there are a number of other office suites that are entirely adequate for bureaucratic organizations to build methodical processes around (which is what bureaucracies do). the capabilities of the underlying tools don’t matter much in this regard.
also, audits aren’t meant to prove anything (like security), but instead to shift liability.
GP never says that you’re naive, but the comment was.
This is, at best, a stretch.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233538/average-number-s...
I would love to see you replace all 100 of those with open source software.
Have you ever dealt with large technology migrations?
i'm not suggesting that governments can only use internally developed or open-source software, i'm saying corporate interests should be firewalled away from goverment. so a locally-installed office suite incorporating no surveillance tech doesn't have the ancillary corporate interests attached to qualify it for being firewalled.
Yes, I speak from experience, migrations and modernizations are kind of my job.
I can’t think of the name of the company now. But there is one company that manage the school lunch programs. Who is going to write the software and you have to replace all of the hardware throughout the state.
And they'll require renegotiation or hardware upgrades at some point, so use that as leverage to say no government entities will buy any more unless they meet certain rules about open sourcing and data storage.
But really, if a handful of things like that were the only examples that would be wonderful.
The beginning is any SaaS that started being used in the last 2-3 years. The immediate solution might just be going back to what they had before, if the top priority is privacy.
As far as open source, the existing companies could often be contracted, but if they don't want to open up then the government can put out bids or build a team. If entire countries want to buy something, they can make a market. And that's assuming there isn't already open source software that can do the job, because there often will be.
Now on the other hand, return offers for interns at my BigTech company is around $150K. The average salary for the superintendent of schools for larger cities is $167K. Where is the government going to get the money to compete with the private sector?
Or it can offer tens of millions of dollars for some software and see who bids.
Especially when the previous provider would probably like to get more money selling something to the government, even if they have to make changes.
The above poster was willing to pay "1% GDP" for the initial migration and for the US 200 billion dollars would pay for a lot of development work.
Do you really think the government has the competence to create software? How many decades has the US government been trying to modernize the IRS? Do you remember the original ACA website rollout?
Not only do you have to hire developers, you have to hire project managers, retrain employers, etc.
Are you going to also create data centers to create what’s available in the public cloud? You need to make those redundant across regions, are you going to force open sourcing of control plane software?
I think the main idea was to remove third party data storage? With some open source? You can contract both of those out, and when it's open source the company doesn't have the same kind of leverage.
> Do you really think the government has the competence to create software?
It's not like companies are usually good at it either, so shrug.
> Are you going to also create data centers to create what’s available in the public cloud? You need to make those redundant across regions, are you going to force open sourcing of control plane software?
At that scale, datacenters are cheaper than cloud hardware. As for making the cloud software, well, billions of dollars can buy a lot. Force shouldn't be necessary.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, SalesForce, Oracle, are not good at creating software?
Let’s say the government wanted to “leverage” open source, do you think they could make a better version of ChromeOS than Google?
You also just think throwing money at a problem can automatically create software that is better than private corporations?
The original poster said:
i’d support any legislation that booted google, fb, ms, adobe, salesforce, and a whole host of other surveillance tech companies from any and all levels of government. it’s literally as important as the separation of church and state. in fact, i’d love to see a constitutional amendment explicitly separating corporate interests from governmental ones, in all facets of civic life (e.g., campaign finance).
They don’t want any private company involved in government IT. That means the government has to build everything out themselves without using contractors.
Doesn't Netflix only run their metadata servers in the cloud? I'm not sure what those other two do.
> Google, Apple, Microsoft, SalesForce, Oracle, are not good at creating software?
Did I imply that?
Though we could debate Oracle...
> You also just think throwing money at a problem can automatically create software that is better than private corporations?
I never said better. But "good enough", in avoidance of horrible privacy violations, is a choice I'd approve of.
And open source software usually does quite well when given moderate funding.
> They don’t want any private company involved in government IT.
My interpretation is that if you get rid of the surveillance you solve the main problem, as far as outsourcing goes. If that's wrong then some of what I suggested isn't compatible.
I’m not trying to “appeal to authority”. But since we are taking specifically about AWS, I should disclaim that I work at AWS in the consulting department. That’s where my perspective about large scale migrations come from. I’m not necessarily saying everyone “should move to the cloud”. I’m more referring to how deeply ingrained the commercial sector has always been involved with government.
