Microsoft are deep into the government with exchange and Active Directory with most being migrated to Microsoft365 and Azure.
Add in MS Teams, SharePoint, MS SQL, 30 years of business rules living in old excel macros that ends up running the entire company.
Windows enterprise licences would be a tiny part of their spend and far too costly to mitigate away from. Most large corporations are virtualising old windows version just to keep their existing legacy apps runnings.
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 36•8 months ago
I am a pretty big fan of Open Source and have used Linux myself since the early 90’s. Most governments are not going to save money switching to Open Source. At least not within say the term of a politician or an election cycle. Probably the opposite.
This kind of significant shift costs money. Training costs. Consultants. Perhaps hardware. It would not be at all surprising if there are custom software solutions in place that need to be replaced. The dependencies and complexities may be significant.
There are quite likely to be savings over the longer term. The payback may take longer than you think though.
I DO believe governments should adopt Open Source. Not just for cost through. One reason is control and a reduction of influence ( corruption ). Another is so that public investment results in a public good. Custom solutions could more often be community contributions.
The greatest savings over time may actually be a reduction in forced upgrades on vendor driven timelines. Open Source solutions that are working do not always need investment. The investment could be in keeping it compatible longer. At the same time, it is also more economic to keep Open Source up to date. Again, it is more about control.
Where there may be significant cost savings is a reduction in the high costs of “everything as a service” product models.
Much more important than Open Source ( for government ) are open formats. First, if the government uses proprietary software, they expect the public to use it as well and that should not be a requirement. Closed formats can lead to restrictions on what can be built on top of these formats and these restrictions need to be eliminated as well. Finally, open formats are much, much more likely to be usable in the future. There is no guarantee that anything held in any closed format can be retrieved in the future, even if the companies that produced them still exist. Can even Microsoft read MultiPlan documents these days? How far back can PageMaker files be read? Some government somewhere is sitting on multimedia CD projects that can no longer be decoded.
What about in-house systems that were written in proprietary languages or on top of proprietary databases? What about audio or video in a proprietary format? Even if the original software is available, it may not run on a modern OS. Perhaps the OS needed is no longer available. Maybe you have the OS too but licenses cannot be purchased.
Content and information in the public record has to remain available to the public.
The most important step is demanding LibreOffice ( or other open ) formats, AV1, Opus, and AVIF. For any custom software, it needs to be possible to build it with open compilers and tools. Web pages need to follow open standards. Archival and compression formats need to be open.
After all that, Open Source software ( including the OS ) would be nice. It bothers me less though. At that lobby, it is more about ROI and Total Cost of Ownership. Sometimes, proprietary software will still make sense.
Most proprietary suppliers actually do stuff for the fees they charge. Are governments going to be able to support their Open Source solutions? Do they have the expertise? Can they manage the risks? Consultants and integrators may be more available, better skilled, amd less expensive on proprietary systems. Even the hiring process can be more difficult as local colleges and other employers are producing employees with expertise in proprietary solutions but maybe not the Open Source alternatives. There is a cost for governments to take a different path from private enterprise. How do you quantify those costs?
Anyway, the path to Open Source may not be as obvious, easy, or inexpensive as you think. It is a good longer term goal though and we should be making progress towards it.
Good comment. I’m pretty sure “public money, public code” used to be a slogan a while back. It didn’t get a lot of traction but it resonated with me.
You would have to calculate it assuming that msft wouldn’t deliberately make the process more difficult and impractical, which they have demonstrated they are willing to do.
(Refer to the section labeled “The Microsoft Playbook”: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html)
I believe the question is missing somehow the main points… even if the switch cost the double or triple there are several strategic advantages that should take into account:
- use Linux allow to growth the number of high specialized professional workers, investing on local resources;
- invest in a local network of specialized companies, instead of financing the silicon valley with ours public money;
- be less dependent by abroad technologies, get a major control of the system used;
These are few that come to my mind…
What would be really interesting to know is the percentage of the investment that stay in the region/country following a linux-based/opensource IT infrastructure for public bodies vs the current closed M$|OSX paradigm.
I agree. A lot of profits wouldn’t be cash saved, for one taxes that you aren’t losing to multinational corporations headquartered in Ireland or Cyprus.
Cybersecurity costs would also likely go down due to most malware being exploited isn’t targeting desktop Linux.
Cybersecurity costs would also likely go down due to most malware being exploited isn’t targeting desktop Linux.
Which is going to change once any sort of widespread adoption happens.
But at least in my circles, malware really isn’t that big of a deal in security. Phishing is where the danger is these days, where the costs occur.
I hear it didn’t go well in the German government, something about the cost of training and skyrocketing tech support calls for basic tasks.
That sounds like a bad transition plan. For sure there’s some lessons to learn from that experience.
They seem to be pushing for it still. Did you hear about that grant the German government gave to gnome?
One of them main reasons for that, I think, is how the average non-tech computer user perceives UI/UX, when they have been exposed to only a single type of interface for most of their lives (most probably Windows).
