As I recall, this sort of public statement is used as a lever to squeeze some discounts out of Microsoft's Enterprise Sales team before the government "decides" to stay with Windows.
Whats worse is they could all pull it off if they invest in existing Distros and hire people to build out the main infrastructure they need. If they rely on legacy Windowd OS' the licenses for new OS' wont matter. They need secure systems to avoid being hacked by external malicious state actors.
I would love to see some countries adopting Linux for government systems and funding research and development e.g. maybe fund Libre Office or the KDE one more and then build out other tools to be cross platform.
"... and hire people to build out the main infrastructure they need."
There's a reason Microsoft was successful for years: they built turn-key solutions, and added new turn-key features their customers requested.
Switching from that sort of IT to a linux-based, 'we need a system architect' model doesn't happen overnight. There's organization shift, cultural shift, firing unneeded people who won't retrain, retraining people who are worth it, and hiring talent to fill gaps.
Not to mention that talent's more expensive and less easily certified (e.g. all the official MS rubber stamp programs).
Not impossible, but it's a LOT of work. With dubious chances of success.
Basically Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This is something people forget about. OS and app licenses are likely a drop in the ocean compared to the operating costs of supporting your infrastructure (regardless of whether it runs on Windows or Linux).
TCO was also a big part of the marketing campaign of Microsoft against Linux in the late 90ies, early 00s.
A big difference compared to one or two decades ago is that a lot of domain-specific services have moved to web applications. So, there are probably a lot of machines out there that are just glorified web browsing machines.
Also, the popularity of iOS and Android have made more applications cross-platform.
Of course, once Office documents or legacy Win32 applications are part of the equation, you can't really beat Windows. It is a common misconception that LibreOffice could replace Office. I use a Linux desktop and a MacBook and most of the Word/Excel paperwork that I have to do (luckily irregularly) does not open correctly in LibreOffice. Of course, it is an uphill battle for the LO folks.
I’ve switched to libreoffice from excel and find it totally viable as an excel replacement except for lack of vba support, but it has its own scripting language so even that isn’t a deal breaker. It’s just so much faster and less bloated than today’s excel.
For most users, "replacement" mean it can open and edit Microsoft's documents perfectly. For some users, it even means the GUI is just about the same so they don't feel lost.
By that criteria (which are real criteria from real people), the only viable replacement for Microsoft Office, is the next version of Microsoft Office.
The only way to break out of this, I think, is for governments to forbid themselves to use proprietary software that was not developed on their own soil. Because let's face it, it's not really about money (especially not about short term money). It's more about national security, sovereignty, and freedom.
And for why that's important: business teams who generate business-critical Excel sheets never got the memo about good ideas from the software development lifecycle. And have been cobbling together undocumented tools to get work done for decades.
Dealing with this at work now.
And it's not like they're disinterested or incapable of learning, literally no one thought "Gee, what those folks are doing looks a lot like code."
The biggest boost to interop would be requiring software vendors to release spec sheets for necessary software components and file formats... if they want government work. No more "It's too hard" or "We can't." You want the job, those are the rules.
> business teams who generate business-critical Excel sheets never got the memo about good ideas from the software development lifecycle. And have been cobbling together undocumented tools to get work done for decades.
So, business teams invented the all-too-common version of agile development even before “real” software developers, without the disadvantage of ignorance of the body of knowledge around the SDLC, got around to it.
There's a document that ostensibly describes the format, but I'm not aware of a free software reference implementation. Their format may be open in theory, but in practice Microsoft still takes advantage of vendor lock in.
> By that criteria (which are real criteria from real people), the only viable replacement for Microsoft Office, is the next version of Microsoft Office.
By that criteria, the only viable replacement for Microsoft Office is the _same_ version of Microsoft Office.
The delta between two Microsoft Office versions has often been larger than between a Microsoft Office version and a LibreOffice version...
But the two MS Office versions both have a Microsoft logo on them. People will grumble, but get used to the new version, whereas if you give them something with a different logo, they will scream bloody murder and demand that you get rid of that weird program and give them back their Office programs.
Perceived change generates just as much stress and associated opposition as actual change. You've just enabled me to make that explicit for myself. I feel stupid that took me so many years. Thank you for that.
Writing this out somewhat softens my frustration with people refusing to use anything but the blue e or similar intellectual laziness.
Where in my comment did you see any opinion being expressed? I merely described something that I encountered many, many times. You do not have to believe me, that is up to you.
Not everything is an adversarial thing about two opposing groups of people.
Condescension does not change the fact that that’s an accurate description of the behaviour of some people, any more than it would change a left wing sneer at right wingers who think climate change isn’t a big deal, or a right wing sneer at left wingers who think evolution in humans stopped at the neck.
> For most users, "replacement" mean it can open and edit Microsoft's documents perfectly. For some users, it even means the GUI is just about the same so they don't feel lost.
Citation needed.
The company I work for switched wholesale away from Microsoft. Management moved first and the rest of us shortly afterwards. Haven't heard any complaints.
