Comment by jaabe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaabe | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who likes Linux and genuinely believe that software that was paid for by the public should be open source, I just have to ask you why that is.

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.

partial counter-point: many large companies, universities, schools etc have switched to things like Google Docs. Most use of office software is simple enough that people can transfer (afaik a big part in the Munich migration was making sure all the templates used for common documents where ported properly and people could easily access to).

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 is not really a counter point though. I mean, education is part of a municipality, it makes up around 15% of our work force, and you’re right, they could probably be switched to Linux.

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.

That's basically why vendor lock-in works, you'll always stay on Windows. I get that, but that's the case for everything. If you want to change anything in your life, there's some need to get out of your comfort zone, since not doing so means only doing what you're comfortable with, thus not changing anything.

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.

I actually personally think all public software should be open source so citizens can have access to what they pay for. It’s a tough sell though, because of how massive of an undertaking it is.

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 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

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.

> 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.

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