool.
| It's almost like asking for pdf to support real-time
| collaboration. I'm not sure about Writer, but Word and pdf
| documents are awful with regards to edits and git-style
| collaboration. They're formats for presentation, not editing.
| In case someone here hasn't delved into the internal
| structures of the files, remember how WYSIWYG HTML editors
| jumbled the HMTL beyond recognition? It's similar in that it
| doesn't seem like the format we want to collaboratively work
| on documents before finally converting them to
| Writer/Word/PDF.
| ozim wrote:
| * _Intuitively it seems like text-first documents
| (markdown, etc.) should better lend themselves to tools
| like diff or git, or any other collaboration tool,
| especially a real-time edit tool.*_
|
| Well don't explain it to me I know that stuff. Go grab 2-3
| office workers and try to explain markdown to them. If
| you're lucky maybe they won't leave when you move on to
| explain Git.
|
| I worked one time with a guy that wanted to convince sales
| department to write documents in LaTex so then it could be
| well printed for the customers and also put in Git ... well
| they laughed the guy out of the room - well before he's
| even started explaining formats for presentation vs formats
| for editing.
|
| I see how business people we work with on documents
| understand I have a cursor here and I type and there is my
| avatar/photo on top that I am active - I see how they
| wouldn't understand Git diff at all and would just move on
| presented with Git diff not even wanting to collaborate.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| It's the administration of user accounts, the certified
| compliance, the backups..
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| In terms of client software stuff that's true, but in terms of
| _services_ it 's not, as other comments here are pointing out.
| concinds wrote:
| "Saves 15 million" on license costs, but how much will be wasted
| on the contractors involved, the lost productivity for state
| employees (especially the ones who depend on Excel, who will be
| converted too per the announcement)? And how much do you really
| save if you keep switching back and forth between M$ and Linux
| every decade, as state governments seem to enjoy doing?
|
| They should switch to open-source for sovereignty. Not "cost".
| The fact that they mention "cost" as motivation and to secure
| buy-in is very worrisome. If you really want to switch to open
| source permanently and secure your sovereignty, you should invest
| _more_ (making LibreOffice Calc as good as Excel? One can dream,
| but it 's not cheap). Cost-savings show a lack of seriousness.
| How long until another government switches back?
|
| How to know when they're serious: when the federal government
| hires an in-house team of (well-paid) programmers, and sysadmins.
| Not consultants. Put them in charge of public-facing and
| internal-use digital infrastructure, serving both the federal and
| state governments. Make them work to tailor a distro, or
| LibreOffice, to government needs. Invest in workforce training to
| keep their productivity up despite the switch.
|
| And then, one day (let's dream for a second), that team could
| also pick new projects that serve the public interest, like a
| vulnerability research team (like Google Project Zero), or
| helping out with all those underfunded core pieces of digital
| infrastructure out there with only a single maintainer. Creating
| public goods is the point of a government.
| tirant wrote:
| This is the situation. And knowing how inefficient the German
| administration is, this would en up costing more in taxes and
| slower processes.
| juliusceasar wrote:
| It is better to spend 20milion on German contractors, then
| spending just 15m on licenses to foreign company.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| At least the federal government loves to contract McKinsey,
| so a lot of the profit still ends up outside of the country.
| I didn't find any quickly accessible data on the state
| government in Schleswig-Holstein, though.
| DanOpcode wrote:
| True, regardless of the cost, it feels like money spent on open
| source software is more ethical and a better way to spend tax
| money. Why pay $15 million to Microsoft that will only benefit
| their shareholders, when spending the same amount of money on
| open source software would benefit everybody (the citizens as
| well).
| p2detar wrote:
| This resonates with me as well. This money will increase
| attention and expectedly contributions to OSS, which will
| also be of benefit to other entities implementing the same
| model later on. That's the way to go towards sovereignty in
| software.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| A not to be easily dismissed factor is privacy and data
| protection. A company that has 700+ "partners" that they sent
| who knows what data to from inside their e-mail client is not
| to be trusted. I don't want my data in the hands of these
| crooks.
| bogwog wrote:
| > Saves 15 million" on license costs, but how much will be
| wasted on the contractors...
|
| Approximately 9 million, according to the article:
|
| > In contrast, there would be one-time investments of nine
| million euros in 2026, explained the Ministry of Digitalization
| to the Kieler Nachrichten. These would have to be made for the
| conversion of workplaces and the further development of
| solutions with free software in the next 12 months. Given the
| annual savings, this sum will pay for itself in less than a
| year.
| concinds wrote:
| Yeah. Notice how they emphasize how the "one-time" spend on
| contractors will save them money. Never includes the cost of
| the lack of institutional knowledge, or the impact on
| quality, maintainability, etc. Money brain.
|
| For a transition to open-source to be successful and
| permanent, manage it well. Not like this.
| whstl wrote:
| IMO they should also emphasize that this money _can_ go
| into German (or at least European) consultants, rather than
| dumping 15 million on licensing costs that will go straight
| to Redmond, Seattle.