An ad hominem means using an insult as the basis for rejecting an argument, e.g. 'that is wrong because you are [attack]'. Saying an argument is naive and then explaining why is not an ad hominem.
if it had been starter, engine, and transmission, maybe you’d have a point, but instead it’s corroded battery, door handle, and tailpipe.
"You're European, so your argument is biased and wrong" is an ad hominem. "Your argument is naive, here's why I think that" is not. The latter is logically downstream of the argument, while the former is upstream.
see how those three sentences go together? that's a line of reasoning. the subject comment doesn't have that throughline. it's disjointed; the parts are only tangentially connected.
What on earth do you mean by "literal" here? Ad hominem refers to a specific fallacious style of argumentation. Being ignorant of the definition and then too stubborn to admit it is not pushing back against "overliteralism".
Especially because the rest of your comment (dismissing the rest of the argument due to "ad hominem") only makes sense if one assumes the correct definition!
Are they though? Do you know this for a fact? I mean, sure, MS Office is very popular in government settings, but does this really go beyond the possibility of just replacing it with LibreOffice if they so decided?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbQFTkFaYlo
or Box/DropBox/other cloud storage services, which is less convenient than proper collaborative in-pace editing, but you can still get the file at the link, edit it and upload it.
You've just identified one very good reason that they shouldn't be dependent on a single, proprietary vendor.
Really, I was surprised to find your original comment on Hacker News, especially with you ironically fronting it with calling other people naive.
[1]: https://larlesienne.info/2022/02/22/la-municipalite-de-carol...
In fact, I bet you that a major part of the delays in Government are because Tom from IT needs a sign off from three separate people to get a new Office 365 license for Brenda in accounting.
With Libre Office you make that a thing of the past.
Depends. When odf would be the standard maybe, but it isn't. Standard is microsoft office, and libre office is not 100% compatible. But you will still have to deal with lots of microsoft documents, from all the other agencies, ordinary people, companies, ..
Meaning, when Munichs government tried to switch to oss a few years ago, they did indeed lost a lot of time with broken documents, templates, layouts etc. so they ultimately switched back (direct microsoft lobbying with even Bill Gates getting personally involved might have played a role, too).
So I am all for an open standard, but this easier said, than done.
Then change it. By law if need be, and have all government departments go over to Libre Office at the same time.
Microsoft then tried to get their format ratified as an ISO standard. But everyone complained that their spec did not actually specify how to implement, instead it said things like "In accordance with output from Word 2007". So after a bit of back and forth MS realized that they did not want to _actually_ document what they were doing. The solution? Pack the committee with MS shills to vote yes on every proposal by MS. Urgh.
One of the negative flow on effects was that these new committee members only cared about voting for things that MS had instructed them to vote on - so other standards and issues stalled due to a lack of a quorum. It was super disappointing looking at this from the sidelines at the time.
Here is a link that explains a small part of the history: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2618153/how-microsoft-was-...
I would have defined Libre Office as the reference implementation. Other software is allowed to the extent it reads/writes those files formats correctly.
I would also have mandated open source.
What I have had more incompatibility issues with is Gsuite (or whatever Google is calling it these days) which a LOT of medium sized businesses and school are using now as an office alternative.
That's unlikely, and if so I doubt Libre Office would liberate Brenda. It may be the reverse. On-boarding or moving Brenda between functions would mean provisioning her for internal ID, identity, email/communication, security, network/group access and permissioning, physical device(s), etc. Various parts of Microsoft 365 would just be part of the checklist and deployment, an integral part.
Microsoft make the above very smooth. I don't think someone slapping Libre Office on a PC makes any of that a thing of the past. Any realistic alternative needs to be all the way down the stack.
Also, nature loves a bit of redundancy. And capitalism loves competition. You can't have competition under a monopoly.
And the govt. is the biggest monopoly of all.
Somehow, restrictions against US firms are praised but if US imposes restrictions that is condemned (e.g. TikTok).
By whom?
> if US imposes restrictions that is condemned (e.g. TikTok).
By whom?
I didn't say shut down the megacorps. Maybe they have use; I don't know. What I do know is they're unaccountable (like the shit bits of government).
