As I recall, this sort of public statement is used as a lever to squeeze some discounts out of Microsoft's Enterprise Sales team before the government "decides" to stay with Windows.
I would love to see some countries adopting Linux for government systems and funding research and development e.g. maybe fund Libre Office or the KDE one more and then build out other tools to be cross platform.
There's a reason Microsoft was successful for years: they built turn-key solutions, and added new turn-key features their customers requested.
Switching from that sort of IT to a linux-based, 'we need a system architect' model doesn't happen overnight. There's organization shift, cultural shift, firing unneeded people who won't retrain, retraining people who are worth it, and hiring talent to fill gaps.
Not to mention that talent's more expensive and less easily certified (e.g. all the official MS rubber stamp programs).
Not impossible, but it's a LOT of work. With dubious chances of success.
[edit: TOC -> TCO]
A big difference compared to one or two decades ago is that a lot of domain-specific services have moved to web applications. So, there are probably a lot of machines out there that are just glorified web browsing machines.
Also, the popularity of iOS and Android have made more applications cross-platform.
Of course, once Office documents or legacy Win32 applications are part of the equation, you can't really beat Windows. It is a common misconception that LibreOffice could replace Office. I use a Linux desktop and a MacBook and most of the Word/Excel paperwork that I have to do (luckily irregularly) does not open correctly in LibreOffice. Of course, it is an uphill battle for the LO folks.
By that criteria (which are real criteria from real people), the only viable replacement for Microsoft Office, is the next version of Microsoft Office.
The only way to break out of this, I think, is for governments to forbid themselves to use proprietary software that was not developed on their own soil. Because let's face it, it's not really about money (especially not about short term money). It's more about national security, sovereignty, and freedom.
Dealing with this at work now.
And it's not like they're disinterested or incapable of learning, literally no one thought "Gee, what those folks are doing looks a lot like code."
The biggest boost to interop would be requiring software vendors to release spec sheets for necessary software components and file formats... if they want government work. No more "It's too hard" or "We can't." You want the job, those are the rules.
So, business teams invented the all-too-common version of agile development even before “real” software developers, without the disadvantage of ignorance of the body of knowledge around the SDLC, got around to it.
By that criteria, the only viable replacement for Microsoft Office is the _same_ version of Microsoft Office.
The delta between two Microsoft Office versions has often been larger than between a Microsoft Office version and a LibreOffice version...
Perceived change generates just as much stress and associated opposition as actual change. You've just enabled me to make that explicit for myself. I feel stupid that took me so many years. Thank you for that.
Writing this out somewhat softens my frustration with people refusing to use anything but the blue e or similar intellectual laziness.
Walk a mile in our shoes. You understand truths about your job we may not.
Not everything is an adversarial thing about two opposing groups of people.
Citation needed.
The company I work for switched wholesale away from Microsoft. Management moved first and the rest of us shortly afterwards. Haven't heard any complaints.
The company you work for is one of the enlightened few. Or maybe it's a tech company with an enlightened management?
It is. We are a tech/consulting company, but management is management and we also have a good number of employees older than me (and I think that is great :-)
For that use case, there's always SoftMaker Office[1].
If I have a 50% chance to cut my IT budget by 15%, if I remake my org, is it worth it?
Honestly, because most customers sponsoring projects were morons. If you told them there was a 25% chance of failure, they'd go with someone else who claimed a 0% chance of failure.
I finally decided most of this was just sponsors covering their ass. If they initiated a project with risk and it failed, that reflected on them. If they initiated a project and the consultants claimed (winkwinknudgenudge) there's no risk, then if it failed those lying consultants were the only ones to blame.
Income inequality is a concern, and some people are certainly overpaid. But at the C* or technical architect level, the cost of pinching pennies is dominated by the cost of choosing a wrong direction (or not recognizing a changing situation and correcting quickly enough).
For example, IIRC, they use a smart card to authenticate on their workstations, and also on their web applications. For that you need to customize a bit (better out of the box support for pkcs11 devices, integrate the Certificate Authorities needed, drivers).
There are a few contributions to open source projects:
A few years back, they were contributing to a fork of Thunderbird called Trustedbird for example.
There are also a few individual contributors inside the Gendarmerie, for example Xavier Guimard creator and one of the current developers of LemonLdap (SSO portal).
Also just as a side note, this distribution is used by the Gendarmerie, which is not exactly the national Police. In France you have both a Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie National. The Gendarmerie is military personel (the Police is civilian). I'm guessing national sovereignty plays a small role in that (VS using MS Windows, which is completely controlled by a US company, bounded to the US government).
