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Comment by clairity

3 years ago

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.

42 comments

clairity

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mmanfrin  3 years ago

> 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.

  • clairity  3 years ago

    arguments can have multiple lines of reasoning, one of which can be an ad hominem all by itself.

    • wutbrodo  3 years ago

      None of the lines of reasoning were an ad hominem. From your other comment[1], it seems like you think "ad hominem" just means "being rude to someone". I recommend reading the GP comment's description of ad hominem again: it means making a logical argument that depends on the speaker's personal characteristics.

      "You're European, so your argument is biased and wrong" is an ad hominem. "Your argument is naive, here's why I think that" is not. The latter is logically downstream of the argument, while the former is upstream.

      [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31854644

      3 replies →

Jcowell  3 years ago

> ah, the ad hominem, never a good sign for the proceeding argument.

GP never says that you’re naive, but the comment was.

  • clairity  3 years ago

    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.

scarface74  3 years ago

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?

  • quantum_magpie  3 years ago

    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.

    • scarface74  3 years ago

      Are you going to also train staff to use the new open source software? Where is the open source SalesForce equivalent? Workday? Concur? Device management? Email service? ServiceNow? Time tracking? Photoshop? Are you going to also force every employee to use Linux instead of Mac and Windows? Are you going to tell them to rewrite all of their software and business processes written on top of Oracle and SQL Server? Should they also rewrite all of their bespoke mobile apps to support open source mobile operating systems? Are you going to migrate all of their Office documents and SharePoint? Are they going to move all of their project management processes from Microsoft Azure DevOps (aka Visual Studio Online)? Are they going to move all of their call center software to open source? For school systems are they going to move their fuel procurement software? Many education systems are partially funded by the lottery. Are they going to move their backend systems from GTech? Their lunch programs payment systems for students use a third party, are they going to move that too? Their ATS? LMS? Grade tracking software?

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  • clairity  3 years ago

    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.

    • scarface74  3 years ago

      You migrated a product. Were you involved in migrating the entire infrastructure of an entire state?

      Yes, I speak from experience, migrations and modernizations are kind of my job.

      1 reply →