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.”
The idea that a state government is unnecessarily at the mercy of any corporation is hard to comprehend. Especially, as in this case, a foreign corporation.
Open source shouldn’t only be the standard for governments. It should be the minimum requirement.
IMO it should be further than that.
Open source software is, more often than not, used as digital infrastructure.
Governments around the world should absolutely be investing in open source software and actively contributing to it.
They do. https://code.mil/
Good, we need to stop supporting products that try to strong arm you into a perpetual subscription.
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.
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
You mean this? They’ve been working on it for a while, this is about adopting stuff they’ve already done.
For example, covid tracking apps
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.
This is the sexiest thing Germany has done since that German couple that drives the Porsche in Super Troopers.
German is a good country about open culture
I wonder what they will choose for their base. I was surprised LiMux was based off Debian since Suse is headquartered in Luxembourg City. I personally would welcome a large organization choosing Suse products as we need more competition for RHEL (which would be a huge boon in productivity since we won’t need like 3 projects to spend a decent amount of time repackaging RHEL).
Good!!! I hope other governments follow.
Good. Now, you want to make a bigger impact? Do the schools.
This might actually happen in Germany
This isn’t going to happen.
This headline comes up every year that it’s time for the government to negotiate contracts with Microsoft. Once they get the best price they think they can, they will accept it and issue a news release that “we’re staying in Windows after all”.
It’s lame, but it’s what is going to happen.
I remember some city in Germany actually doing it some years back and then eventually giving up and switching back.
googles
It’s a little unclear exactly what software was and wasn’t switched, but sounds like it’s Munich, and now they’re back on LibreOffice again.
By 2006, the city had started a concerted effort to move away from Microsoft products and onto Linux. Fast forward to 2013 and 80% of all workstations in the government and related organizations were running LiMux. However, Microsoft’s Windows and Office services were still used.
As we reported back in 2017, the government made a controversial decision to abandon open source and return to Windows.
A newly elected government in Munich, Germany has said it will aim to use open source solutions in its offices. In doing so, the government is moving away from Windows and Microsoft Office despite committing to the products several years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
LiMux was a project launched by the city of Munich in 2004 in order to replace the software on its desktop computers, migrating from Microsoft Windows to free software based on Linux.[citation needed] By 2012, the city had migrated 12,600 of its 15,500 desktops to LiMux. In November 2017 Munich City Council resolved to reverse the migration and return to Microsoft Windows-based software by 2020.[1][2][3] In May 2020, it was reported that the newly elected politicians in Munich, while not going back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux wholesale, will prefer Free Software for future endeavours.[4]
EDIT: I guess I should have just read the other comment responding to the parent, which mentioned Munich.
Munich did exactly that in 2017, so let’s see how far Sleswig-Holstein is willing to go, hopefully they won’t be falling for Microsofts sweet talk.
The reason Munich switched back to Windows, when users were just fine working with Limux, was a corrupt politician who ordered the return to windows, probably pocketing a hefty bribe in the process.
Source?
https://www.zdnet.de/88202452/stadt-muenchen-erwaegt-abkehr-von-linux/
The article from 2014 explains how this was mostly a political quarrel, with a former administration transitioning away from Microsoft (which as a US corporation has no business in any government administration of another country), and the conservatives pushing (under a “social democrat” mayor, admittedly) to go back to MS against technological advice.
Im Stadtrat hingegen steht den Berichten zufolge eine fraktionsübergreifende Mehrheit hinter LiMux. Bettina Messinger, Sprecherin der SPD-Fraktion für Personal, Verwaltung und IT, sagte Heise Online, dass man keine neue Haltung zu dem Thema habe. Sie bezeichnete die Umstellung auf Linux als „mutige Entscheidung“. Kritische Stimmen und Beschwerden seien im EDV-Bereich nichts Ungewöhnliches. Man müsse LiMux und das Umfeld nun stetig verbessern und nutzerfreundlicher gestalten. Unter anderem sei dafür mehr IT-Personal in der Verwaltung nötig.
Auch die CSU-Fraktion unterstützt LiMux weiter. Deren IT-Experte Otto Seidl nannte Schmidts Kritik „eine sachfremde Einzelmeinung eines Juristen“. Die Grünen warnen Heise zufolge vor einem „teuren Schildbürgerstreich“, sollte die Stadt zu Microsoft zurückkehren. Demnach wollen die Abgeordneten in einer Ausschusssitzung klären, woher die Beschwerden stammen.
In other words: the “manyfold complaints” were an “ad populum” argument without sources and were most likely made up.
I genuinely hate AI art
Right? The rash of AI images used in journalism is genuinely troubling. It seems like at least 50% of news article thumbnails I see are AI these days.
And, like…are those penguins in the back cheering with human arms? Is that an orca jumping out of the water? What the fuck is going on.
This one is terrible because it’s like a montage of a penguin colony over a generic historic painting of a port city. Very little creativity and quality control. I’d just combine some actual photo of the Kiel port and penguins jumping out of water. (Not necessarily these two)
Maybe soon a unified CSV handling might be possible.
