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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

Public funding of open source software is one of the most direct ways that government spending can grow the supply side of the economy. Taxpayers will directly benefit from the public domain technologies developed to replace the contracts CERN is moving away from. Software and science share an important economic trait, that once you produce them you can maximize their total impact by spreading them around as much as possible. That's an advantageous situation for public funding without IP restrictions, which is the model of academia.

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Migrating away from Microsoft won't be easy. Despite high licensing costs, Windows, AD and Exchange are still great solutions with millions of people familiar with them, good documentation and support.

I agree that only public funding and massive donations would allow the development of true alternative to these products.

The building blocks are already there: desktop Linux, openLDAP, FreeRADIUS, LibreOffice, etc.

What is needed is lots of refinements, improvements and UI/UX polish to have a package that small shops to Fortune 500 companies could deploy.

You dont need to get rid of Windows to support Open Source software though. My favorite Open Source tools work no matter what OS I am using be it Mac, Windows or Linux.

I think everybody should move away from Windows & other software assets. In 2019 it is crazy to make end users responsible for the security of the OS. I have for example never questioned the security of my iPhone.

A child that has a chromebook will never understand why you need a virus checker, firewall, that the data really is gone if a ssd breaks or have to install a special program to make a fysical print. The average training time to make this migration from MS Office to Google Docs for employees at Forbes 500 companies is 1 hour.

Chrome OS is such an undervalued solution for the end user in a traditional business.

In tech we all use GSuite. On stackshare.io a whopping 17.200 companies use G-suite in their tech stack. Microsoft Office 173.

You can't get hired if you answer MS Office as your main document driver in an interview. This discussion is not even a thing that gets discussed at a sane technology company. G Suite is awesome and it just works.

Kids use Google Docs as a chat app. A traditional document program is a typewriter and a google doc is a laptop with internet connection.

G Suite API's create so much automation option plug&play out of the box that 95% of your automation can be arranged with SAAS.

Both Zapier & IFTT supply a polished UI, where anybody can connect G Suite with 600 other SAAS API providers. Nobody outside technology has ever started a conversation about these two.

https://stackshare.io/stackups/g-suite-vs-microsoft-office-3...

Going from one proprietary locked-in system to the next doesn't solve the problems. Especially 'The Web'®© services are unsuitable for anything with remotely sensitive documents.

Using stackshare stats for software adoption is somewhat disingenuous. Companies aren't required to disclose what they use, and many don't. You are also more prone to finding similar tool stacks in similar companies (new tech, startup, enterprise, etc...), this isn't even mentioning that the only two software solutions you presented for document management take two very different approaches for monetization, and your post implies that you value the convenience of customer-as-a-product models which we don't have the stats available to back which approach is better. That perspective is also not valid anymore as even Office, and the likes of Libre Office now provide similar conveniences of cloud backed storage and web interfaces.

Counter point: the more the government gets into funding OSS, they will essentially become a competitor to other software companies. Now the government both has the power and incentive to hinder private companies with rules and regulations.

I think that if the government needs OSS software for actual use by the government, then that's fine. Don't make the government become a competitor to private industry. Look how that turned out with Uber vs. Taxis.

OSS is just like anything in the free market. If people and companies want it that much, they will spend time and energy on it.

> Now the government both has the power and incentive to hinder private companies with rules and regulations.

What incentive? In the scenario you describe, I don't see an obvious mechanism for the government to receive additional tax revenue as a result of funding OSS, and that's the usual mechanism for such an incentive.

I mean, I guess you could argue that tax revenues will tend to increase as the economy grows, but that seems like a case where the interests of the government are aligned with the interests of the nation(s) as a whole, which is generally considered a good thing.

The same is true of the government using proprietary software thus funding it against open source. The work can be outsourced to open source companies, etc. as well, just like it effectively is with proprietary.

As long as they don't forbid companies from using OSS inside of (or to produce) a commercial product, I don't really see the problem? It'd actually give companies a competitive advantage.

Speaking of that, it's absurd how many private companies benefit from Linux! I bet only a tiny percentage of those companies contribute back into the open source projects they benefit from.

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