German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#81

Post by INTPenis » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:52 PM UTC

heisenbit wrote: post #15

Much more important: Schools are moving to Office 365 in a rush in face of Covid-19. There are data protection concerns but a crisis can shift priorities so it seems.

Not just schools, what scares me is that healthcare is moving to the cloud.

I know from an insider that one of the largest areas of Sweden, at least one, has been moving to office365. While conscious people inside the very same organisation have been trying to prevent the move of data into the hands of a foreign company.

And at the same time large telcos with a lot of government clients have also moved to office365 but with warnings to their employees that they should avoid storing certain client files in this cloud solution until the legal situation is resolved. WTF

So basically these consultancy companies have a legal requirement not to store client data in a foreign cloud if that client is part of the Swedish government. But at the same time healthcare is moving to the cloud.

I wish I knew more about the legal situation, all I can give you are the observations and musings of a geek.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#82

Post by remir » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

donjoe wrote: post #60

remir wrote: post #43

Windows, Office and Win Server (AD) make a combo that is quite difficult to replace. But if these cities are smart, they would pool their resources together to fund common tools. All the bits and pieces are already here. What is needed is a solid package that can be deployed and maintained easily, with user friendly GUI.

... throw universities and schools into the pool also and you might finally get something which 'just works'. Difficult question: how do you make people in power agree on a solution? Not even universities managed so far to standardize their IT infra. Germany is a country where one city orders would new trains which would eventually crash into the next city's platform due to different platform dimensions [0]... [0] ht…

Difficult question: how do you make people in power agree on a solution? Not even universities managed so far to standardize their IT infra.

Most universities probably already standardized on Microsoft's ecosystem of product and solutions.

Question is: why change for something open source?

Answer: licenses for MS are costing a fortune and privacy considerations.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#83

Post by occamrazor » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

dunefox wrote: post #66

bostonpete wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Seems unreasonable to expect that every city can manage their own secure data store...

Because very likely that would be another US company again. The whole point is to become less reliant on US companies.

There are German cloud providers (DT, 1&1, Hetzner, Exoscale are the best known)

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#84

Post by brmgb » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

artonge wrote: post #59

remir wrote: post #43

Windows, Office and Win Server (AD) make a combo that is quite difficult to replace. But if these cities are smart, they would pool their resources together to fund common tools. All the bits and pieces are already here. What is needed is a solid package that can be deployed and maintained easily, with user friendly GUI.

Can you explain the difference with openldap ? I have never used AD, and I am satisfied by openldap, I mean once I understood how to configure it...

> I mean once I understood how to configure it...

AD is a misnomer. It's not simply a directory. It not only does what OpenLDAP does but also what Kerberos does.

Openldap is aweful to configure by the way. The documentation is terrible, sometimes lacking important piece of information. I remember TLS being a pain to setup. Actually I think everything having to do with authentication (PAM, OpenLDAP, Kerberos, nss) on Linux is a pain to setup.

By comparison, AD is fairly nice.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#85

Post by hitpointdrew » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

dunefox wrote: post #14

shadowtree wrote: post #13

Does Desktop OS matter anymore? So much is running in "browsers" now, even the SpaceX astronaut controls were Electron. The cloud provider is where it's at. AWS, Azure, GCloud ... and nothing from Europe.

Yes, it does. I don't want to have city documents in some cloud.

> city documents

You realize that AWS/AZURE ect. all have GOVERNMENT contracts right? They have special infrastructure and portals just for government customers.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#86

Post by bobthepanda » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

dewey wrote: post #48

andai wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been wondering about this. Competition breeds innovation and all that, but in the end, aren't we ending up with a whole lot of repeated effort for little benefit?

I guess it's a whole lot easier to repeat the effort (Even if it seems wasteful) than getting multiple countries / governments / languages and funding situations organized around one project. Probably just easier to do it on your own and if at some point one of the distributions is gaining some momentum maybe then others will adopt it and send patches upstream.

Keep in mind that the whole motivation of these is "we don't trust outside group X"; these governments have no reason to believe that OSS isn't compromised, and one of the easiest ways to know everything is to do a lot of the work yourself.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#87

Post by sq_ » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

hsitz wrote: post #76

sq_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely can't blame them for being distrustful. Seems like it would probably be easy enough for Microsoft to hide extra data in the telemetry that Windows 10 already sends home if the NSA or someone were to force them to, and history seems to inform us that US companies have little choice but to comply with such orders.

Just curious, what "history" are you talking about? Do you have some reference links?

Mostly just referring to PRISM and the like. Also, over the years, we've seen a few instances where big companies have publicly fought National Security Letters or gag orders, so I think it's a safe guess that plenty of other stuff like that goes on behind the scenes without ever coming to the public's attention.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#88

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

pphysch wrote: post #62

axegon_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, aware of those... But... I wouldn't really use most of the countries on your list to set an example for the rest of the world, if you know what I mean...

Plenty of other countries have faced US aggression, or are in danger of such.

[deleted]

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#89

Post by iammyIP » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

shadowtree wrote: post #13

Does Desktop OS matter anymore? So much is running in "browsers" now, even the SpaceX astronaut controls were Electron. The cloud provider is where it's at. AWS, Azure, GCloud ... and nothing from Europe.

Yes it matters. No, the cloud provider is not where it's at. No, the SpaceX Astronaut controls aren't electron.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#90

Post by AdmiralAsshat » Wed, Jun 03, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

lrem wrote: post #41

BossingAround wrote: post #34

Again? I love Germany, but I honestly can't tell whether this is an old news brought back to life, or whether it's a new story at a glance. Deja vu anyone?

I believe the root issue here is that Germany has more than one city.

This is exactly why Germany will never achieve widespread adoption. All the citizens wish to go and form their own cities, reinventing the wheel and duplicating effort. They should abandon all their smaller cities and focus their resources on a single city.