6 ms·

Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector

143 points by areski 2y ago

Rinzler89 2y ago
Should be an EU wide mandate at this point, as it's mostly pros with little cons. Since the options are 1), keep spending EU taxpayer money to boost Microsoft's and other US big-tech market cap, or 2), spend EU taxpayer money on FOSS and local companies implementing and maintaining that FOSS for local infrastructure, then the correct choice seems obvious to me. The only cons are the short term costs, teething issues and pains of the transition, but that's outweigh by the long term pros once that hill is crossed, the biggest which is tech sovereignty and independence form major tech firms under Uncle Sam's control, and the taxpayer money going to local companies and jobs instead of US. Ironically, Russia was unaffected by the Crowdstrike incident since they're under sanctions and can't use it, and IIRC they also started switching to Linux for their infrastructure after the war, so maybe it's an interesting case study.
- lynx23 2y ago
  The same would apply to assistive technology. Right now, various countries are paying relatively big sums to Freedom Scientific for JAWS licenses. It would be way better for the users if those countries would pay open source devs to work on accessibility for everyone. However, capitalism is preventing this. Resellers would be out of bussiness, so they lobby for the current system to stay as it is.
- kenjackson 2y ago
  The biggest con is IMO the most obvious one. What if a third party non-open source product does something that FOSS can’t do or is dramatically behind on? And are companies going really source local maintainers for FOSS versus the standard maintainer? Eg, is Switzerland really not going to use Canonical for supporting Ubuntu because it is British?
  - InitialLastName 2y ago
    Reading the blog linked in TFA, in this case the requirement applies just to software developed by the Swiss government (or on their behalf by a contractor), not to all software in general.
  - jraph 2y ago
    > What if a third party non-open source product does something that FOSS can’t do or is dramatically behind on? That's almost the best side effect: in a place where open source is mandatory, they will have to fund the missing features and it will be available to everyone, once and for all. If everyone does that, we rapidly get great software, sharing the costs, very efficiently, and it's all open source. The alternative being everyone paying their own little license on their side ad vitam eternam.
    - jamil7 2y ago
      In theory, maybe. I think in practise, in the case of somewhere like Germany, they realistically just won't implement the hypothetical feature and let productivity of employees drop even further. There is no motivation or reward in the public sector here for anyone to do anything better or more efficiently. I'm maybe overly cynical about the public sector's ability to get anything done here, I would like to be proven wrong, though.
      - binary132 2y ago
        It seems like maybe you’re assuming that state employees would be the ones building the required features, but I would guess these are simply going to be makework contracts going to (hopefully) local engineering firms.
        kenjackson 2y ago
        No. I’m not assuming that. I assume the governments will have to fund the work, but they will contract it out. But even then governments have struggled to deliver on this. And even when governments have the funding they tend to be horrible at specifying and getting delivery of technology - at least that’s been the case for the US.
- lnsru 2y ago
  You can see how it worked it Munich: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i... Spoiler alert: it didn’t work well. The world is not perfect and decision makers are greedy. Edit: I see I am being downvoted. Is there an objective reason for moving back to Microsoft? Is there any objective reason to ditch implemented and working open source software project? As Wikipedia tells most of city computers were successfully migrated. And users were giving positive feedback.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    Of course Microsoft et-al won't sit around with their disks in their hands watching their market cap get obliterated by Europeans moving to FOSS, so they'll wine and dine politicians, open an office here and there, offer generous kickbacks and discounts for volume purchases, bribe Ursula v.d. Leyen and have her delete her emails after doing deals under the table, you know, the usual EU drill, making the decisions to move to FOSS seem very expensive to the bean counters running the show compared to staying locked in to the Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc ecosystems, so I don't think such a transition will even happen EU wide besides a few small municipalities here and there.
