5 ms·

Europe really does seem to be leading the way with open source gov tech. If this is successful (and I hope it is), the world will have no choice but to follow.

Europe really does seem to be leading the way with open source gov tech. If this is successful (and I hope it is), the world will have no choice but to follow. This really could be the beginning of the end of Microsoft as an ever-present aspect when filling in forms, tables, templates, etc.

rwyinuse 1y ago
I really hope this will be successful. Living in Finland, I was surprised to find out that last year our public sector spent over a billion Euros on Microsoft licenses alone, while simultaneously following austerity politics elsewhere, making cuts that badly impact people's lives to save way smaller sums of money. No wonder EU's tech industry and economy in general aren't doing well, when we let so much money flow to America, even though we absolutely have the talent to build good enough systems over here.
- simiones 1y ago
  > No wonder EU's tech industry and economy in general aren't doing well, when we let so much money flow to America, even though we absolutely have the talent to build good enough systems over here. You have to be careful with this line of thinking, because as you've stated it, this justifies concepts like Trump's tariffs based on trade deficits. The reality is that Finland won't be any richer (nor poorer, of course) if it spent 1+ billion euro on some EU or even Finnish alternative to MS; nor if it were spent on consulting and/or a government IT office. Trade is not a problem in itself. The real concern is that letting Microsoft be the only game in town for business software of this type lets them control prices - that just having some trustworthy alternatives would allow the same services to be obtained for, say, 500M euro instead. The other concern is related to tech dependence - that the government's reliance on MS services allows the US to use a threat of denying access to MS products as a strong-arming tactic in any negotiations. Finally, the concern that a US company - and, implicitly, US security services - has access to potentially highly confidential data is a national security risk, though the impact is hard to measure.
  - pu_pe 1y ago
    > You have to be careful with this line of thinking, because as you've stated it, this justifies concepts like Trump's tariffs based on trade deficits. The difference is that if you are using tariffs to stimulate local industrial capacity, this can take many years and you might have competitive disadvantages (ie wages, access to supply chains, etc.). If you are replacing software like Windows and Office with open source alternatives and you put the money from the licenses into your local tech sector to develop a support ecosystem, I think this is both achievable and would make your country richer too.
  - akdor1154 1y ago
    > The reality is that Finland won't be any richer (nor poorer, of course) if it spent 1+ billion euro on some EU or even Finnish alternative to MS. If Finland sends €1B to the U.S, then there's €1B more on a U.S. balance sheet. If Finland sends €1B to Finish companies, then clearly Finland has €1B more in it than it otherwise would. So 'Finland the government balance sheet' would be unchanged, but 'Finland the aggregate of people and businesses' would indeed be richer.
    - ls612 1y ago
      This is just as ignorant of comparative advantage as Liberation Day was.
    - rwyinuse 1y ago
      Yep, what I was thinking weren't just direct cost savings, but the ways how what money would flow to other parts of Finnish economy had it stayed here, instead of going to America. We're in recession, there are way too many fresh IT grads, and even experienced devs are having it hard in this job market. Ultimately this affects every area of our economy, as unemployed people aren't buying houses or spending much on services. Shifting some spending from MS licenses to developing local solutions would almost certainly have a positive impact on our whole economy, even if the solutions weren't any cheaper in the end. It should be also noted that we have a state-funded education system. It seems incredibly dumb to use lots of public money to train programmers, and then have them sit unemployed, while using more public money to buy mediocre software written by other programmers beyond European Union.
Arainach 1y ago
>If this is successful (and I hope it is), the world will have no choice but to follow. Why do you believe this is so? It's important to remember that many of the dominant enterprise software companies aren't there as the result of a secret conspiracy - it's because they're very good at listening to what their customers want and delivering it. Saying "we want this open" sounds nice, but the sticker shock of paying for development, maintenance, and hosting is the tip of the iceberg. The real problems and expenses are in support and training. Companies like Microsoft excel here - they have dedicated support teams to escalate to empowered to understand the problems of large customers and get them fixed. Paying an engineer to investigate why your USB badge reader doesn't work on Linux on Lenovo laptops on Thursdays is more expensive than a significant number of Windows licenses. Your comment could be pulled directly from Slashdot back when the German Government decided to try SUSE.
mvdwoord 1y ago
One can hope... There is some precedent in Germany, esp. in Munich with LiMux. No clue how successful that project now really is though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
- Tainnor 1y ago
  As it says on that page, the project was discontinued in 2017 - although they did later make another U-turn and committed to open source without, in my understanding, fully going back to LiMux.