If government had to use open systems, the quality of those open systems would improve and compete better with the similar commercial ones. The public (and companies and other countries) then have a choice between the tools from the megacorps and the open tools. The public also gains/improves a resource. More competition. Probably better for everyone.
I refuse to use the NHS here in the UK because of the widespread use of Microsoft everywhere.
terrible and more expensive is also a joke, but not as big, you still could got to ibm or oracle if you want to pay more for less, admitted
I disagree. It would be relatively straightforward to build such systems on Linux and open source.
> and more expensive to the tax payer
As a proportion of Italy's GDP, the cost would be negligible, especially given that this is a matter of national security, something governments tend to be keen to spend money on.
After how many failed rewrites that never deliver a working product?
The other undertone I'm getting from this thread is that people think America has a monopoly on building software, and that's simply not the case. It's not hard to find companies doing really good work outside of the US. There is also nothing special about Office 365, it doesn't have a technology moat, it just has a surmountable interoperability moat and a social moat.
I don't think you comprehend the scope of what you're suggesting.
I work for a school district and I'm currently migrating our system from using one commercial bus routing service to another... using Windows, SQL Server, Teams, etc. from Microsoft... using a laptop, dock, three monitors, keyboard, and mouse from HP... and today the elevator was broken so we called a repair company to come fix it... oh, and some company makes the school buses, and the networked phone on my desk, and the printer around the corner, and all of the paper in it... the fluorescent bulbs above me don't grow on trees...
you can't just expect governments, even at the national level, to roll their own everything without interfacing with corporations in any way—this is a hopelessly naïve view of the world. I am just as uncomfortable as you are with data being shared with corporations, but you're going to have to figure out a more realistic set of political goals than what you've outlined here.
but even if you just mean to say "government should not share citizens' data with corporations", well, there are presently two (until our license with one is up at the end of summer) separate corporations that both know where every kid in my school district lives, what their special ed needs are, what their parents names are, what their parents' contact information is, if they live between multiple households, and so forth, because that is the explicit purchase of their business, and that why we purchased their software. the same goes for another piece of SaaS we recently purchased a license to involving food service management for the school system. when designing the data export we opted to not follow the part of the schema that wants SSNs for the students (because why would they need that?!), but that might not be the case for other districts using the same software.
my point is there are a lot more interconnected corporate software services sharing citizen data at play in contemporary government systems than you probably think, and, once again, even though I agree with your position with regards to sharing citizen data with corporations... I think that ship might've pretty much sailed sometime in the past few decades.
but yes, i'm explicitly against governments sharing private data with corporations, no matter how convenient it might seem to be for workers. governments have run for centuries without those conveniences, so it's not a dichotomous choice of share all the data or not have schools (for instance). a lot of data sharing is driven by the misguided desire to control (that is, to centralize power), whether it be teachers, students, or administrators, not for actual educational outcomes, despite the latter being the nominal impetus.
I have yet to see this occur. instead, it's all about bureaucratic convenience. why hire more people for Student Transportation to keep bus routes straight, and deal with printing out & distributing paper passenger lists to bus drivers, etc. etc., when you could use a piece of software to handle it all for you? nobody at the bureaucratic levels we're talking about here care about hoarding personal information for power or centralization or anything like that, it's purely for convenience and streamlining of bureaucracy.
one might say, ok, sure, but why does it have to be a third-party SaaS that you're SFTPing data back and forth with, why can't it just be a traditional piece of software that you install and manage locally? again: convenience, for all involved. that's one less thing for our sysadmins to worry about dealing with, and when you get enough of these things then you'll need to hire and retain more sysadmins (who we're frequently cycling through as is due to failure to compete with corporate salaries). the software developers of the third-party bus routing software don't have to worry about platform compatibility if the platform they're targeting is the web. parents can easily log into the website to see their child's bus routes and if they're delayed or whatever (apparently this is a real thing real parents demand...). but also, hey, we're already using Office 365, so "what's a few more SaaS solutions to problems we have, at this point?"
what I'm getting at here is the rise of SaaS and the fall of self-hosted solutions to things like this is pervasive everywhere in the corporate world, so if you don't want your tax money "wasted" on even keeping school district student data in-house and secure, this is the world we have to live with now. I'm not saying it doesn't suck ass, another piece of software we replaced is all web-based (albeit locally-hosted) and strictly inferior to the end-of-life Java-based software it is replacing. software kinda just keeps getting worse, and the further stratification of everything into SaaS is definitely not good in the long run. but... that's the current state of things everywhere, so why should government be any different?
