this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
314 points (90.7% liked)
Technology
59030 readers
3175 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As someone in German Government who has written a thesis on OSS in government:
Happens regularly, on a small scale, but almost always eventually leads to a rollback to Windows. People are discontent with the solutions on Linux since they have to get used to something else, and the aging governmental workers and exactly very keen on things changing.
The City of Munich had a similar program of switching to Linux before, only took Microsoft to open an office in the city to revert on those plans.
The federal government recently finished rolling out a centralised, unified client around all of their ministries and other institutions. Which OS? Guessed it, Windows 10.
Dont get me wrong, having something like the French Police would be amazing, but the highly federal nature and old workforce of government make it super unlikely for Linux to have a proper chance. Taking into consideration the lack of suitable employees to drive forward such a change, the lack of money at local government levels and the fact that most of the specific software required doesn't have a version for Linux doesn't fill me with hope.
Office suites are a tricky one. The shitstorm when MS changed it to the ribbon UI was insane. Business users really do not like change. That and the minor incompatibilities in document loading to LibreOffice. I mean, it's like 99.9% of the way there, but that 0.1% is guaranteed to be in the middle of one of those massive spreadsheets that absolutely fucking everything hinges on.
Still, Office has been going in-browser for a while now. They might at least get off Windows, even if they're stuck with Office.
Let’s hope it gains traction and you can write another paper on the success of oss in government.