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US government’s reliance on Microsoft means the company gets a free pass

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Re: US government’s reliance on Microsoft means the company gets a free pass

#21

Post by the_snooze »

smt88 wrote: post #11
mewse-hn wrote: post #5

Here's a radical idea: One government worker sending a document to another government worker should not involve a proprietary, for-profit data format. With a hardcopy paper document this would obviously be unacceptable, but since digitization and software eating the world, we pay our fees to Microsoft and go about our merry way. I'm middle-aged and tired, I'm not going to fight this fight anymore. Maybe some day legi…

Of all the things to be upset about here, this should be low on the list. Microsoft Office documents haven't been proprietary for a long time. The formats are publicly-documented and Microsoft maintains open-source libraries that read/write them. They're all XML-based and unobfuscated (beyond their convoluted design). There are also many FOSS applications, including LibreOffice, that are perfectly fine as replacement…

>There are also many FOSS applications, including LibreOffice, that are perfectly fine as replacements for Microsoft Office.

From my own experience dealing with MS Office-based government organizations, this is absolutely false. Sure, LibreOffice can read and write DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files that are nominally interoperable with MS Office. But more often than not, MS Office mangles the formatting of LibreOffice-generated files. For example, text sizes, fonts, and element alignments in PPTX files get thrown off noticeably.

As another reply mentions, there's this nominal open-source standard. But the de facto standard is the MS Office implementation. I have to use MS Office instead of LibreOffice to eliminate the risk of document mangling when I send files over to the government people in charnge of my funding.

Re: US government’s reliance on Microsoft means the company gets a free pass

#22

Post by snowpid »

ankushnarula wrote: post #9

It is a sad state of affairs that the most technologically advanced government in history is incapable of rolling its own in-house tech. Taxpayers deserve better.

Estonia does, because well... policy wise the US is not functioning very well. (Well various German goverments have their own inhouse tech, but kind of get the critic of German goverment lack of digitalisation)

Re: US government’s reliance on Microsoft means the company gets a free pass

#23

Post by exitzer0 »

Until we sort out the whole idea that it is OK for the US intelligence communitity to use Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, N-other big tech companies to act as their data collection services. They will all continue to basically do whatever they want including jeopardizing our national security with their plainly stated profit motives.

It isn't that Microsoft does not care at all about security it is just that they see it as some business that they can/must make 40-50% margin on like the rest of their operations.[aka outsource it all to countries where folks have fake credentials]

Re: US government’s reliance on Microsoft means the company gets a free pass

#24

Post by jsnell »

> "We are committed to adapting to the evolving threat landscape and partnering across industry and government to defend against these growing and sophisticated global threats"

> “committed to secure by design and secure by default.”

> “As an industry leader we must be accountable for the security of our products and services.”

Wow, that sure is a lot of commitment and accountability! I'm not seeing much in the way of consequences for failing to meet those commitments though, and obviously there is absolutely no accountability. What's the value of a commitment that you can just fail to meet with impunity again?

This almost reads like all those tech company CEOs taking full responsibility for layoffs last year.

Re: US government’s reliance on Microsoft means the company gets a free pass

#25

Post by ckcheng »

lapetitejort wrote: post #12
scarface_74 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a first approximation, every word processor can open Word documents including open source ones.

Is that a result of an open standard, or from constantly reverse engineering whatever change Microsoft makes?

I think open standard?

Download is here? https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...

MS made it open because...

> More than a year after being asked by the European Union to standardize their Office 2003 XML formats, Microsoft submitted 2,000 pages of documentation for a new file format to the Ecma International consortium for it to be made into an open standard. [1]

The competing OpenDocument Format was standardized first though [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

Re: US government’s reliance on Microsoft means the company gets a free pass

#26

Post by ankushnarula »

generic92034 wrote: post #20
ankushnarula wrote: post #9

It is a sad state of affairs that the most technologically advanced government in history is incapable of rolling its own in-house tech. Taxpayers deserve better.