  - 0xDEADFED5 2y ago
    Seems like it wasn't so terrible. Munich has still decided that "Where it is technologically and financially possible", the city will emphasize use on open standards and free open-source licensed software. Which seems reasonable. from [1]: In 2018, journalistic group Investigate Europe released a video documentary via German public television network ARD that claimed that the majority of city workers were satisfied with the operating system, with council members insinuating that the reversal was a personally motivated decision by lord mayor Dieter Reiter. Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
  - Barrin92 2y ago
    >and decision makers are greedy local decision makers in particular. Doesn't take that much to get some administrators in Munich to flip and to run into compatibility issues when every city does it independently. Make it a five or ten year EU plan with some serious cash behind it, it's basically at this point an investment into security and autonomy of the continent.
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  >they also started switching to Linux for their infrastructure after the war, After the war? To which do you refer?
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    *after the [Russo-Ukrainian] war started
  - timeon 2y ago
    How many wars are currently in Europe?
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      I'm always in awe on how petty and pedantic some people can be in the comments here, acting confused and pretending to misunderstand you out of context, if you aren't 100% verbose with your statements as if they're context unaware of current world events. They're worse than LLMs.
- throwaway7ahgb 2y ago
  Isn't the Linux/GNU philosophy "Use the best tool for the job". Making OSS always a choice is good, but it is definitely not always the best tool for the job.
  - zulban 2y ago
    Sure, but if you let most people choose, they don't choose the best IT tool. They choose what they know. Or they choose the tool with the best marketing team. Either way, you can't make a rule for people to choose the best tool for the job. A rule like this may come closer to the GNU Linux philosophy.
  - acdha 2y ago
    “Best” isn’t a simple objective trait. Is that the one which lets you get your job done for the lowest cost? Or the one with the easiest training and documentation? The most consistent UI so you don’t have to retrain people? The one which avoids geopolitical concerns about ceding control to potentially hostile countries? Is it the one where you have the most control over the direction because e.g. there could be an Swiss digital service cranking out patches for things they would have to haggle with someone at Microsoft or Oracle to get implemented? What about the one which you can most easily fix accessibility problems with? (That last being a legal requirement doesn’t mean that certain companies don’t try to blow it off release after release) Every one of those will have someone arguing that it should determine “best” status. A compromise like “usable and we have more control” seems quite defensible.
  - Timshel 2y ago
    Even if it's not the best today the question is for tomorrow. With proper funding you can hope open-source will become better and hopefully if more actors join the cost might even become lower. Of-course you can continue to enrich the likes of Microsoft today because they are "better" but even not considering the cost with the current trends in Microsoft (and others) products you might still end-up with something worse and another expensive bill to pay to try to leave ...
- rightbyte 2y ago
  It was close that EU ruined FOSS in the union by the warranty proposal. I dunno if that should make me optimistic or pessimistic. A good start would be to ditch MS in schools. If the supply of ready MS users dwindle companies could easier switch to Linux.
- mordae 2y ago
  This cannot happen. Microsoft writes digital laws in most EU member states.
- diffeomorphism 2y ago