When you run Linux you do it by creating custom packages and changing the package manager to point to a different server, at which point you have created a "custom distro".
Technically interesting, though.
I don't know about that, I've seen what kinds of systems the existing distros build and I'm not impressed. Which isn't to say that Microsoft would definitely better, seeing as they are doing their best to become a Linux distro themselves while embracing all the bad behaviors that entails, but your statement certainly isn't a given.
What do you mean by this?
Run Linux on a Desktop and it's a whole different story. Shit breaks all the time, the package dependency spaghetti is insane, no one seems to test anything (or they don't listen to the people who do), etc.
I work in a Danish municipality with 100.000 citizens. We operate more than 300 IT systems, some of these are one of a kind systems that have no alternatives and some of those only run on Windows.
We also have 8000 employees, a lot of them couldn’t tell you if the smartphone they use each day is an android or an iPhone. They know windows and they know office, switching them to pages and macOS would be almost impossible, Linux and libre office is out of the question.
We have an IT staff of skilled people who were willing to skip pay for ideology they are all certified Microsoft and have little other education. They could all easily leave for other positions in the Microsoft infrastructure. It would cost around a million to replace just one of them.
We could easily switch our tech to Linux, we would need to build a lot of replacement software but that could be done in a reasonably manner, but moving the business side to Linux would be the most expensive thing we ever did.
Which is why I’m a skeptic of something I believe should happen. We pay a tech tax to Microsoft, by we can’t stop. It’s just not doable.
Specialist software is a big problem of course, likely leading to a parallel Windows infrastructure of some kind, either dedicated Windows workstations for the workers that need it or a terminal-server setup of some kind - I know companies that used the latter to keep Windows XP applications available in an isolated environment too. But it's all a bespoke process.
That doesn’t really make sense though, because our IT staff can’t support it, so we would need 1-2 guys extra which is more expensive than the windows licenses for 1200 employees.
As someone who supports both Windows and Linux laptops, if you switched to Linux your support staff would eventually halve. The control you have over Linux is so tight, its relative immunity viruses, to staff playing with it and adverse Microsoft "upgrades" so good that support literally drops to whatever it takes to keep the hardware going. Or to put it another way: if you need to re-image a Linux laptop, it's because the disk drive broke.
Mind you, it takes a while to get to that point. And you need someone with real Linux expertise. Real Linux expertise unfortunately means when a problem arises gets to the point you would give up and re-image Windows, instead with Linux you haul out the source, and find the root cause. But if you can do that you will be able to drive the software defect rate to near zero.
Or to put it another way again: Windows licences are the price to pay if you don't / can't pay for that sort of expertise, so you are trapped into paying to do it for you. Unfortunately Microsoft is a monopoly, so you end up paying a fair bit more. I'll grant you small enterprises don't have much choice. But I'd expect someone with 1200 employees does have the choice.
There's no doubt there'll be increased support costs in the short term, but this should be a long-term investment to get off of proprietary software and embrace open formats, (in my humble opinion, governments should by law be required not to produce documents that require proprietary software to open properly).
Governments should be the ideal vehicles for long-term investments. It's usually public corporations that are mostly concerned with the short term, it shouldn't be governments. If the SK government would seriously commit, in 10 years Linux would be the new normal and it would be Windows that requires extra staff, support etc.
We simply have too much software that only runs on; and too much staff schooled for Windows. You’re right that we could change if we wanted to, but it’s just hard to justify such an investment in an area where it would mean that we had to fire teachers and nurses to pay for it.
We don’t even have a good business case. I mean, our total Microsoft licenses are around the same expense as 4 employees. It would be literal decades before we brought the investment home if we made a full switch.
That doesn’t really work in political organisations, and it’s likely why all the previous attempts to switch have failed. To do this, we’d need massive public support for it, so the political leadership doesn’t get cold feet during the “short” term investment, and the truth is, the public couldn’t care less.
That doesn’t mean we can’t get there eventually. We try to buy more and more open source, we set up co-operations across municipalities to define architectural standards so suppliers can’t define our infrastructure anymore. But it’ll take a long time, and maybe it’ll never make sense to leave Microsoft. I mean, what’s the open source alternative to office365?
That's nice to hear. I think your best bet is indeed to slowly make sure you're not dependent on Microsoft. Even if Windows never wholly goes, at least Linux could then be a viable option for new deployments, or for smaller departments.