rwyinuse 1y ago

I really hope this will be successful. Living in Finland, I was surprised to find out that last year our public sector spent over a billion Euros on Microsoft licenses alone, while simultaneously following austerity politics elsewhere, making cuts that badly impact people's lives to save way smaller sums of money. No wonder EU's tech industry and economy in general aren't doing well, when we let so much money flow to America, even though we absolutely have the talent to build good enough systems over here.

simiones 1y ago
> No wonder EU's tech industry and economy in general aren't doing well, when we let so much money flow to America, even though we absolutely have the talent to build good enough systems over here. You have to be careful with this line of thinking, because as you've stated it, this justifies concepts like Trump's tariffs based on trade deficits. The reality is that Finland won't be any richer (nor poorer, of course) if it spent 1+ billion euro on some EU or even Finnish alternative to MS; nor if it were spent on consulting and/or a government IT office. Trade is not a problem in itself. The real concern is that letting Microsoft be the only game in town for business software of this type lets them control prices - that just having some trustworthy alternatives would allow the same services to be obtained for, say, 500M euro instead. The other concern is related to tech dependence - that the government's reliance on MS services allows the US to use a threat of denying access to MS products as a strong-arming tactic in any negotiations. Finally, the concern that a US company - and, implicitly, US security services - has access to potentially highly confidential data is a national security risk, though the impact is hard to measure.
- pu_pe 1y ago
  > You have to be careful with this line of thinking, because as you've stated it, this justifies concepts like Trump's tariffs based on trade deficits. The difference is that if you are using tariffs to stimulate local industrial capacity, this can take many years and you might have competitive disadvantages (ie wages, access to supply chains, etc.). If you are replacing software like Windows and Office with open source alternatives and you put the money from the licenses into your local tech sector to develop a support ecosystem, I think this is both achievable and would make your country richer too.
- akdor1154 1y ago
  > The reality is that Finland won't be any richer (nor poorer, of course) if it spent 1+ billion euro on some EU or even Finnish alternative to MS. If Finland sends €1B to the U.S, then there's €1B more on a U.S. balance sheet. If Finland sends €1B to Finish companies, then clearly Finland has €1B more in it than it otherwise would. So 'Finland the government balance sheet' would be unchanged, but 'Finland the aggregate of people and businesses' would indeed be richer.
  - ls612 1y ago
    This is just as ignorant of comparative advantage as Liberation Day was.
  - rwyinuse 1y ago
    Yep, what I was thinking weren't just direct cost savings, but the ways how what money would flow to other parts of Finnish economy had it stayed here, instead of going to America. We're in recession, there are way too many fresh IT grads, and even experienced devs are having it hard in this job market. Ultimately this affects every area of our economy, as unemployed people aren't buying houses or spending much on services. Shifting some spending from MS licenses to developing local solutions would almost certainly have a positive impact on our whole economy, even if the solutions weren't any cheaper in the end. It should be also noted that we have a state-funded education system. It seems incredibly dumb to use lots of public money to train programmers, and then have them sit unemployed, while using more public money to buy mediocre software written by other programmers beyond European Union.

Arainach 1y ago

>If this is successful (and I hope it is), the world will have no choice but to follow. Why do you believe this is so? It's important to remember that many of the dominant enterprise software companies aren't there as the result of a secret conspiracy - it's because they're very good at listening to what their customers want and delivering it. Saying "we want this open" sounds nice, but the sticker shock of paying for development, maintenance, and hosting is the tip of the iceberg. The real problems and expenses are in support and training. Companies like Microsoft excel here - they have dedicated support teams to escalate to empowered to understand the problems of large customers and get them fixed. Paying an engineer to investigate why your USB badge reader doesn't work on Linux on Lenovo laptops on Thursdays is more expensive than a significant number of Windows licenses. Your comment could be pulled directly from Slashdot back when the German Government decided to try SUSE.

mvdwoord 1y ago

One can hope... There is some precedent in Germany, esp. in Munich with LiMux. No clue how successful that project now really is though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

Tainnor 1y ago
As it says on that page, the project was discontinued in 2017 - although they did later make another U-turn and committed to open source without, in my understanding, fully going back to LiMux.