  The much bigger and more obvious con is interfacing with "everybody else" (e.g. outside the public sector). People assume perfect bug-for-bug compatibility with the dominant software solution. So you also incur long term costs of always ensuring that compatibility. Hence, the more common compromise is to pay a local company to implement and maintain that infrastructure for you but using the US software.
- KronisLV 2y ago
  > Since the options are 1), keep spending EU taxpayer money to boost Microsoft's and other US big-tech market cap, or 2), spend EU taxpayer money on FOSS and local companies implementing and maintaining that FOSS for local infrastructure, then the correct choice seems obvious to me. Didn't that happen in Germany, where they basically did a migration away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice and then basically switched back? Here's a more recent article about something similar that mentions that case: https://www.zdnet.com/article/german-state-ditches-microsoft-for-linux-and-libreoffice/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/german-state-ditches-microsoft... > If some of this sounds familiar, congratulations on having a great memory. Munich, the capital of Bavaria, Germany, switched from Windows to Linux in 2004. That move lasted for a decade before Munich returned to Windows -- in no small part because the mayor wanted Microsoft to move its headquarters to Munich. Either way, to me it feels like both having that additional bit of options/leverage is a nice thing, as well as using open source in the first place. I've built systems both with the likes of Oracle and PostgreSQL and while both have some nice features, in most cases I'd lean towards the latter because it's just nicer to use, regardless of whether you need to operate an instance for some environment, launch a local instance or even have short lived test instances that are spun up for your CI pipeline; it's like suddenly your hands are no longer tied up in licensing and layers upon layers of complexity and restrictions. In my eyes, it's the same for using some variety of GNU/Linux on the server side, instead of Windows Server. That's not to say that tech coming from big orgs itself is the problem, I have nothing against JDK, Java, MySQL, .NET, ASP.NET etc. Rather, it's that permissively licensed solutions with communities around them are usually pretty nice to use. Plus, there's way less friction during development, too., you don't even need to check whether you have the Kendo UI license but instead something reusable is an npm install away. That said, in regards to established software like Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice, it's likely that there will never be full feature parity, but that's probably not some absolute dealbreaker for most.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > That said, in regards to established software like Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice, it's likely that there will never be full feature parity, but that's probably not some absolute dealbreaker for most. At least for finance and insurance industry, the feature differences between Excel and LibreOffice Calc are are deal-breaker (users in these industries are often power users of Excel). I can also easily imagine that the same holds for Powerpoint vs LibreOffice Impress for the consulting industry.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
xvector 2y ago
This is great, but I doubt this will ever actually be enforced. At least not without Switzerland dramatically increasing its investment in FOSS.
- esarbe 2y ago
  The idea is that this will increase FOSS investments and create cooperation between municipalities to setup FOSS project managements for their needs.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sschueller 2y ago
There are still arguments going on to make sure the entire Swiss Digital National ID (e-ID)[1] code will be open source. [1] https://github.com/e-id-admin/open-source-community/blob/main/tech-roadmap/tech-roadmap.md https://github.com/e-id-admin/open-source-community/blob/mai...
- thisconnect 2y ago
  First approach (by Swiss Post) was rejected by swiss citizens. https://sarahjamielewis.com/evoting/ https://sarahjamielewis.com/evoting/
  - sschueller 2y ago
    That's e-voting and that was an absolute disaster. This is E-id which we voted on not to have the private sector operate. The current solution proposed are quite good, the biggest issue that remains is that currently the law is not clear who can require the ID and this should be tightened so I don't need to show my ID to use a pay toilet.
