Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s most northern state, is starting its switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, and is planning to move from Windows to Linux on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions.
Concerns over data security are also front and center in the Minister-President’s statement, especially data that may make its way to other countries. Back in 2021, when the transition plans were first being drawn up, the hardware requirements for Windows 11 were also mentioned as a reason to move away from Microsoft.
Saunders noted that “the reasons for switching to Linux and LibreOffice are different today. Back when LiMux started, it was mostly seen as a way to save money. Now the focus is far more on data protection, privacy and security. Consider that the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) recently found that the European Commission’s use of Microsoft 365 breaches data protection law for EU institutions and bodies.”
If governments actually employed most of the development teams who build their services, and cut out most of the private middlemen consultants, managers, sales staff etc they could 1) build an engineering and cybersecurity capability without surveillance capitalism, focused on data security and privacy 2) save money 4) create productivity multipliers by unifying and sharing code for common functions across governments around the world 5) return our tax dollars to us through FOSS software that benefits us, instead of enriching big tech corporations who are already richer and more powerful than most nation states.
For example, covid tracking apps — instead of every dumb cunt government paying tens/hundreds of millions for consultants to reinvent the wheel or reskin someone else’s code, they could have had in house devs coordinate common FOSS codebases and collectively saved 80+% of the cost. This is the same for most standard or common services using bespoke or proprietary software and systems.
Politicians are criminally corrupt idiots though, so they’ll continue enriching big tech and surveillance capitalism at the expense of civilisation.
You mean this? They’ve been working on it for a while, this is about adopting stuff they’ve already done.
Germany’s is open source. Developed by Telekom and SAP, most of the money didn’t go towards development (it’s simple enough of an app, after all) but infrastructure and end-user support. You can’t just tell random FLOSS people to deal with 80 million DAUs.
Yes. I’m aware there are a few who appear to be moving in the right direction, but I have strong doubts it’ll become more than an outlier.
You’ve got my vote
Example: https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/05/local_council_tech_struggles/
Maybe if they collectively owned a software company it would be more responsive.