if this bothers you about public schooling in particular, then the solution (which I'll likely be doing, but not for this reason) is homeschooling your kids. then their data is only stored in the district database and only transmitted to and from the state and local governments, for reporting purposes.
but more broadly speaking, what's the use in calling out governments transmitting personal information to corporations when corporations are already taking so much of your data themselves? I bought my fiancée a hat with a soda logo on it last week and she was getting ads for that specific soda the next day. how it happened, I have no idea. shortly after I moved back to my hometown, I picked up some groceries for my mom using her credit card, including a can of Red Bull I got for myself, the first I'd had in months. later that day, ad for Red Bull on my social feeds, first I'd seen... in months. whenever I buy booze, I get (different) booze ads on Twitter for days—when I don't buy any booze for awhile, the ads stop.
there's already so much personal information being trafficked between corporations everywhere without our consent, what makes the government sending it to corporations for legitimate purposes so specifically offensive? maybe I'm being too cynical but it seems like the genie's just kind of out of the bottle now for personal data in general. TFA is sticking a finger in one of many finger-sized holes in the hull of a ship which is sinking mostly not due to the finger-sized holes but to the person-sized ones that we're just kinda ignoring.
homeschooling might fix the short term, but it helps no one else and probably not your kids' long term. speaking up, debating alternative solutions, supporting better legislation, even making your own job harder will help you and all your neighbors in the long run. we each need to call out governments and corporations for their misdeeds, all the time, whenever we see it. being a citizen is a responsibility, not a right.
(also, i don't see ads and don't give data willingly to the likes of google)
Can the government purchase a car? Hire a private corporation to build a road? Hire a consulting company to check the security of their (now-free-and-without-a-support-contract FOSS?) computer setup?
The same applies to websites. If a government website uses Google analytics, it is essentially requiring you to do business with a specific company (in this case Google) in order to use a government service.
Of course some citizens are living over seas so we can provide a satellite uplink for them.
The gov. is using some service and therefore some citizen data is subject to the T&C's and that's it.
If Google were a German or UK company it would be the same thing - everyone subject to those T&C's.
But government can impose requirements, like TAA compliance (1) and SHB requirements (2) on its service vendors, forcing those vendors to purchase from a fairly constrained number of hardware providers.
https://www.dtra.mil/Portals/61/Documents/Business%20Docs/ev...
https://www.afcea.org/site/sites/default/files/files/2-ColLi...
If you open the door to a govt office, are you doing business with the company who installed the doors? If you use the toilet, are you doing business with the company that janitorial services are contracted out to?
When you visit a site with Google Analytics, they still have your data after you leave.
If those are sacrosanct, the choice of tools vendor matters far less.
I get why google et al want it for their growth/sales, but they are a private entity not owning internet in any way, extremely foreign to Europe with no clear friendly intentions. One of few times I can say I am proud to be living on old continent.
living in europe doesn't much matter, given the reach of these companies and their interweaving into government systems, along with reciprocal surveillance agreements (however-many-eyes countries).
How is that possible, since corporations are, by definition, creations of government through law?
But it’s not that simple. What harms the public? Many would argue being able to use data google collects (legally through subpoenas or grey-legally through any of the number reports that have come out since Snowden) helps government agencies by increasing public security—thus the opposite of harm. Being
If government can literally fine/shutdown your business arbitrarily (as they do for lockdowns, permits, etc.), then they should have a voice in the government that could treat them so terribly.
Unless you mean to say that government should be so much smaller that it doesn't impose separate business taxes, import/export controls, require permitting and licensing and follow arbitrary regulations on those businesses, which I could get behind. Ideally, if there's no advantage or penalty to avoid by petitioning government, won't everyone stop paying attention to government? No gaming the game can happen then!
The problem is that we can't have it both ways, can't restrict a group from petitioning and then pose rules they MUST follow, without a say. That's not democracy at all.
Companies are just groups of individuals after all, and should have just as much voice as an activist group does, like ACLU or Americans for Tax Reform or whatever.
If you’re Italian, you do have a say, and if you’re doing international business in Italy then you accept the sovereign risk of dealing with a foreign state.