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It's... an admirable goal, but it pretty much remains to be seen if "France"[1] follows through. Previous attempts to "ditch Windows" have not ended that well.
by WaryByDesign 6mo ago
It's... an admirable goal, but it pretty much remains to be seen if "France"[1] follows through.
Previous attempts to "ditch Windows" have not ended that well. Munich in 2003, the entire Federal German government in 2009, Munich again in 2013, Munich again in 2021, and so on. Most common end-result: back to Windows.
Breaking points are typically the lack of an "Office 2016" compatible suite, lack of "Adobe PDF" tooling, and a mishmash of legacy apps. The latter seems trivially addressable by a "Remote Desktop/RemoteApps" environment, but there are definitely issues, mostly surrounding printing and clipboard handling.
All of that can be solved, but definitely requires more funding and, crucially, coordination, beyond "Open Source Cures All."
[1] Oh, I just love it when an entire culturally-diverse region gets lumped in together, or, when, as in this case, ~6M French government employees are treated as a homogeneous group.
- bornfreddy 6mo agoMotivation matters.
- WaryByDesign 6mo ago[flagged]
- mixmastamyk 6mo agoIf they only diverted 10% of the budget from MS to solving issues they’d have had a solution a decade or two ago.
- WaryByDesign 6mo agoI'm... not so sure? The French government has, widely seen, 6M employees. Given retail pricing of EUR200/seat/year (and they definitely have a better arrangement), that's 1.2B, and I'm not sure that's enough to provide an identity management plus office apps plus file storage solution? And at 10% of that? Absolutely forget it...
- mixmastamyk 6mo agoAll of that came about without them spending anything. So the extra is just to fix bugs and do integration work. StarOffice (LibreOffice ancestor) existed in the 90s—I used it and it was fine for government work. File storage? Cheap by Y2K as well.
- WaryByDesign 6mo ago[flagged]
- mixmastamyk 6mo agoIt's really cheap to run FOSS on commodity PCs in the twenty first century. Hetzner is very reasonable in the cloud more recently. It's not a binary switch either, you build the platform bit by bit every year and roll it out to more and more workers. Four dimensional thinking, that could have succeeded already, a decade plus ago. Sure a few components would have to be written in the meantime. Just a few million a year would be a huge boost to gaps in FOSS.
- dang 6mo agoYou posted this text in 5 separate places. Worse, you edited 7 previous comments by gutting their original text and replacing them with this same tantrum. That's abusive. I'm not going to ban you for this because everyone goes on tilt sometimes, but please don't pull a trick like that on HN again. I've restored the text of the 7 edited comments to what it was before you vandalized them. I've also canceled the downvotes on those posts because I agree with you that the downvotes were unfair. (At least I think I do - I didn't read them closely and don't know the context.) I hope the latter feels at least a little bit like a good faith gesture, because that's how I'm intending it. (The 5 comments that only ever said "[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}" remain downvoted and flagged since obviously they were against the site guidelines.)
- danny_codes 6mo agoYou’re saying a government couldn’t take open source building blocks and run.. office apps with basic security and.. file storage? For $100M a year? This could be done with a 30 person team
- Akronymus 6mo agoWerent the munich government employees quite happy with linux, but microsofts lobbying with their headquarters got them to switch back?
- Slothrop99 6mo agoWere they? Sounded like they stuck with some terrible old version of OpenOffice ("brokenoffice"). Users don't really care about the OS, its the apps.
- WaryByDesign 6mo agoI'm not aware of Microsoft's economic footprint in the Munich region, but I doubt it's significant. The complaints that lead to the several-reversions-to-Windows at the time, as I recall, were all around "citizen sent me X, can't open X" And those are all addressable issues, but not without significant know-how and funding.
- LtWorf 6mo ago> I'm not aware of Microsoft's economic footprint in the Munich region, but I doubt it's significant. Perhaps be aware before explaining everyone how things really are?
- WaryByDesign 6mo ago[flagged]
- earthnail 6mo agoI've never seen a user replace all their comments with "[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}" making it impossible for others to read their original comments. If this now becomes a trend I feel like there may be a need to change the rules around editing.
- samsk 6mo agoEarlier attempts were mostly about money and ideology. Now its a question of security, thanks to one 'clever' 'businessman'. So thanks to his _great_ efforts, it might actually work out this time.
- WaryByDesign 6mo ago[flagged]
- ricw 6mo agoMunich is a bad example - they were effectively „bought out“ by Microsoft by investing hugely into the local economy in the form of offices and employees. It was also two parties that kept flip flopping with different priorities. Linux itself had some hiccups but was fine from what I recall.
- WaryByDesign 6mo ago> they were effectively "bought out" by Microsoft Yeah, let me dispute that. They were, at least on three occasions, forced to roll back due to "citizen sent me X and can't open it" and/or "sent Y to citizen and they can't open it" concerns. Mind you: these issues still persist in a fully Microsoft/Adobe "solution environment", but less so than in the "disregard all and move to Linux" situation. And to be perfectly clear: that's all unacceptable. But it adds another, say, EUR 2B to the equation.
- gus_ 6mo agohttps://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/ https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/ It doesn't matter if this or that doesn't work. Or if Microslop pressures to continue using Winslop. Now the reasons are geopolitical.
- WaryByDesign 6mo ago[flagged]
- fxtentacle 6mo agoMunich led to "all of Schleswig-Holstein" in Germany. 44,000 Exchange mailboxes replaced with Open-Xchange. 25,000 Windows+Office desktops replaced with Linux+OpenOffice.
- WaryByDesign 6mo agoNope. That was rolled back: 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... And, again, I'd very much like Microsoft to lose here, but, there are real issues here
- fxtentacle 6mo agoMunich was rolled back but inspired SH to do it instead of them.
- atherton94027 6mo agoYou must be German — the French state is a lot more top down than Germany with its regions, so generally these kinds of mandates get applied broadly
- WaryByDesign 6mo ago> You must be German Oof, that's just offensive! Anyway, most German Linux 'mandates' were indeed regional, and (for good reasons!) failed to migrate 'upstream'. Whether the French mandate takes hold remains to be seen. "We're not Germany" is not the end-all argument it might seem to be to you.
- atherton94027 6mo agoSorry I didn't see your reply, what was it about?