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Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector

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Re: Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector

#51

Post by diffeomorphism »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #2

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…

The much bigger and more obvious con is interfacing with "everybody else" (e.g. outside the public sector). People assume perfect bug-for-bug compatibility with the dominant software solution. So you also incur long term costs of always ensuring that compatibility.

Hence, the more common compromise is to pay a local company to implement and maintain that infrastructure for you but using the US software.

Re: Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector

#52

Post by theF00l »

esarbe wrote: post #31
incomingpain wrote: post #15

Switzerland is so brilliant. I wish they spoke english, id consider moving there.

Pretty much everyone speaks English in Switzerland. In big[0] cities you can get by with only English. This should not be a reason not to more there. [0] for Swiss values of "big"

My experience was struggling a lot to integrate without German when I lived in Zurich. Then I learnt German and struggled with Swiss German.

Great standard of life but can be isolating for some people. Unless you are happy sticking to the expat bubble, nothing wrong with that.

Re: Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector

#53

Post by rvnx »

treyd wrote: post #33
kenjackson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest con is IMO the most obvious one. What if a third party non-open source product does something that FOSS can’t do or is dramatically behind on? And are companies going really source local maintainers for FOSS versus the standard maintainer? Eg, is Switzerland really not going to use Canonical for supporting Ubuntu because it is British?

Do you have an example of something FOSS can't do?

Photoshop vs Gimp for example

Re: Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector

#54

Post by jraph »

kenjackson wrote: post #35
jraph wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if a third party non-open source product does something that FOSS can’t do or is dramatically behind on? That's almost the best side effect: in a place where open source is mandatory, they will have to fund the missing features and it will be available to everyone, once and for all. If everyone does that, we rapidly get great software, sharing the costs, very efficiently, and it's all open source. The alternat…

This idea works for well funded open source projects - typically funded by Big Tech. But for a given country to do this it seems more likely the functionality is just missed until Big Tech decides they need it. For example let’s take apiece if software everyone on HN hates, Sharepoint. I’ve yet to find any open source alternative that comes close. And while you may hate it, it provides tons of value to local governme…

Many well funded open source projects are not Big Tech. And entities (public or otherwise) do sponsor features in open source software.

I work on one of these projects.

Re: Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector

#55

Post by KronisLV »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #2

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…

> 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.

Didn't that happen in Germany, where they basically did a migration away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice and then basically switched back? Here's a more recent article about something similar that mentions that case: https://www.zdnet.com/article/german-state-ditches-microsoft...

> If some of this sounds familiar, congratulations on having a great memory. Munich, the capital of Bavaria, Germany, switched from Windows to Linux in 2004. That move lasted for a decade before Munich returned to Windows -- in no small part because the mayor wanted Microsoft to move its headquarters to Munich.

Either way, to me it feels like both having that additional bit of options/leverage is a nice thing, as well as using open source in the first place.

I've built systems both with the likes of Oracle and PostgreSQL and while both have some nice features, in most cases I'd lean towards the latter because it's just nicer to use, regardless of whether you need to operate an instance for some environment, launch a local instance or even have short lived test instances that are spun up for your CI pipeline; it's like suddenly your hands are no longer tied up in licensing and layers upon layers of complexity and restrictions. In my eyes, it's the same for using some variety of GNU/Linux on the server side, instead of Windows Server.

That's not to say that tech coming from big orgs itself is the problem, I have nothing against JDK, Java, MySQL, .NET, ASP.NET etc. Rather, it's that permissively licensed solutions with communities around them are usually pretty nice to use. Plus, there's way less friction during development, too., you don't even need to check whether you have the Kendo UI license but instead something reusable is an npm install away.

That said, in regards to established software like Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice, it's likely that there will never be full feature parity, but that's probably not some absolute dealbreaker for most.

Re: Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector

#56

Post by flarzzarp »

Sadly, this article is plain wrong. I've been working in the gov. IT sector in switzerland and reading the headline and article gives a false impression.

The aforementioned law EMBAG does not mandate the use of open source software.

What it does is mandate that software develeoped especially for the federal government needs to be open sourced, unless that is not possible due to licensing issues or national security reasons. The whole swiss administration is microsoft based.

Also, most day-to-day administrative tasks are handled by the cantons (think state) administrations, and they are, as far as I understand, not subject to this law. The federal and cantonal administration are quite separated in switzerland.

All of this happened in november 2023

Re: Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector

#57

Post by aleph_minus_one »

KronisLV wrote: post #55
Rinzler89 wrote: post #2

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…

> 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. Didn't that happen in Germany, where they basically did a migration away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice and then basically switche…

> That said, in regards to established software like Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice, it's likely that there will never be full feature parity, but that's probably not some absolute dealbreaker for most.

At least for finance and insurance industry, the feature differences between Excel and LibreOffice Calc are are deal-breaker (users in these industries are often power users of Excel). I can also easily imagine that the same holds for Powerpoint vs LibreOffice Impress for the consulting industry.

Re: Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector

#58

Post by freetanga »

binary132 wrote: post #38
jamil7 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, maybe. I think in practise, in the case of somewhere like Germany, they realistically just won't implement the hypothetical feature and let productivity of employees drop even further. There is no motivation or reward in the public sector here for anyone to do anything better or more efficiently. I'm maybe overly cynical about the public sector's ability to get anything done here, I would like to be proven…

It seems like maybe you’re assuming that state employees would be the ones building the required features, but I would guess these are simply going to be makework contracts going to (hopefully) local engineering firms.

Funny. I thought “ok, yet another generation of Accenture/TCS/Fujitsu large scale government projects that cost billions and fail to deliver a single thing”

Re: Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector

#59

Post by jamil7 »

freetanga wrote: post #58
binary132 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like maybe you’re assuming that state employees would be the ones building the required features, but I would guess these are simply going to be makework contracts going to (hopefully) local engineering firms.

Funny. I thought “ok, yet another generation of Accenture/TCS/Fujitsu large scale government projects that cost billions and fail to deliver a single thing”

But look! A clickable prototype!

Re: Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector

#60

Post by justin66 »

jraph wrote: post #20
kenjackson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest con is IMO the most obvious one. What if a third party non-open source product does something that FOSS can’t do or is dramatically behind on? And are companies going really source local maintainers for FOSS versus the standard maintainer? Eg, is Switzerland really not going to use Canonical for supporting Ubuntu because it is British?

> What if a third party non-open source product does something that FOSS can’t do or is dramatically behind on? That's almost the best side effect: in a place where open source is mandatory, they will have to fund the missing features and it will be available to everyone, once and for all. If everyone does that, we rapidly get great software, sharing the costs, very efficiently, and it's all open source. The alternat…

> in a place where open source is mandatory, they will have to fund the missing features and it will be available to everyone, once and for all

Or the majority of their users will suffer with substandard products, while highly paid or influential users will get exceptions to the policy so they can use the software they want.

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