    - thisconnect 2y ago
      Who issues the id?
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] Some discussion earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40852084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40852084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047172
davidelettieri 2y ago
That's the right approach, hopefully more governments will follow. Stuff built with public money should belong to the public.
incomingpain 2y ago
Switzerland is so brilliant. I wish they spoke english, id consider moving there.
- polycaster 2y ago
  You'd get by just fine. It's not uncommon to speak three languages fluently in CH (given it has 4 official languages), and usually English is in the mix. I lived there for a couple of years and while not speaking French or Italian, I got by quite easily in the respective regions.
  - jajko 2y ago
    Get by, yes its often enough. Job search - that limits your choices maybe to 10%, in a job market that is consistently overcrowded (100-500 applicants for any good position, not all are brilliant and with right experience but some always are, whole world tries to get here). You will regularly hit the language wall in places like shops, post office, neighbors etc. where answer in given language if they speak english is consistently "no". Integration outside big cities is a lot about you becoming like them, not vice versa, better keep the differences compared to locals behind doors of your home. Smaller cities, more rural places - forget english outside tourism, many young speak it but otherwise there isn't much will and often neither skill. French part is worse than German part in this (just like French from France are much, much worse when it comes to will to speak english than Germans from Germany are).
- rhplus 2y ago
  Somewhat ironically, Switzerland has four official languages, none of which are English, but with so many regional dialects within those, English is quickly becoming the… ahem… Lingua Franca: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland#Engli...
- esarbe 2y ago
  Pretty much everyone speaks English in Switzerland. In big[0] cities you can get by with only English. This should not be a reason not to more there. [0] for Swiss values of "big"
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sebiw 2y ago
Well, yes and no. The law (which went into effect 2023 BTW) still has a lot of loopholes, e.g.: > The federal authorities subject to this Act shall disclose the source code of software that they develop or have developed for the performance of their duties, unless the rights of third parties or security-related reasons would preclude or restrict this. "unless the rights of third parties [...] would preclude or restrict this" pretty much says it all.
nemo44x 2y ago
Mandatory is a ridiculous rule if only for the self defeating nature of limiting yourself. I can understand the sentiment but maybe make the rule say to prefer OSS. That is when sourcing RFPs prefer OSS solutions that can fulfill requirements.
teekert 2y ago
Love the initiative but it has failed so often (Munich anyone?) because of stupid choices like: - let’s make our own distro. - Let’s use OpenOffice (0 knowledge of FOSS at the start) - let’s ban anything proprietary from day one I hope someone wise is in charge (that Sturmer seems to be a good one, let’s just hope he is not too dogmatic/RMS about FOSS) and they set themselves up for success. Which, to me means: take it slow, ask for feedback, guide; don’t force. … basically apply standard change management techniques.
deleted 2y ago
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flarzzarp 2y ago
Sadly, this article is plain wrong. I've been working in the gov. IT sector in switzerland and reading the headline and article gives a false impression. The aforementioned law EMBAG does not mandate the use of open source software. What it does is mandate that software develeoped especially for the federal government needs to be open sourced, unless that is not possible due to licensing issues or national security reasons. The whole swiss administration is microsoft based. Also, most day-to-day administrative tasks are handled by the cantons (think state) administrations, and they are, as far as I understand, not subject to this law. The federal and cantonal administration are quite separated in switzerland. All of this happened in november 2023
kjlojpo 2y ago
[dead]
nklhlk 2y ago
[dead]

