Excellent, good for them! I don't understand why other governments don't follow suit, or why people are opposed to it. There might be some valid cons about requiring the use of FOSS (e.g. LibreOffice vs MS Office), but the part about requiring government sponsored code to be released as open source is clearly good for governments. Having the code freely open is good leverage against greed and good insurance for vendor failures.
Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software
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Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software
#12[dupe]
Some discussion a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40852084
and this week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047172
Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software
#13Does that also cover public healthcare ?
Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software
#14It’s only responsible to use tax money in ways the resources used revert to its internal markets as much as possible. What good is Swiss tax money that creates jobs in Redmond?
I think this is probably not seeing the forest for the trees. If using LibreOffice and NextCloud (or whatever) ends up costing more than ~€40/headcount/month in admin, hosting and productivity, then the Swiss citizens are losing out on this decision.
Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software
#15Excellent, good for them! I don't understand why other governments don't follow suit, or why people are opposed to it. There might be some valid cons about requiring the use of FOSS (e.g. LibreOffice vs MS Office), but the part about requiring government sponsored code to be released as open source is clearly good for governments. Having the code freely open is good leverage against greed and good insurance for vendo…
Probably makes it harder to outsource inflated projects to contractors and makes them more publicly liable because now the public can audit them.
Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software
#16It’s only responsible to use tax money in ways the resources used revert to its internal markets as much as possible. What good is Swiss tax money that creates jobs in Redmond?
I think this is probably not seeing the forest for the trees. If using LibreOffice and NextCloud (or whatever) ends up costing more than ~€40/headcount/month in admin, hosting and productivity, then the Swiss citizens are losing out on this decision.
But it'd be Swiss IT guys getting paid, right? That money goes back into Switzerland.
Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software
#17[deleted]
Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software
#18Excellent, good for them! I don't understand why other governments don't follow suit, or why people are opposed to it. There might be some valid cons about requiring the use of FOSS (e.g. LibreOffice vs MS Office), but the part about requiring government sponsored code to be released as open source is clearly good for governments. Having the code freely open is good leverage against greed and good insurance for vendo…
There’s no workable Excel alternative, FOSS, OSS or paid. You can deal with the word processor and presentation software, but Excel is alone in a class for itself.
Also not sure how you deal with LDAP/Kerberos - is samba good enough for large deployments?
Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software
#19Really curious to see what turns up. A lot of stuff like geo-data and tools [1], as well as meteorological tools and models [2] were already partly public. Having worked for the federal administration and using their IT at least a few weeks yearly, the rest is mostly Microsoft and SAP software, or classified software that they can’t and won’t release.
In Switzerland, a lot of public services are located at the « Cantonal » (i.e. state) or « Communal » (i.e. city) level, which AFAIK isn’t affected by this.
[1] https://github.com/swisstopo [2] https://github.com/MeteoSwiss
Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software
#20This seems like something almost every government would have already done. Open source software means they aren't locked into a single vendor and can hire anybody they wish (including their own internal developers) to modify their software to meet their needs. With proprietary software, a company like Microsoft or Apple can change your software whenever they want and however they want even if that isn't in your interest.
From the perspective of a consumer, being able to hire your own developers to modify your software is basically useless. But this is very useful if you're the government and have relatively unlimited funds taxed from your subjects.