Commas are too common, we should go with semicolons. And
\nand UTF-8 by default. And a header that defines changes from defaults, plus metadata such as data logger model and settings. These are some significant quality-of-life improvements but I’d guess it will take another file extension before that happens.At that point why not use TSV?
Switching to an open-source project is easy, but the concern is more about the context in which they are used and how long they will persist in using these. It might be more convenient for the government to initially try Linux for some pilot projects that require less human intervention. This is because I’m not sure how familiar civil servants are with Linux and LibreOffice. On the other hand, open-source projects don’t provide after-sales services and may have technical or compatibility issues. It requires time for them to get accustomed to them.
According to the article,
- They are also migrating backend infrastructure such as emails servers etc.
- They already have Linux migration experience in some German states as well as the current proposer.
- Companies such as RedHat, Canonical and OpenSuse do offer enterprise level support. So open source software doesn’t have “after sales” support is a myth.
- They say that the goal of the migration is privacy and security, no necessarily cost driven. They may very well be prepared to pay a premium for enterprise level support.
- They have already identified compatibilities issues in their previous project. They got them because they mixed Windows and Linux, the article says. That’s why they migrate everything to Linux this time.
Yeah for the simple stuff LibreOffice will be just fine but for anything complex like mail merges and such it’s probably going to require a lot of work re-doing things.
When someone uses a text editor like LibreOffice, whenever someone mentions complex tasks, I’d imagine writing a thesis, a series of books, a big ass report or the like. Mail merges sound like something another app should do…
Yeah LibreOffice will do things like mail merges, but I mean it will probably require relearning the process. It will be different than the process they used with MS Office.
If you just porting over simple things like letters and simple documents you should be able to move back and forth between MS Office and LibreOffice with few changes.
I love this, but having used ms office extensively for work, we all know it has many more features. Libreoffice isn’t a drop in replacement, but maybe with the increased user base it can become one.
It really depends on the needs.
When my entire company (10k employees) switched to LibreOffice, it was almost fine. There was like 50 ppl who were frustrated at breaking changes. But many adapted and it was a pretty clean transition.
As for LibreCalc, fuck that. What a nightmare. Employees resorted to creating Google accounts to use Google Sheets instead. We still don’t have a solution, and if one particular director gets his way, that whole department might switch back to Windows just for Excel.
Meanwhile another german city (munich) is going back to MS
but maybe with the increased user base it can become one.
You think the state will contribute? I highly doubt that. At best it will be gov specific functionalities.
Well, Munich decided to switch back around the time Microsoft was negotiating about building their Germany HQ there. There have been allegations of backroom dealings, but I dunno if there’s ever been anything proven. There is a very big, very shiny building with a sign that says Microsoft near where I lived when I was there, though.
Though I also read some articles about them partially going back to FOSS, so who knows what they’ll do in the end.
Ad I said yesterday when this was posted. They tried this about 15 years ago, reverted to Windows after a few years.
I wish them all the luck in the world with this, truly. But I’m not sure a government has the drive, management, and flexibility to pull this off successfully.
If we want to see Linux compete with Windows for the desktop, it will need to start at the opposite end of the spectrum: small environments where the need for specialized apps is minimal, IT is a smaller group, flexibility is much higher, end users are a smaller group (from a training perspective) and reduced cost realizations are more apparent and impactful.
We may be seeing the beginning of this with VMWare’s new, exorbitant licensing costs causing a push to other solutions such as Proxmox/TrueNAS for virtualization/virtualization backup in the SMB.
And if we really want to see a sea change, we need to get Linux as a desktop in education. But that would require settling on a single shell, and generally a single distribution (or at a minimum ensure there’s a consistent set of tools in the OS).
Seems like an “Education Build” would be a great idea. But, again, who’s going to back it, and which Linux distro gets the nod?
It’s done before in Munich. It can work.
“Linux could have the desktop now”
And yet doesn’t.
Again, why do enterprises prefer to pay tens of millions per year in licensing rather than deploy Linux as a desktop?
You think these places don’t have hundreds or thousands of IT folks with Linux expertise?
Blame game, simple.
Proprietary software comes with a price tag (some people think free = bad), a license (which implies some sort of ownership) and a company behind it which you can sue if something hits the fan. Zero responsibility for the licensee.
FOSS, in the other hand, is no strings attached (for the most part, some sw is dual-licensed and/or there are paid services): if it hits the fan, you clean it up.
So proprietary-mentality managers either cough up money for an IT department, which they almost never do, or fork off money to a proprietary company and write it off as an expense and externalize everything, including resposibility.
LibreOffice is perfectly fine for your Dear Princess Celestia letters (which 99 percent of Word users do is write simple letters), but once you start doing more advanced formatting (such as tables and text boxes and other embeddings), LibreO really doesn’t like it. And good luck if you have to convert such a Word document.
That’s a blatant lie. LibreOffice Writer works better than M$ Word for every single purpose and application.