And the companies I worked with repeatedly stated that they couldn't possibly switch away because their clients (often the government itself) was using a particular version of MS Office. This often meant we had to use several versions of MS Office, depending on who we were interacting with.
The company you work for is one of the enlightened few. Or maybe it's a tech company with an enlightened management?
> The company you work for is one of the enlightened few. Or maybe it's a tech company with an enlightened management?
It is. We are a tech/consulting company, but management is management and we also have a good number of employees older than me (and I think that is great :-)
Yeah, it is, unfortunately. But the question then becomes, is it better for them to use GNU software and Linux, with maybe one or two closed-source apps, which they could migrate from over time, or use Windows and everything proprietary, even if the only use case LO doesn't cover is opening MS Office files 'perfectly' (yet)?
I've seen some spectacular cockups over the years and eye watering sums of money burned because no-one factored in risk properly. And they more often than not happen on government projects, and usually some big name consultancy is heavily involved - Capita, PwC et-al.
Having worked the consultant gig for a bit, we never talked about risk.
Honestly, because most customers sponsoring projects were morons. If you told them there was a 25% chance of failure, they'd go with someone else who claimed a 0% chance of failure.
I finally decided most of this was just sponsors covering their ass. If they initiated a project with risk and it failed, that reflected on them. If they initiated a project and the consultants claimed (winkwinknudgenudge) there's no risk, then if it failed those lying consultants were the only ones to blame.
Or just not the right expertise to launch and manage such a contract. Sadly really difficult for government to hire the right expertise - either hiring procedures are too complicated (equitable!) or slow (thorough!) or not interested (salaries not competitive as citizens would be outraged about gov paying high salaries for high expertise).
Not to mention it's a LOT of work that needs to be coordinated by someone with the vision and skill to make it happen. People like that are not exactly common in the public administration of any country.
Mostly because government and small-scale enterprise balk at the salaries they command.
Income inequality is a concern, and some people are certainly overpaid. But at the C* or technical architect level, the cost of pinching pennies is dominated by the cost of choosing a wrong direction (or not recognizing a changing situation and correcting quickly enough).
Public sector salaries are simply set a certain way - through a political process, covering all employees. There is little leeway to give higher/lower salaries to a few as that smells like cronyism. You can't negotiate a gov salary, except for externals.
Why are they using a custom distro? Is it just different graphics or do they have changes significant enough that a customised Ubuntu installer wouldn't suffice?
For example, IIRC, they use a smart card to authenticate on their workstations, and also on their web applications. For that you need to customize a bit (better out of the box support for pkcs11 devices, integrate the Certificate Authorities needed, drivers).
There are a few contributions to open source projects:
A few years back, they were contributing to a fork of Thunderbird called Trustedbird for example.
There are also a few individual contributors inside the Gendarmerie, for example Xavier Guimard creator and one of the current developers of LemonLdap (SSO portal).
Also just as a side note, this distribution is used by the Gendarmerie, which is not exactly the national Police. In France you have both a Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie National. The Gendarmerie is military personel (the Police is civilian). I'm guessing national sovereignty plays a small role in that (VS using MS Windows, which is completely controlled by a US company, bounded to the US government).
When you run Windows you can use GPO to override loads and loads of behaviours, and WSUS to customise which updates get picked up by the computers.
When you run Linux you do it by creating custom packages and changing the package manager to point to a different server, at which point you have created a "custom distro".
My fiancee who is from South Korea thinks very highly of the North Korean engineers' skills. Even under hunger and adverse conditions, they can produce their own Linux distribution and nuclear weapons program.
> Whats worse is they could all pull it off if they invest in existing Distros and hire people to build out the main infrastructure they need
I don't know about that, I've seen what kinds of systems the existing distros build and I'm not impressed. Which isn't to say that Microsoft would definitely better, seeing as they are doing their best to become a Linux distro themselves while embracing all the bad behaviors that entails, but your statement certainly isn't a given.
Increasing user hostility (see: forced updates "for your own good"), poorer quality software released more often, no QA, ridiculously convoluted dependency management...
What distro are you using that has these issues? My Debian server has been running solidly for years without crashing or (automatically) updating. I've also never had any problems with QA or package management; everything installed with the system package manager has always run, installed, and updated smoothly. I'm not a linux expert, but what you described are all issues I associate exclusively with Windows and, to a lesser extent, recent MacOS, both of which I also use frequently.
A server is generally a single purpose device, and the server stuff in Linux is pretty mature because people make money off of it.
Run Linux on a Desktop and it's a whole different story. Shit breaks all the time, the package dependency spaghetti is insane, no one seems to test anything (or they don't listen to the people who do), etc.
As a french, I have to say the french local police (gendarmerie) has been using Ubuntu in all their stations for years and they are very happy with that !
Still means Linux is working as intended. Freedom means options. Options means bargaining power. Bargaining power means monopolies can't push you around as much.
As someone who likes Linux and genuinely believe that software that was paid for by the public should be open source, I just have to ask you why that is.