Are the taxpayers willing to pay higher taxes for IC government employees receiving Microsoft level salaries?

I expected this question - the answer as it stands is hell no. And who can blame us for being skeptical.

But as a taxpayer, I’d be very open to those salaries IF government IT was overhauled and run like a competent and agile tech startup, unencumbered by politics and red tape - at least to bootstrap some initital momentum.

Longer term, we need something like a “Tech Corps”, akin to a branch of the military, where new recruits are trained in tech bootcamps, and then deployed to one of the thousands of government departments that require resources for their projects/processes. Ideally, these roles should be viewed as an honorable monastic vocation, not a bureaucratic or political career.

Re: US government’s reliance on Microsoft means the company gets a free pass

#27

Post by butlike »

mewse-hn wrote: post #5

Here's a radical idea: One government worker sending a document to another government worker should not involve a proprietary, for-profit data format. With a hardcopy paper document this would obviously be unacceptable, but since digitization and software eating the world, we pay our fees to Microsoft and go about our merry way. I'm middle-aged and tired, I'm not going to fight this fight anymore. Maybe some day legi…

If only there was a separate arm of the government dedicated to sending and receiving communiqué. You could also use it to send _citizen's_ communiqué as well!

Re: US government’s reliance on Microsoft means the company gets a free pass

#28

Post by delfinom »

the_snooze wrote: post #21
smt88 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the things to be upset about here, this should be low on the list. Microsoft Office documents haven't been proprietary for a long time. The formats are publicly-documented and Microsoft maintains open-source libraries that read/write them. They're all XML-based and unobfuscated (beyond their convoluted design). There are also many FOSS applications, including LibreOffice, that are perfectly fine as replacement…

>There are also many FOSS applications, including LibreOffice, that are perfectly fine as replacements for Microsoft Office. From my own experience dealing with MS Office-based government organizations, this is absolutely false. Sure, LibreOffice can read and write DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files that are nominally interoperable with MS Office. But more often than not, MS Office mangles the formatting of LibreOffice-gener…

Print PowerPoint to PDF.

And hope that both of you are using Adobe lol

Or make your presentations as a website and hope their browser follows the same standards, they don't have bad extensions or security policies setup that may break it too.

Can't really win in human friendly days interchange, because all this crap gets layered on due to humans having their own things going on.

Re: US government’s reliance on Microsoft means the company gets a free pass

#29

Post by [deleted] »

generic92034 wrote: post #20
ankushnarula wrote: post #9

It is a sad state of affairs that the most technologically advanced government in history is incapable of rolling its own in-house tech. Taxpayers deserve better.

Are the taxpayers willing to pay higher taxes for IC government employees receiving Microsoft level salaries?

[deleted]

Re: US government’s reliance on Microsoft means the company gets a free pass

#30

Post by linguae »

generic92034 wrote: post #20
ankushnarula wrote: post #9

It is a sad state of affairs that the most technologically advanced government in history is incapable of rolling its own in-house tech. Taxpayers deserve better.

Are the taxpayers willing to pay higher taxes for IC government employees receiving Microsoft level salaries?

1. How many software engineers are necessary for the federal government to build its own office software, or at the very least contribute to open-source projects such as LibreOffice? Depending on the size of the team, this may be a drop in the bucket compared to the federal government's multi-trillion dollar budget, even if the developers made Microsoft-level salaries. Let's make a very liberal estimate: suppose there were a team of 20 engineers dedicated to contributing to LibreOffice, and each engineer costs $400,000 in salary and overhead. The total is $8 million per year. When spread out over a population of 333 million, that's less than 2.5 cents per person. Now compare that $8 million per year to the cost of Microsoft Office licenses.

2. I consider myself a limited government proponent, but even if government were cut down to the bone, there is still a need for the government to maintain in-house software. Just imagine the internal software that the military and the IRS has, for example. The Library of Congress probably has very interesting software for helping manage its collection. It is conceivable for the federal government to build and maintain office software to aid its operations.

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