143 points by areski 2y ago

Should be an EU wide mandate at this point, as it's mostly pros with little cons. Since the options are 1), keep spending EU taxpayer money to boost Microsoft's and other US big-tech market cap, or 2), spend EU taxpayer money on FOSS and local companies implementing and maintaining that FOSS for local infrastructure, then the correct choice seems obvious to me. The only cons are the short term costs, teething issues and pains of the transition, but that's outweigh by the long term pros once that hill is crossed, the biggest which is tech sovereignty and independence form major tech firms under Uncle Sam's control, and the taxpayer money going to local companies and jobs instead of US. Ironically, Russia was unaffected by the Crowdstrike incident since they're under sanctions and can't use it, and IIRC they also started switching to Linux for their infrastructure after the war, so maybe it's an interesting case study.

lynx23 2y ago
The same would apply to assistive technology. Right now, various countries are paying relatively big sums to Freedom Scientific for JAWS licenses. It would be way better for the users if those countries would pay open source devs to work on accessibility for everyone. However, capitalism is preventing this. Resellers would be out of bussiness, so they lobby for the current system to stay as it is.
kenjackson 2y ago
The biggest con is IMO the most obvious one. What if a third party non-open source product does something that FOSS can’t do or is dramatically behind on? And are companies going really source local maintainers for FOSS versus the standard maintainer? Eg, is Switzerland really not going to use Canonical for supporting Ubuntu because it is British?
- InitialLastName 2y ago
  Reading the blog linked in TFA, in this case the requirement applies just to software developed by the Swiss government (or on their behalf by a contractor), not to all software in general.
- jraph 2y ago
  > What if a third party non-open source product does something that FOSS can’t do or is dramatically behind on? That's almost the best side effect: in a place where open source is mandatory, they will have to fund the missing features and it will be available to everyone, once and for all. If everyone does that, we rapidly get great software, sharing the costs, very efficiently, and it's all open source. The alternative being everyone paying their own little license on their side ad vitam eternam.
  - jamil7 2y ago
    In theory, maybe. I think in practise, in the case of somewhere like Germany, they realistically just won't implement the hypothetical feature and let productivity of employees drop even further. There is no motivation or reward in the public sector here for anyone to do anything better or more efficiently. I'm maybe overly cynical about the public sector's ability to get anything done here, I would like to be proven wrong, though.
    - binary132 2y ago
      It seems like maybe you’re assuming that state employees would be the ones building the required features, but I would guess these are simply going to be makework contracts going to (hopefully) local engineering firms.
      - kenjackson 2y ago
        No. I’m not assuming that. I assume the governments will have to fund the work, but they will contract it out. But even then governments have struggled to deliver on this. And even when governments have the funding they tend to be horrible at specifying and getting delivery of technology - at least that’s been the case for the US.
lnsru 2y ago
You can see how it worked it Munich: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i... Spoiler alert: it didn’t work well. The world is not perfect and decision makers are greedy. Edit: I see I am being downvoted. Is there an objective reason for moving back to Microsoft? Is there any objective reason to ditch implemented and working open source software project? As Wikipedia tells most of city computers were successfully migrated. And users were giving positive feedback.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Of course Microsoft et-al won't sit around with their disks in their hands watching their market cap get obliterated by Europeans moving to FOSS, so they'll wine and dine politicians, open an office here and there, offer generous kickbacks and discounts for volume purchases, bribe Ursula v.d. Leyen and have her delete her emails after doing deals under the table, you know, the usual EU drill, making the decisions to move to FOSS seem very expensive to the bean counters running the show compared to staying locked in to the Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc ecosystems, so I don't think such a transition will even happen EU wide besides a few small municipalities here and there.
- 0xDEADFED5 2y ago
  Seems like it wasn't so terrible. Munich has still decided that "Where it is technologically and financially possible", the city will emphasize use on open standards and free open-source licensed software. Which seems reasonable. from [1]: In 2018, journalistic group Investigate Europe released a video documentary via German public television network ARD that claimed that the majority of city workers were satisfied with the operating system, with council members insinuating that the reversal was a personally motivated decision by lord mayor Dieter Reiter. Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >and decision makers are greedy local decision makers in particular. Doesn't take that much to get some administrators in Munich to flip and to run into compatibility issues when every city does it independently. Make it a five or ten year EU plan with some serious cash behind it, it's basically at this point an investment into security and autonomy of the continent.
Ylpertnodi 2y ago
>they also started switching to Linux for their infrastructure after the war, After the war? To which do you refer?
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  *after the [Russo-Ukrainian] war started
- timeon 2y ago
  How many wars are currently in Europe?