And even though they tend to pick up different UIs in mobile phones fairly quickly, that seems to not be the case for computers.
Back that up with earlier versions of middle-school computers studies in being mostly like:
- How to print a file in Microsoft Word?
- How to copy a file to USB drive? (with the implicit - using Explorer on Windows XP)
And you have most of the population thinking that’s the only way to do it. That was the case with me until I learned programming.
Tbh, most people above a curtain age struggle with even that.
Well, of course one can’t expect someone with 0 exposure to similar stuff in their learnable period to be able to pick up those things. Just one of the limitations of the human brain.
On the other hand, people who tend to be more imaginative would probably be able to do better in that regard.
The Germans also fell prey to Microsoft telling them that they would give them all the free copies of Windows they might need and build a new facility providing a ton of jobs in their area if they would abandon the Linux thing.
The city in question also built their own distro based on an older version of an existing distro rather than going from off the shelf.
It’s shameful that I feel the need to preface this by saying that I’ve used Linux for 26 years now:
The consensus is that it’s a massive cost increase rather than savings.
Well, I would argue that depends very much on the basis of your calculations. Closed source software means public services are held hostage after a company winning a contract. In Norway some Finnish company won a contract for some digital system in the health services and later wanted them to ship all their computers to Finland so that they could update their software. In a paradigm were governments commited to Linux and open source software, there would most likely be a lot less overhead in adapting and developing solutions for Linux.
I actually agree with you, under communism we could run public services on open source software no problem.
When the externalities of training people to use that software, integrating with outside systems, using state power to influence standards&norms and contributing back to the development only exist on the balance sheet of the switch though, it’s not possible.
The problem from my pov is, who is getting what support for ms? I just don’t see it.
I used to be okay at using their stuff,
most of the people i’ve every worked with (in the public sector) did a less-than-average job of using the software.
They got by, now it’s worse with office365 and sharrepoint and web-apps and shit like that everything has become extremely infuriating.Whenever we have issues it seems that more money gets earmarked for more new microsoft products, the new shit will solve our problems.
Oh, except the budget for “developers” on that new thing is spent so we’re perpetually “waiting until next development cycle”.The only things we have that are reliable are tools we build ourselves in python, SQL and so on - and we just have to support thm ourselves. We’re not “developers” or anything mystical like that, but it’s the only way to actually get stuff done that helps us work better.
Who is out there having a good experience with MS and where does all this support go? I’m genuinely curious.
Ultimately none of this matters once MS based software has won some sort of auction for a contract (thanks Thatcher). Vendor lock-in is problematic in a lot of cases with a multiplier of damage based on the size of the entity wrapped in it’s web.
The city administration of Munich switched to Linux, migrated all data and users, trained them etc. for millions of Euros, and then eventually switched back some years later since staff productivity was way down, and users didn’t feel comfortable in the OS environment.
You can’t enforce a change. Linux is great, especially so for tech enthusiasts, but the average (or probably below average) user might have a hard time to adjust.
And when performance is measured in workforce efficiency, then you have to accept that it’s simply not suited for every environment.
The switch back to Windows was not because of vad productivity. They switched back when the new Major got a visit from the microsoft CEO.
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-microsoft-linux-verwaltung-1.5562006?reduced=true
The problem with that is a few years is a bit short to get real benefits out of it. And the Wikipedia article contradicts the statement that productivity went down. Actually issues and errors went down, half the workforce was alright with it and they saved tens of millions of Euros. And then they cancelled it. That decision wasn’t backed by technical or factual reasons at all. Many people said they were fine with Linux. Issues were for example that they had old and outdated computers. As a reason to switch back they claimed: sync to mobile phones had issues (…as if government workforce syncs their calendar to their mobile phones…) and these were issues with the groupware suite. Nothing had anything to do with Linux, productivity or the people who sat in front of the computers and actually had to use it. There were quite some benefits and from the technical side things were going well despite admins not being backed by their superiors and the city. They did a final study which contains quite some / mostly dubious statements, and Microsoft also was involved in the switching back.
You CAN enforce a change. Sure, change is always hard in the beginning. But we do it all the time. The story of LiMux is more: You can destroy anything if you really want to. And politics likes to twist things so it suites their narrative. (And lobbyism is a thing and Microsoft is better at it than the Linux community.)
Sounds like very poor management since everytime a business company switches system infrastructure, the end-users will receive courses. I was working in a factory which changed the automation system and every end-user spent 4+4 hrs in the lecture room and after 1 month of use they had again 4 hrs advanced use cases lecture.
After just 6 months every worker said the new system is easier and better, which first seemed to be impossible transfer.
I agree. And for most end users they are just clicking buttons or accessing web based applications where the OS doesn’t play into “needing to switch”
Interesting!
From my experience as an executive I recon they haven‘t factored in the side effects like vendor lock-in, customizability and application speed of changes. Those are pretty hefty sums over years/decades.
What gets me is that militaries use Windows, including North Korea
Watch the movie “zeitgeist moving forward” and learn why they don’t and why life sucks.
I’m sure I’m going to get made fun of for this post.