Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector(news.itsfoss.com) |
Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector(news.itsfoss.com) |
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.
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?
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.
I really don't see how it even still matters today. Even a Libre office from 5 years ago should have plenty features for the average tasks an office clerk needs to do. Heck probably even MS Word 97 would suffice. The rest is often specialized software written by contractors, so "make it OSS" will just be a new requirement.
The software is updated to contemporary standards and rewritten as people come and go about every 10-20 years. Mandating it to be open source makes it simpler for new vendor to take over in those 10 years. And it might provide other benefits such as some degree of code reuse.
As for the foundational software, there usually is a regional partner of Canonical, SUSE, Red Hat, Microsoft and so on who re-sells the licenses and provides part of the support.
A good start would be to ditch MS in schools. If the supply of ready MS users dwindle companies could easier switch to Linux.
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 ...
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.
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.
Hence, the more common compromise is to pay a local company to implement and maintain that infrastructure for you but using the US software.
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...
> 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.
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.
After the war? To which do you refer?
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.
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.
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.
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
[1] https://github.com/e-id-admin/open-source-community/blob/mai...
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.
- 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.
> 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.
Some discussion earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40852084
I wish they spoke english, id consider moving there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland#Engli...
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).
This should not be a reason not to more there.
[0] for Swiss values of "big"
Great standard of life but can be isolating for some people. Unless you are happy sticking to the expat bubble, nothing wrong with that.
I’d love to see an open source football/basketball/sports engine. But it’s hard to do, even without dealing with the licensing aspects.
I think a big part of the reason is that Big Tech really helps push along FOSS, but the licensing aspects make the ROI poor for Big Tech to invest in FOSS here.
GIMP is not the only open source image editor.
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.
Or the majority of their users will suffer with substandard products, while highly paid or influential users will get exceptions to the policy so they can use the software they want.
For example let’s take apiece if software everyone on HN hates, Sharepoint. I’ve yet to find any open source alternative that comes close. And while you may hate it, it provides tons of value to local governments I’ve worked with.
I work on one of these projects.
This is the dysfunctional contracting model combined with “cost savings” removing technical civil service positions, meaning that the government often lacks people who are qualified to review or manage contractors. Groups like the US digital service, 18F, etc. which have staff have much better track records.