61–70 of 383 posts
When I did a 4 year CS degree at a UK university in the 1980s I don't think I touched anything from Microsoft for the entire time I was there!
Like yeah if you have a lot of pre-existing infrastructure migration can be a pain but MS is not in anyway necessary.
For one reasono another im not seeing any of the currently OSS solutions like LibreOffice/OpenOffice.orgwould not gain much traction and will remain niche even as the MS/Goog options remain entrenched. The path taken by Blender(propreiety initially to open source) to reach industry lead would to me seem the most viable to make a dent. In that i think best cost effective options like WPSOffice or Corel Suite , would b…
at work I don't need MS at all. It's just used because the IT department prefers it to manage things. I wish we could just use Fedora or Ubuntu.
I can guarantee some dutch banks are also locked into MS. Maybe not the big ones that actually need to care about tech, but the ones that don't care about tech went head-first into Microsoft Suite these last few years. Its' an awful sight. What's worse is that there's no argument for this extra cost (apart from maybe vendor lock-in), and now no one knows who to blame for the big bill that comes in every month.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity It really needs to be, though, that's kind of the crux of it. Federate or die off, it's time to get rid of old tribal thinking. We're all Europeans.
I can't fathom why you would give one parlement all the power. This is the root issue of America right now, individual states have less and less power every year.
There's no such position or a branch in the EU. None of the three can make any sort of change of their own.
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"Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity. Yes, we have European Union which helps a lot, but it is not complete (and certainly wasn't in the time when Microsofts and Googles of this world started), making that all-important initial scaling way more difficult than it is in the US.
if we talk beaurocracy EU is very well consolidated: "you can't do that", everyone says consistently.
I as an European get the feeling people usually hate on the EU just because it dares to interfere with local legislation. But that's its job. And usually the EU interferes for a good reason. Usually because member countries falling back to only thinking about themselves and forgetting that we Europeans are in this shit together.
> you can't do that
It's good that you can't call sparkling wine that's not from the Champagne "Champagne". It's good that you can't screw over flight passengers the way they do in the US. It's good that you can't annoy customers with phone power sockets that change with every model.
When I hear about actual examples of excess bureaucracy, it's usually on the country-level.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity. Yes, we have European Union which helps a lot, but it is not complete (and certainly wasn't in the time when Microsofts and Googles of this world started), making that all-important initial scaling way more difficult than it is in the US.
> "Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity It really needs to be, though, that's kind of the crux of it. Federate or die off, it's time to get rid of old tribal thinking. We're all Europeans.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Short answer: to Google it's not so bad but it's not like the legal risks are any different from Microsoft. And to the rest -- yes it is very hard. Universities need cloud storage with online collaboration and a fully functioning office suite. LibreOffice doesn't work because it's desktop-only and has no collaboration. However, there's an online-collaboration fork called Collabora Online, and you can use something li…
How much is the typical dutch university paying MS/Google? Maybe 10k students x 200EUR/year = 2 million EUR/year. Twenty universities come together to move to make Collabora+NextCloud work for them. That's 40 million EUR/year. How much do they need to actually spend on developers + infrastructure to make it happen?
At this point all tech is big business. Microsoft or Apple. Azure or AWS. Google Apps or Office. Even dealing with Red Hat feels like you’re dealing with big tech. And the thing is 99.99% of the time everything works just fine. I think these governments often struggle with moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.
But then a week later everyone has adjusted and the motivation to fix it is forgotten.