Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector

Should be an EU wide mandate at this point, as it's mostly pros with little cons.

Since the options are 1), keep spending EU taxpayer money to boost Microsoft's and other US big-tech market cap, or 2), spend EU taxpayer money on FOSS and local companies implementing and maintaining that FOSS for local infrastructure, then the correct choice seems obvious to me.

The only cons are the short term costs, teething issues and pains of the transition, but that's outweigh by the long term pros once that hill is crossed, the biggest which is tech sovereignty and independence form major tech firms under Uncle Sam's control, and the taxpayer money going to local companies and jobs instead of US.

Ironically, Russia was unaffected by the Crowdstrike incident since they're under sanctions and can't use it, and IIRC they also started switching to Linux for their infrastructure after the war, so maybe it's an interesting case study.

This is great, but I doubt this will ever actually be enforced. At least not without Switzerland dramatically increasing its investment in FOSS.

There are still arguments going on to make sure the entire Swiss Digital National ID (e-ID)[1] code will be open source.

[1] https://github.com/e-id-admin/open-source-community/blob/mai...

The same would apply to assistive technology. Right now, various countries are paying relatively big sums to Freedom Scientific for JAWS licenses. It would be way better for the users if those countries would pay open source devs to work on accessibility for everyone. However, capitalism is preventing this. Resellers would be out of bussiness, so they lobby for the current system to stay as it is.

You can see how it worked it Munich: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

Spoiler alert: it didn’t work well. The world is not perfect and decision makers are greedy.

Edit: I see I am being downvoted. Is there an objective reason for moving back to Microsoft? Is there any objective reason to ditch implemented and working open source software project? As Wikipedia tells most of city computers were successfully migrated. And users were giving positive feedback.