And since thes last update from the USA on how they view the EU, this will not be the last move EU countries will make.
I know, I work for one of them. We are ACTIVELY planning our usexit.
In Soviet USsia, USsia exits EU!
Trump admin shoots the U.S. in the foot every chance it gets
It’s cause they misunderstood the prefix for foot and got all excited.
Trust comes on foot and leaves by horse.
It will be decades before some semblance of trust has been earned back by the USA (starting after they act normally again, whenever that may be)
True. It’s not just Trump that feels this way either. Lots of American oligarchs and groups like Claremont and Heritage that support this shit.
This is also good news because it obviously means that german government will have to review the software used for possible security holes and close them, so everyone who also uses the software gets security fixes.
Hehe hehe hehe. Yeah no, you overestimate Germany state governments
This is so selfish. What about the shareholders?!!!??
This is great, But using Microsoft Windows should be illegal for public services in EU.
We can no longer allow ourselves to depend on American IT infrastructure.Public Money should result in public code.
It can’t be, that our public money lands as profits in non European companies.
That should be a given, imhoI 100% agree, but some would consider that a matter of ideology.
The other point about dependency on USA when they are acting with hostility is more pragmatic.99% of people don’t understand all the reason why open source is better for public services, except if we can say it’s cheaper. That’s the one point they understand, and the one point Microsoft has been attacking most with their propaganda against open source.
with open source we can also create jobs by hiring a developer to add functions we need to the software we use!
Go away with your common sense!
5 million a year would go a long way towards making their open source solutions meet their needs.
The cynic in me says they are very good at burning through such amounts without any notable progress. However since it is open source, my hopes are up that this will lift the veil where otherwise bureaucracy and corruption will waste the money.
I mean, optionally they could set up a tiny dev shop with that amount and submit the PRs they want to submit. And at worst, they could maintain their own fork.
It’d be a public service in more ways than one.
I really hope GNU/Linux can run on old Fax machines and the printing-out-emails workflow works smoothly.
Seriously. While I support the change to foss solutions, this is going to go over like a fart in church for the people that were just forced off fax machines and into email a year ago. And there’s a zero percent chance that Germany will use any of those savings for a support infrastructure. The German way is to figure it out, and endure the suffering while you do with the bare minimum of support from people that barely know the shit themselves.
I have a friend who is principal at a high school here in DE and the stories she’s been telling me about the new push to get tablets into the hands of kids is straight fkn Monty Python level absurdity… from the staff!
Germany painted themselves into a corner with their refusal to modernize their tech infrastructure. The “it’s not broken, so don’t fix it” mentality has left them 20 years behind all their neighbors. But, hey, traditions over everything… amirite?
I am 99 percent sure they still have these overhead projectors in schools
In before Microsoft break out the FUD tactics and a year or two of cheap licenses.
Gates is already boarding the jet.
Nadella you mean? It’s been a while since Gates was CEO of Microsoft.
This is a bit of ancient history, but back when Munich decided to move away from Microsoft (only because MS dropped Windows NT 4.0), it is said that Ballmer tried first dropping license fees down to a whooping 90% for a limited time.
That didn’t work, so MS started a campaign of FUD against Linux that lasted ten years (e.g. http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/77174.html).
Then a year later, it was announced that MS would move its DACH headquarters to Munich and almost serendipitously, Munich also declared that it was moving back into Microsoft’s arms for… em… pure bureaucratic reasons: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3006352/munich-it-chief-slams-citys-surprise-decision-to-dump-linux-for-windows
For the love of Pete I don’t remember from whom I heard it first or if I read it somewhere, but at a point Bill Gates was gloating about negotiating with Munich on behalf of Microsoft.
In any case, he never left: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/bill-gates-still-backstage-manages-microsoft
Interesting. I knew the stuff about Munich, and I knew Gates was still a shareholder, but didn’t know he was still so actively involved. Based on that last link, it sounds more like he’ll be telling Nadella to get on a plane and what to say on arrival rather than get on it himself though.
didn’t another german state already try this and fail pretty spectacularly?? cost them WAY more money and then they ended up rolling back to m$??
given that, this is fantastic news! it’s good to see people learn from past failed implementations, hopefully learn from their mistakes, and try again instead of just blaming it on bad software
I’ve been trying to find a source but from what I remember the transition was in maybe Munich and it was going fine.
Microsoft opened a new sales or operation center there and got cozy with the government there as quickly as possible to turn them back into a customer.
EDIT: Here is the LiMux endeavor.
Microsoft had announced in 2013 its willingness to move its German headquarters to Munich in 2016, which according to Reiter though, is unrelated to the criticism they’ve presented against the LiMux project.
They do this every few years, when the contract is up for negotiation, M$ will make a way cheaper option, and they will switch back
I’m holding out hope that discounts wont work this time, because the motivation is different. It used to be about cost, now it’s about digital sovereignty. I won’t bet anything of value, but I can hope.