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    I'm always in awe on how petty and pedantic some people can be in the comments here, acting confused and pretending to misunderstand you out of context, if you aren't 100% verbose with your statements as if they're context unaware of current world events. They're worse than LLMs.
throwaway7ahgb 2y ago
Isn't the Linux/GNU philosophy "Use the best tool for the job". Making OSS always a choice is good, but it is definitely not always the best tool for the job.
- zulban 2y ago
  Sure, but if you let most people choose, they don't choose the best IT tool. They choose what they know. Or they choose the tool with the best marketing team. Either way, you can't make a rule for people to choose the best tool for the job. A rule like this may come closer to the GNU Linux philosophy.
- acdha 2y ago
  “Best” isn’t a simple objective trait. Is that the one which lets you get your job done for the lowest cost? Or the one with the easiest training and documentation? The most consistent UI so you don’t have to retrain people? The one which avoids geopolitical concerns about ceding control to potentially hostile countries? Is it the one where you have the most control over the direction because e.g. there could be an Swiss digital service cranking out patches for things they would have to haggle with someone at Microsoft or Oracle to get implemented? What about the one which you can most easily fix accessibility problems with? (That last being a legal requirement doesn’t mean that certain companies don’t try to blow it off release after release) Every one of those will have someone arguing that it should determine “best” status. A compromise like “usable and we have more control” seems quite defensible.
- Timshel 2y ago
  Even if it's not the best today the question is for tomorrow. With proper funding you can hope open-source will become better and hopefully if more actors join the cost might even become lower. Of-course you can continue to enrich the likes of Microsoft today because they are "better" but even not considering the cost with the current trends in Microsoft (and others) products you might still end-up with something worse and another expensive bill to pay to try to leave ...
rightbyte 2y ago
It was close that EU ruined FOSS in the union by the warranty proposal. I dunno if that should make me optimistic or pessimistic. A good start would be to ditch MS in schools. If the supply of ready MS users dwindle companies could easier switch to Linux.
mordae 2y ago
This cannot happen. Microsoft writes digital laws in most EU member states.
diffeomorphism 2y ago
The much bigger and more obvious con is interfacing with "everybody else" (e.g. outside the public sector). People assume perfect bug-for-bug compatibility with the dominant software solution. So you also incur long term costs of always ensuring that compatibility. Hence, the more common compromise is to pay a local company to implement and maintain that infrastructure for you but using the US software.
KronisLV 2y ago
> Since the options are 1), keep spending EU taxpayer money to boost Microsoft's and other US big-tech market cap, or 2), spend EU taxpayer money on FOSS and local companies implementing and maintaining that FOSS for local infrastructure, then the correct choice seems obvious to me. Didn't that happen in Germany, where they basically did a migration away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice and then basically switched back? Here's a more recent article about something similar that mentions that case: https://www.zdnet.com/article/german-state-ditches-microsoft-for-linux-and-libreoffice/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/german-state-ditches-microsoft... > If some of this sounds familiar, congratulations on having a great memory. Munich, the capital of Bavaria, Germany, switched from Windows to Linux in 2004. That move lasted for a decade before Munich returned to Windows -- in no small part because the mayor wanted Microsoft to move its headquarters to Munich. Either way, to me it feels like both having that additional bit of options/leverage is a nice thing, as well as using open source in the first place. I've built systems both with the likes of Oracle and PostgreSQL and while both have some nice features, in most cases I'd lean towards the latter because it's just nicer to use, regardless of whether you need to operate an instance for some environment, launch a local instance or even have short lived test instances that are spun up for your CI pipeline; it's like suddenly your hands are no longer tied up in licensing and layers upon layers of complexity and restrictions. In my eyes, it's the same for using some variety of GNU/Linux on the server side, instead of Windows Server. That's not to say that tech coming from big orgs itself is the problem, I have nothing against JDK, Java, MySQL, .NET, ASP.NET etc. Rather, it's that permissively licensed solutions with communities around them are usually pretty nice to use. Plus, there's way less friction during development, too., you don't even need to check whether you have the Kendo UI license but instead something reusable is an npm install away. That said, in regards to established software like Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice, it's likely that there will never be full feature parity, but that's probably not some absolute dealbreaker for most.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > That said, in regards to established software like Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice, it's likely that there will never be full feature parity, but that's probably not some absolute dealbreaker for most. At least for finance and insurance industry, the feature differences between Excel and LibreOffice Calc are are deal-breaker (users in these industries are often power users of Excel). I can also easily imagine that the same holds for Powerpoint vs LibreOffice Impress for the consulting industry.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