I work in a Danish municipality with 100.000 citizens. We operate more than 300 IT systems, some of these are one of a kind systems that have no alternatives and some of those only run on Windows.
We also have 8000 employees, a lot of them couldn’t tell you if the smartphone they use each day is an android or an iPhone. They know windows and they know office, switching them to pages and macOS would be almost impossible, Linux and libre office is out of the question.
We have an IT staff of skilled people who were willing to skip pay for ideology they are all certified Microsoft and have little other education. They could all easily leave for other positions in the Microsoft infrastructure. It would cost around a million to replace just one of them.
We could easily switch our tech to Linux, we would need to build a lot of replacement software but that could be done in a reasonably manner, but moving the business side to Linux would be the most expensive thing we ever did.
Which is why I’m a skeptic of something I believe should happen. We pay a tech tax to Microsoft, by we can’t stop. It’s just not doable.
partial counter-point: many large companies, universities, schools etc have switched to things like Google Docs. Most use of office software is simple enough that people can transfer (afaik a big part in the Munich migration was making sure all the templates used for common documents where ported properly and people could easily access to).
Specialist software is a big problem of course, likely leading to a parallel Windows infrastructure of some kind, either dedicated Windows workstations for the workers that need it or a terminal-server setup of some kind - I know companies that used the latter to keep Windows XP applications available in an isolated environment too. But it's all a bespoke process.
That is not really a counter point though. I mean, education is part of a municipality, it makes up around 15% of our work force, and you’re right, they could probably be switched to Linux.
That doesn’t really make sense though, because our IT staff can’t support it, so we would need 1-2 guys extra which is more expensive than the windows licenses for 1200 employees.
> so we would need 1-2 guys extra which is more expensive than the windows licenses for 1200 employees.
As someone who supports both Windows and Linux laptops, if you switched to Linux your support staff would eventually halve. The control you have over Linux is so tight, its relative immunity viruses, to staff playing with it and adverse Microsoft "upgrades" so good that support literally drops to whatever it takes to keep the hardware going. Or to put it another way: if you need to re-image a Linux laptop, it's because the disk drive broke.
Mind you, it takes a while to get to that point. And you need someone with real Linux expertise. Real Linux expertise unfortunately means when a problem arises gets to the point you would give up and re-image Windows, instead with Linux you haul out the source, and find the root cause. But if you can do that you will be able to drive the software defect rate to near zero.
Or to put it another way again: Windows licences are the price to pay if you don't / can't pay for that sort of expertise, so you are trapped into paying to do it for you. Unfortunately Microsoft is a monopoly, so you end up paying a fair bit more. I'll grant you small enterprises don't have much choice. But I'd expect someone with 1200 employees does have the choice.
That's basically why vendor lock-in works, you'll always stay on Windows. I get that, but that's the case for everything. If you want to change anything in your life, there's some need to get out of your comfort zone, since not doing so means only doing what you're comfortable with, thus not changing anything.
There's no doubt there'll be increased support costs in the short term, but this should be a long-term investment to get off of proprietary software and embrace open formats, (in my humble opinion, governments should by law be required not to produce documents that require proprietary software to open properly).
Governments should be the ideal vehicles for long-term investments. It's usually public corporations that are mostly concerned with the short term, it shouldn't be governments. If the SK government would seriously commit, in 10 years Linux would be the new normal and it would be Windows that requires extra staff, support etc.
I actually personally think all public software should be open source so citizens can have access to what they pay for. It’s a tough sell though, because of how massive of an undertaking it is.
We simply have too much software that only runs on; and too much staff schooled for Windows. You’re right that we could change if we wanted to, but it’s just hard to justify such an investment in an area where it would mean that we had to fire teachers and nurses to pay for it.
We don’t even have a good business case. I mean, our total Microsoft licenses are around the same expense as 4 employees. It would be literal decades before we brought the investment home if we made a full switch.
That doesn’t really work in political organisations, and it’s likely why all the previous attempts to switch have failed. To do this, we’d need massive public support for it, so the political leadership doesn’t get cold feet during the “short” term investment, and the truth is, the public couldn’t care less.
That doesn’t mean we can’t get there eventually. We try to buy more and more open source, we set up co-operations across municipalities to define architectural standards so suppliers can’t define our infrastructure anymore. But it’ll take a long time, and maybe it’ll never make sense to leave Microsoft. I mean, what’s the open source alternative to office365?
> That doesn’t mean we can’t get there eventually. We try to buy more and more open source, we set up co-operations across municipalities to define architectural standards so suppliers can’t define our infrastructure anymore
That's nice to hear. I think your best bet is indeed to slowly make sure you're not dependent on Microsoft. Even if Windows never wholly goes, at least Linux could then be a viable option for new deployments, or for smaller departments.
Yep. That's one common outcome. Another one is where they actually move and discover it's a nightmare to train people, and maintain the infrastructure.
Yeah, they're not going to do it. Or do you think they could ever stand to be seen as running the exact same OS as their northern, uh, neighbors? I mean, let's get real.