Inspiration for many more governments!
I have already contacted my, Slovakian government. I should ping them again 😅
I swear to god if this is Schleiswig Holstein again I’m giving it back to Denmark
Edit: of course it is. Ok it’s Sønderjylland again now. Prusssians out.
15mil more in the pockets of politicians as a reward for saving it, lol
So, which distro will they be using?
Hannah Montana.
Amount of copium is insane in comments. Like, people straight up using fate, like it’s a fockin religion, instead of using their head.
Other countries also tried and failed. It’s never brings any profit, instead government usually end up losing shit ton of money. Reason is simple: adoption requires contribution. You need to hire new IT specialist, that knows linux and not windows. You need to do requalification of already existing specialist. You need to adapt software. You need to teach every single focking person how to work with new alternative software. And you need to suffer downtime, cause people still new to linux and it’s software.
Adoption is very hard and those miserable savings on windows licensing is nothing compared to cost of migration. I’m not even saying “hypothetically”, here documented list.
Blind coping will get you nowhere.
This is such a shortsighted take. After the initial hurdle of migration, you’re free of licenses forever. It won’t take long for the savings to match the initial costs, and after that it’s more money in the bank until the Sun explodes.
Not to mention the tiny insignificant issue of a foreign private company having backdoors into your government’s IT infrastructure. A foreign private company headquartered in Trumpistan of all places.
Yeah but you’re missing the point. Them choosing to change despite the massive marketing budget of m$ is what my takeaway would be. Migrations are almost never easy.
Exactly.
This isn’t a decision being made to cut costs, it’s a strategic move because the EU just assessed how badly they’d be screwed if Trump throws a tantrum and forces American tech companies to disrupt services to their governments.
In addition, the EU has strong data privacy laws and US tech companies are resisting compliance (Elon was recently fined 150million, for example).
This has led to several hearings with tech executives who said that they could not guarantee that the data would stay in the EU and they could not guarantee that the data would not be provided to any other country.
Digital privacy laws don’t mean anything if they don’t apply to the major tech companies and they’ve said that they won’t comply.
You missing the point of my comment, not me.
5 million a year would go a long way towards making their open source solutions meet their needs.
Look, people in comments here think that it will be profitable. That it will save shit ton of money out of thin air. That what I call copium.
I did not said “it’s bad” to adopt linux, quite the opposite. What I said is that commenters here operate on a fate, not on a logic and that surprises me.
Upd. Like, you would expect from people on lemmy out of all places, especially in “technology” to be knowledgeable in terms of how IT and business works, but instead it’s like I reading comments of children’s.
That comment does not state that imo. I interpret it as „If they would spend that money on the transitions and advancing the open source projects they consider switching to, that would help the process“. But maybe that’s just a misunderstanding.
That comment does not state that imo.
What do you meant :c
It’s right there, literally in the first sentence:
Amount of copium is insane in comments. Like, people straight up using fate, like it’s a fockin religion, instead of using their head.
Well I was of course talking about the comment you quoted.
5 million a year would go a long way towards making their open source solutions meet their needs.
How is that „using fate instead of using their head“? Germany already has funds in place specifically for open source projects so that’s not so far off the charts (even though the amount would be lower) so what’s your point ?
Edit: And to be more specific the point of somehow being profitable is also not coming through to me on this, since when is open source software profitable except when used by for profit companies ? I can understand the hype, I also know it will be pain for people involved and M$ will do everything to reverse the change possibly leading to even more headaches for said admins etc. as has happened in the past but you can’t finish what you don’t start so I think it’s still good news.
I can only imagine all these bureaucrats with learning issues because something needs to be done differently now🙄
I worked for “business automation” company, mainly as tech support of SAAS solution that target accountants\clerks that works with government documents.
I feel sorry for support guys\system administrators and everyone else involved.
Except for the clerks I guess… I wouldn’t feel sorry for them.
What exactly are you trying to prove with that Wikipedia link? If anything it shows relatively wide adoption of Linux.
Reread my comment then from the start.
No no, I know what you’re implying, I was implying that the link doesn’t prove what you think it does. I’m assuming you fixated on the Munich project, and that is a convoluted story and the Wikipedia entry on that is not up to date. The latest on the Munich project is that they cancelled the switch back to Windows.
Edit: And I can only assume that you were referring to the Munich story because you threw up the link with zero quotations or direct references. If you have a specific interpretation of that Wikipedia article, then you need cite things. What exactly is the “cost of migration”? Is it one million dollars or 50 million? Did it take a weekend to do, or did it bog down entire departments for months at a time? Is that 50 million dollars over budget? How are the immediate costs vs long term savings measured? Because the savings are measured in decades, not single year or several year licensing costs.
I’m not going to do your job for you. You might think that a months or even years long transition progress is unacceptable, but someone like myself who works in IT would see that is within expectations. If you have a point to make, then MAKE IT.