xvector 2y ago

This is great, but I doubt this will ever actually be enforced. At least not without Switzerland dramatically increasing its investment in FOSS.

esarbe 2y ago
The idea is that this will increase FOSS investments and create cooperation between municipalities to setup FOSS project managements for their needs.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sschueller 2y ago

There are still arguments going on to make sure the entire Swiss Digital National ID (e-ID)[1] code will be open source. [1] https://github.com/e-id-admin/open-source-community/blob/main/tech-roadmap/tech-roadmap.md https://github.com/e-id-admin/open-source-community/blob/mai...

thisconnect 2y ago
First approach (by Swiss Post) was rejected by swiss citizens. https://sarahjamielewis.com/evoting/ https://sarahjamielewis.com/evoting/
- sschueller 2y ago
  That's e-voting and that was an absolute disaster. This is E-id which we voted on not to have the private sector operate. The current solution proposed are quite good, the biggest issue that remains is that currently the law is not clear who can require the ID and this should be tightened so I don't need to show my ID to use a pay toilet.
  - thisconnect 2y ago
    Who issues the id?

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

[dupe] Some discussion earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40852084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40852084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047172

davidelettieri 2y ago

That's the right approach, hopefully more governments will follow. Stuff built with public money should belong to the public.

incomingpain 2y ago

Switzerland is so brilliant. I wish they spoke english, id consider moving there.

polycaster 2y ago
You'd get by just fine. It's not uncommon to speak three languages fluently in CH (given it has 4 official languages), and usually English is in the mix. I lived there for a couple of years and while not speaking French or Italian, I got by quite easily in the respective regions.
- jajko 2y ago
  Get by, yes its often enough. Job search - that limits your choices maybe to 10%, in a job market that is consistently overcrowded (100-500 applicants for any good position, not all are brilliant and with right experience but some always are, whole world tries to get here). You will regularly hit the language wall in places like shops, post office, neighbors etc. where answer in given language if they speak english is consistently "no". Integration outside big cities is a lot about you becoming like them, not vice versa, better keep the differences compared to locals behind doors of your home. Smaller cities, more rural places - forget english outside tourism, many young speak it but otherwise there isn't much will and often neither skill. French part is worse than German part in this (just like French from France are much, much worse when it comes to will to speak english than Germans from Germany are).
rhplus 2y ago
Somewhat ironically, Switzerland has four official languages, none of which are English, but with so many regional dialects within those, English is quickly becoming the… ahem… Lingua Franca: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland#Engli...
esarbe 2y ago
Pretty much everyone speaks English in Switzerland. In big[0] cities you can get by with only English. This should not be a reason not to more there. [0] for Swiss values of "big"

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sebiw 2y ago

Well, yes and no. The law (which went into effect 2023 BTW) still has a lot of loopholes, e.g.: > The federal authorities subject to this Act shall disclose the source code of software that they develop or have developed for the performance of their duties, unless the rights of third parties or security-related reasons would preclude or restrict this. "unless the rights of third parties [...] would preclude or restrict this" pretty much says it all.

nemo44x 2y ago

Mandatory is a ridiculous rule if only for the self defeating nature of limiting yourself. I can understand the sentiment but maybe make the rule say to prefer OSS. That is when sourcing RFPs prefer OSS solutions that can fulfill requirements.

teekert 2y ago

Love the initiative but it has failed so often (Munich anyone?) because of stupid choices like: - let’s make our own distro. - Let’s use OpenOffice (0 knowledge of FOSS at the start) - let’s ban anything proprietary from day one I hope someone wise is in charge (that Sturmer seems to be a good one, let’s just hope he is not too dogmatic/RMS about FOSS) and they set themselves up for success. Which, to me means: take it slow, ask for feedback, guide; don’t force. … basically apply standard change management techniques.

deleted 2y ago

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flarzzarp 2y ago

Sadly, this article is plain wrong. I've been working in the gov. IT sector in switzerland and reading the headline and article gives a false impression. The aforementioned law EMBAG does not mandate the use of open source software. What it does is mandate that software develeoped especially for the federal government needs to be open sourced, unless that is not possible due to licensing issues or national security reasons. The whole swiss administration is microsoft based. Also, most day-to-day administrative tasks are handled by the cantons (think state) administrations, and they are, as far as I understand, not subject to this law. The federal and cantonal administration are quite separated in switzerland. All of this happened in november 2023

kjlojpo 2y ago

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nklhlk 2y ago

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