|
| Of course no guarantee that it will be the case for 100%
| but still better. Even if there were no savings it would be
| better spent money.
| hilti wrote:
| I really tried to read the comments on heise.de ... but their
| website is the perfect example if ad revenue drives a company
| instead of providing value to their readers. Why do users have to
| create another page impression to read a comment?
| Cockbrand wrote:
| To Heise's (slight) defense, their forum system is at least 24
| years old, extrapolated from checking the date of my first
| comment on it. Probably even older. Apart from driving page
| impressions, there didn't seem to be an incentive to make the
| experience smoother, as user engagement is still very high.
| Semaphor wrote:
| You dodged a bullet there. Heise is infamous for incendiary,
| low quality discussion.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| heise is older than online ads.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Over half my life I've been reading this headline. "[Subdivision
| of Germany] switches to Linux". Here's some slashdot slop from
| 2002.
|
| You'd think Microsoft would be dead and buried by now, or that
| the readers would have realized how inconsequential these changes
| are. One or the other.
|
| https://m.slashdot.org/story/25936
| ekianjo wrote:
| problem is these changes are constantly reverted (back to
| Microsoft services)
| jeffbee wrote:
| Right, but if you point out that the median time to uninstall
| Open Office is two minutes people get mad.
| aruggirello wrote:
| Microsoft had to move their local headquarters to Munich to
| have their municipality revert the change...
|
| Now, if two or more municipalities managed to migrate to
| Linux at the same time...
| ekianjo wrote:
| Wait until Microsoft comes back with lobbying some well placed
| politicians and restores Microsoft 365 in no time. This happens
| every single time.
| danielEM wrote:
| Benefits are bigger than anyone realizes. Even if it would cost
| same it would still be money that are to circulate further in
| local economy.
| jmclnx wrote:
| >Almost 80 percent of licenses canceled
|
| Looks like what IBM tied. IBM allowed some people to stay on
| Microsoft Office, the 'some people' were VPs and a few
| 'important' people. That turned into a disaster.
|
| Eventually almost everyone started requesting M/S Office
| Exceptions, and many were granted. Other people revolted. IBM
| then gave up and went back to M/S Office.
|
| To do this correctly, convert everyone, from CEO, Board Members
| down to the lowest level of person. No exceptions.
| erikerikson wrote:
| That was by far the most hostile cookie banner I've ever seen by
| a lot. It required multiple levels of saying no with a bid level
| of clicking reject a few hundred times. It wasn't worth it.
| cube00 wrote:
| Unless you pay for the subscription you can't reject all of it
| anyway.
|
| * Data processing by advertising providers including
| personalised advertising with profiling - _Consent required for
| free use_
|
| The full page reload after wasting all that time to realise I
| don't actually have a choice was a nice touch.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Delete the banner from the DOM. They can't process your data
| legally until you pressed that button. That's why the reload
| is. When you delete it, you never pressed the button.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Or just use noscript.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Note that this is considered not freely given consent by
| various data protection authorities, including the Dutch one
| (quite strongly; could find a source but would be in Dutch)
| and the European-wide collective of them (more weakly):
| https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2024/edpb-consent-or-
| pa... It's not like GDPR is new or dubiously worded on this
| aspect. They're willfully ignoring both ethical boundaries
| and the law
|
| I don't know why people keep sending me / sharing Heise
| links. There's more than one news website in the world
| cube00 wrote:
| _" We are at almost 80, without the tax administration."_
|
| Guess someone decided "we need to make it sound like we have 80%
| anyway we can", who knows what the real percentage is.
| kaluga wrote:
| Cost savings make headlines, but the important part is reducing
| structural dependency. Governments shouldn't base essential
| functions on systems they can't inspect or control. Even if OSS
| requires investment, that investment at least builds local
| capabilities instead of external lock-in.
| bdangubic wrote:
| what's the surveillance situation in the Linux ecosystem these
| days? :-)
| WillEngler wrote:
| Good move, gotta watch out for complicated contractual claims in
| Schleswig-Holstein. Microsoft might ally with the Danes and claim
| Schleswig, and then we'd have an 1864 situation on our hands
| again.
| PearlRiver wrote:
| The US becoming a national security risk can't help.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| What is the political element in Germany that makes these very
| public walk away from Microsoft viable?
|
| I've run projects for a few different employers to look at doing
| this. The math doesn't math unless you can segment your
| workforce. For example, at one place we had a field workforce
| that operated dispatch centers and field techs. That was all iOS
| + Linux or Chrome.
| perlgeek wrote:
| > What is the political element in Germany that makes these
| very public walk away from Microsoft viable?
|
| Mostly the widespread perception that the USA has betrayed the
| security guarantees given to Europe, and that the USA isn't a
| reliable partner anymore.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Recent comments (and by now published strategy) of the US
| administration have certainly shifted public and political
| perception. Not necessarily 180deg but enough too make such
| projects/attempts more viable.
