Comment by abarwick
3 years ago
This is just naive. Government offices/agencies are so tightly coupled with packages like office 365 that forcefully separating them would require home built solutions which would always be terrible, less secure, and more expensive to the tax payer. There’s a lot of good these products can provide, granted they are properly audited and have high security requirements.
Idk here in France there are cities and state-wide administrations with free/libre stacks based on Linux, LibreOffice, Zimbra and others and things seem to JustWork™. For instance the french Gendarmerie, the cities of Rennes and Arles...
Arles is getting suckered by Microsoft, sadly [1]. Unfortunately all it takes is one idiot to get in office once to kill this kind of successful initiative that has been running for almost two decades.
[1]: https://larlesienne.info/2022/02/22/la-municipalite-de-carol...
Are there any high functioning large companies that use Linux/LibreOffice/Zimbra? I suppose governments rarely aspire to be high functioning.
Using Libre Office rather than Office 365 is unlikely to be the limiting factor in how fast anything in a government office is going to run.
In fact, I bet you that a major part of the delays in Government are because Tom from IT needs a sign off from three separate people to get a new Office 365 license for Brenda in accounting.
With Libre Office you make that a thing of the past.
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> would require home built solutions which would always be terrible, less secure,
I disagree. It would be relatively straightforward to build such systems on Linux and open source.
> and more expensive to the tax payer
As a proportion of Italy's GDP, the cost would be negligible, especially given that this is a matter of national security, something governments tend to be keen to spend money on.
> As a proportion of Italy's GDP, the cost would be negligible
After how many failed rewrites that never deliver a working product?
The assumption here seems to be that the government would be writing the software, but it would go out to market. This would be a fantastic opportunity for a local software company to put out something in the space. I'm foreseeing more of this kind of thing as data sovereignty becomes a more considered issue by governments.
The other undertone I'm getting from this thread is that people think America has a monopoly on building software, and that's simply not the case. It's not hard to find companies doing really good work outside of the US. There is also nothing special about Office 365, it doesn't have a technology moat, it just has a surmountable interoperability moat and a social moat.
Zero. Start off with using the latest Ubuntu LTS. Then add stuff as needed.
I didn’t read it as government can’t use commercial products. Just that the corps couldn’t influence politics. But I’m not the OP, so I can’t speak to what was intended.
More around the storing of data. This is why Scale8.com is on EU servers...
> are so tightly coupled with packages like office 365
Are they though? Do you know this for a fact? I mean, sure, MS Office is very popular in government settings, but does this really go beyond the possibility of just replacing it with LibreOffice if they so decided?
Sharing a link to a document that others can edit in the cloud is much more convenient than emailing around a _final_v3(2).docx document.
Well... there's Collabora online:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbQFTkFaYlo
or Box/DropBox/other cloud storage services, which is less convenient than proper collaborative in-pace editing, but you can still get the file at the link, edit it and upload it.
I obviously can’t speak for all, even most, but back in my consulting days I can say the many US federal and state agencies use Azure AD and a litany of AWS services that are core to vital work streams. Enough that having to shut them down would neuter the department.
> Enough that having to shut them down would neuter the department.
You've just identified one very good reason that they shouldn't be dependent on a single, proprietary vendor.
Really, I was surprised to find your original comment on Hacker News, especially with you ironically fronting it with calling other people naive.
Most developed countries have several offices/agencies that already run 'home built' solutions, they just don't get talked about much.
They get talked about incessantly at the local Microsoft HQ.
your whole argument is based on the assumption that proprietary software is superior in every single metric. thats just patently false.
ah, the ad hominem, never a good sign for the proceeding argument.
there are a number of other office suites that are entirely adequate for bureaucratic organizations to build methodical processes around (which is what bureaucracies do). the capabilities of the underlying tools don’t matter much in this regard.
also, audits aren’t meant to prove anything (like security), but instead to shift liability.
> ah, the ad hominem, never a good sign for the proceeding argument.
An ad hominem means using an insult as the basis for rejecting an argument, e.g. 'that is wrong because you are [attack]'. Saying an argument is naive and then explaining why is not an ad hominem.
arguments can have multiple lines of reasoning, one of which can be an ad hominem all by itself.
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> ah, the ad hominem, never a good sign for the proceeding argument.
GP never says that you’re naive, but the comment was.
either way (intent can also be multi-modal), it signals a triggered response and is entirely superfluous and distracting. it's worth setting that aside, even after writing it, and examining the emotional underpinnings that led to the response in the first place. we learn a lot about our own subconsciousness that way.
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The average large organization uses over 100 SaaS products
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233538/average-number-s...
I would love to see you replace all 100 of those with open source software.
Have you ever dealt with large technology migrations?
And if no one does anything, in 5 years it will be a 1000, in 10 years 5000. As it is right now, the only voice governments hear is that of corpos, and corpos want to preserve the influence of corpos. That's why we need to force the ban on corpo influence. I'd rather pay 1% gdp for a one-time migration to open and free software than pay .01% gdp per corp per year.
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not sure that it's relevant and 'large' is subjective, but yes, i stewarded the technology migration of a core product suite for a prior employer, which incidentally had government agencies as a prominent customer segment.
i'm not suggesting that governments can only use internally developed or open-source software, i'm saying corporate interests should be firewalled away from goverment. so a locally-installed office suite incorporating no surveillance tech doesn't have the ancillary corporate interests attached to qualify it for being firewalled.
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100 SaaS products in one org sounds like a security and logistics nightmare.
so just assuming you have an overpriced stinking pile of sh*t, is this an argument to stay with it forever?
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Russia has that. Just typewriters and stationary.
Sounds like it would create jobs too, that's a plus not a minus lol
"Creating jobs" to inefficiently solve a solved task is not a good thing, it is society burning it's tax income. It is only good to create jobs when the output of those jobs is increased value.
Slowing the flow of money out of the public purse and into a very small number of barely accountable global megacorps and private equity funds, whilst improving the employment prospects of the local population, sounds like it's worth the cost of repeat work.
Also, nature loves a bit of redundancy. And capitalism loves competition. You can't have competition under a monopoly.
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If there isn't anything generally available that doesn't have telemetry, then productivity software w/o telemetry isn't a solved task. If you accept LibreOffice and the like, then it's a solved task but you'll still need someone to manage it, hence job creation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
less secure? can it get worse than ms, outlook and active directory foo? they incepted their own industry around their unsecurity, lol.
terrible and more expensive is also a joke, but not as big, you still could got to ibm or oracle if you want to pay more for less, admitted
The legal and moral question is one of data sovereignty, not tools vendor. I suggest the GP comment be read with that context in mind.
Rubbish, there has been a concertive effort by the US to undermine other countries including so called NATO allies in order to dominate the world, its been going of for decades.
I refuse to use the NHS here in the UK because of the widespread use of Microsoft everywhere.