221–230 of 402 posts
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Volunteer firefighters.
At least in Germany, they are not professionals working unpaid. They are just volunteers with other jobs. Not really comparable.
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I haven't seen a particular productivity boost anywhere from regular office + sharepoint and office365. I also haven't noted a productivity difference between sharepoint (which office 365 really is) and other content management platforms. Ironically the only place where office 365 offered a boost is in the linux world really. You don't even need a local suite office to open msoffice documents.
Most non-technical people have a pattern of work. They know how to do their job because it’s been repeated over years. This change will alter many of those patterns. Even the simplest things like text editor or using a command line will be disruptive. The support staff is going to be overwhelmed.
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And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US? Companies buy Office 365 subscriptions so they can focus on their main business and don't want to think about their office solution and want something that JustWorks which is already compatible with what everyone else uses. They have a business to run and money to makes, so spending extra tim…
You just do it like USA does: if you want to do business with the public sector, you must not rely on a foreign cloud.
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It’s kind of a bummer that there’s a bunch of these separate OSS initiatives in Spain, France, Germany and a few other countries.. Instead of everyone rolling their own subvariant of Nextcloud, Matrix, LibreOffice etc, imagine if there was an EU mandate set up and some serious money was budgeted to it. You’d get a triple multiplier of more budget, less duplication of effort, and a self-reinforcing cycle where more us…
But isn’t this the very centralisation we’re trying to avoid?
Did not work well in Munich, my hometown, in 2004. Hope the lessons have been learned. https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/
It's a sad story. My spouse is working for the city in some legal department and she was happily using LiMux for years with no big issues. The main problem was that the IT department was understaffed and underpaid... One reason for their switch might be that Microsoft thought about opening up a big office here. Another reason might have been the study conducted by Accenture [1], who have some close ties to Microsoft.…
I worked on LiMux in the developer team at the start of my career. HN is a village, lol. And the situation is more complex, and long enough has passed for me to detail out what actually were the problems without revealing anything top secret...
1. most of the desktop hardware was OLD. Like really fucking old. We're talking of systems with 256M of RAM. Anything would send these into swapping. But instead of blaming the finance department for not upgrading the computers, everyone was more than happy to blame LiMux because many people hoped that enough blaming would bring Windows back eventually (as it did...)
2. A lot of the hundreds of sites that the city of Munich has weren't connected to fast fiber, but via 10/10 SDSL (or slower) links. That's enough for Active Directory to work, and most sites had cache servers on-site to make life bearable, but still: everything was SLOW for a lot of users. From what I hear through the grape vines, that has changed at least for everything inside the Mittlerer Ring demarcation as M-net/SWM built out FTTB across the entire area, but some sites more remote still are on crap links.
3. LibreOffice, or rather OpenOffice was shit back then - I was there right when the fork happened. (And from what I hear, it's not gotten much better... developing an office suite actually requires funding which barely anyone wants to provide)
4. Many of the special applications ("Fachverfahren") were only available for Windows. Some (e.g. SAP) were available as Java apps (with all the problems JVM has, particularly being a memory hog), a few were available as Linux applications but usually in rpm format and not deb which made every update a PITA with alien (LiMux was Ubuntu based), but the utter majority were Windows-only. Some could be made to work with WINE, but some (particularly those interfacing with proprietary hardware such as specially hardened printers) still required a few Windows workstations here and there.
5. We were fucking understaffed. Like 4 FTEs working on packaging and development, but a whole externally sourced test department (that was, to be fair, really needed to catch regressions, and there were a lot of them). But each and every single one of my colleagues were absolute experts and a joy to work with and learn from. Without them, the situation would have been much worse.
6. Political interference. Not just from the city government and its bullshit, but especially from the entrenched "micro fiefdoms" in the administration. No one wanted to cede control to us or the central IT@M organization that was being formed when I was there, instead they all wanted their own decentralized teams (dIKA). Some wanted to opt out of LiMux entirely, and had good reasons for that (chiefly, their applications not running on LiMux).
7. Dieter fucking Reiter, the successor of Christian Ude as mayor after the 2014 elections, as well as the Social Democrat-Conservative government that came into power with him. Ude, for all he turned wrong after he left office, was a staunch protector of LiMux, and we all knew what would come once he left, and so it inevitably happened. And that's just one thing in the long list of reasons to despise Reiter.
The germans have been tinkering with policies mandating non-cloud dependent products for a while wondering if this is a start of it actually getting implemented on a large scale or if the delay attempts will remain successful elsewhere across the region. If this is a start of an actual migration away from cloud dependence, it's a matter of time before windows(which is as cloud dependent as office those days for enter…
Do the americans exclusively use MS Office in government computers?
Local and state govts usually follow suit, as it makes sense that what works for the Fed will work for them. But I've seen plenty of open source softwares being used in various municipal and state offices. LibreOffice and CentOS would probably be the most common alternatives.
So, to answer your question, no it's not exclusively Windows. It's almost exclusively Windows in the Federal govt as there are mandates there, but otherwise it's a hodgepodge of what works/can be afforded throughout all other levels of govt.
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You just do it like USA does: if you want to do business with the public sector, you must not rely on a foreign cloud.
What are the alternatives. Like, really. I get it: Hetzner and OVH exist. But what are the alternatives to AWS, GCP, Azure?
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While your small projects with next to zero market share fight it out between themselves, Microsoft keeps swallowing more market share making more billions. Who do you think is the real winner of your sandpit fight?
Until you can bribe officials to the tune of billions the quality of your software won't matter. The only reason why ms keeps winning is that it keeps bribing.
MS bribery is a factor, but if we use it as an excuse to ignore our own faults as a community then we're just screwing ourselves over.
It was the top line item for the quarter, beating out health insurance line related line items.