|
| In the end, from a European/German perspective, it matters
| little whether these thoughts/comments/strategies are a
| negotiation tactic, "trolling", serious threats or something
| else entirely. And the fact that "Government adjacent" people
| like Elon Musk behave the way the do certainly doesn't help.
|
| The fear that the United States may use it's tech companies as
| blunt offensive weapens does now exist (in a semi-abstract
| form) where it didn't 5 or 10 years ago.
|
| I think at this point in time nobody can say what the end
| result will be or how things may develop in the future. Either
| on the political or the technological field.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > What is the political element in Germany that makes these
| very public walk away from Microsoft viable
|
| Germany has had a fairly active Linux community for decades. A
| large portion of German local government has had experience
| using or RFPing FOSS alternatives since the 2000s all the way
| back to Munich's bake off of Windows vs Linux.
|
| While the geopolitical portion is sexy and fun to look at, in
| most cases American vendors just don't find much value in
| supporting DACH customers because their budgets are
| significantly lower and they tend to be much more on-prem heavy
| unlike their Scandinavian, CEE, or British peers.
|
| DACH local governments also tend to rely heavily on MSP/MSSPs
| and for these kinds of businesses, margins really matter and
| vendors don't like dealing with channel sales because they just
| don't bring enough money to the table for the amount of money
| you have to spend wining, dining, and supporting them. And
| given MSP/MSSP margins, it makes sense for them to adopt FOSS.
|
| Finally, some German local governments have used public
| proclamations like these to renegotiate vendor deals (I think
| Munich did something similar).
|
| That said, private sector players in DACH have largely
| consolidated around American or Israeli vendors, such as
| Schwarz - despite their proclamation for digital soverignity -
| using American-Israeli SentinelOne [0].
|
| It's good to have competition though, and I do strongly feel
| that MSP/MSSPs and organizations dependent on Channel are
| better suited to using FOSS tooling.
|
| [0] - https://www.sentinelone.com/press/sentinelone-and-
| schwarz-di...
| breve wrote:
| > _What is the political element in Germany that makes these
| very public walk away from Microsoft viable?_
|
| Russia is waging war on Europe. America is increasingly aligned
| with Russia:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpvd01g2kwwo
|
| When the US government has become erratic, unreliable,
| untrustworthy, and aligned with your enemies then it's
| necessarily time to de-risk your infrastructure and supply
| chains by removing America products and services from them.
|
| It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your
| telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the
| Chinese government will do to it or with it.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Russia is waging war on Europe.
|
| No. NATO is engaged in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.
|
| > America is increasingly aligned with Russia
|
| Sure, and that's why they provide Russia with weapons and
| sanction Ukraine and Europe, right?
| mnau wrote:
| Here is a concrete example of what other comments are talking
| about (threat that MS/USA is no longer reliable partner).
|
| Microsoft blocked official email account of Karim Khan (a
| prosecutor of International Criminal Court). That was due to
| Executive order by president Trump (Executive Order 14203 -
| Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court).
| kittikitti wrote:
| Whenever cost-cutting measures are open for recommendations, I
| always mention how any company or organization can save on
| Microsoft licenses by switching to open source alternatives. It's
| never taken seriously, my competence is always questioned, and I
| somehow form new enemies from Microsoft fans. In the end, layoffs
| are conducted meanwhile the bills from Microsoft increase. The
| worst part about it all is that if my recommendations were
| implemented, the savings could have been enough to save everyone
| from a layoff.
| mleroy wrote:
| Schleswig-Holstein (pop. 3M) shows that Open Source in government
| is viable. We need an EU that shifts its focus from compliance
| frameworks to actually investing and building.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related in October:
|
| _Schleswig-Holstein completes migration to open source email_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558635
| submeta wrote:
| A company that cuts all services to members of the International
| Criminal Court because they prosecute war criminals that are
| protected by the US is not a reliable service provider for non-US
| customers. That's why Swiss Data Protection Officers recommended
| recently to migrate away from MS products and services. And all
| European agencies should do the same immediately.
| einpoklum wrote:
| The key word missing from the title: LibreOffice.
|
| It is by now a trusty enough workhorse for large organizations.
|
| Yes, it's not all the way there: I've filed hundreds of bugs
| against LibreOffice, and many are still open (not just feature
| requests); and yes, I have a lot of criticism of the governance.
| But it is proof that a huge, end-user-facing software project can
| sustain itself and improve within having to rely on the MS-bucks
| or the Googlebucks and such.
|
| But a huge project needs a lot of support, and needs to renew its
| support from new people, so please help out!
|
| https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org/
|
| Filing bugs, contributing graphics, translating parts of the UI
| (which you would be a saint to do since the translation system is
| the pits), designing document templates, organizing an install-
| party, getting promotional material and putting it, and of course
| you can write write code (starting with easy-hacks) or contribute
| money.
|
| ----
|
| Due disclosure: I'm a trustee of The Document Foundation, which
| manages the project. Going to speak at LOConf Asia 2025 in Tokyo
| later this month:
|
| https://conf.libreoffice.asia
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