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Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software

tomshardware.com

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Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software

#21

Post by shrimp_emoji »

baq wrote: post #18
mrwyz wrote: post #11

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 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?

FreeOffice PlanMaker is an Excel clone for Linux and Mac. Not sure what corner cases it doesn't cover though.

Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software

#22

Post by shrimp_emoji »

rowanG077 wrote: post #7
danihh wrote: post #5

[flagged]

This comment is especially brain dead in the wake of crowdstrike. Brought to you by two multi billion dollar companies.

To me, software in the 2000s was better than any software today.

Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software

#23

Post by AmericanChopper »

medstrom wrote: post #16
AmericanChopper wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well it's either getting a positive RoI or not, if you just want to give Swiss people some tax revenue back, why not just give them a tax cut? Losing productivity is money that's just being thrown away, even if you ignore all the additional operating costs, I don't think you'd have to lose much productivity to make up the difference. I'm not sure what the average pay of Swiss civil servants is, but I can't imagine one standard E5 license (~€40/month) is far off an hours work.

Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software

#26

Post by rowanG077 »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #22
rowanG077 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is especially brain dead in the wake of crowdstrike. Brought to you by two multi billion dollar companies.

To me, software in the 2000s was better than any software today.

I certainly don't miss the blue screens.

Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software

#27

Post by panick21_ »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #23
medstrom wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it'd be Swiss IT guys getting paid, right? That money goes back into Switzerland.

Well it's either getting a positive RoI or not, if you just want to give Swiss people some tax revenue back, why not just give them a tax cut? Losing productivity is money that's just being thrown away, even if you ignore all the additional operating costs, I don't think you'd have to lose much productivity to make up the difference. I'm not sure what the average pay of Swiss civil servants is, but I can't imagine on…

First, I am a Swiss developer so that's my perspective.

Because long term if we invest in domestic ability to support, debug and improve software is a benefit. Getting actual control over the software deployed, rather then just what Microsoft want's you to get.

Switzerland is behind in Digitization, and having an increase amount of open software to interact and build with makes a hell of a lot of sense. A you do digitization, every part of the software from every deparment needs to interact with every other software. Having this stuff be open source based on open standards, supported by local developers who can make this happen is vital.

We should not just hand our IT infrastructure to Microsoft and Oracle, just as we are not handing of our railway system to Virgin (looking at you Britain).

Of course if its just about LibreOffice, there is no point, we need a much more systematic, wide-reaching long term digitization plan, and open source must be a big part of that.

I frankly don't care if short term it costs a bit more,

Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software

#29

Post by kkfx »

baq wrote: post #18
mrwyz wrote: post #11

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 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?

Hem... I fail to see a single reasons to use a spreadsheet or create slides in PowerPoint alike software actually...

We can compute easily in R, Python, Clojure, also with some wrappers from Jupyter to R-Studio to Clerk for those who want it, personally I present in org-mode (dslide) with easy and no extra overhead. Maybe it's about time to teach administrative people how to use a computer...

Re: Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software

#30

Post by hulitu »

bdw5204 wrote: post #20

This 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 inter…

> This seems like something almost every government would have already done.

Yes, thank god we have legal corruption aka lobby. /s

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