German state Schleswig Holstein is rolling out their Open Source strategy | Hacker News Reader

German state Schleswig Holstein is rolling out their Open Source strategy

schleswig-holstein.de

23 pointsdoener15 comments

"Der Weg der digitalen Souveränität folgt aber auch einem klaren industriepolitischen Kompass. Meine Vision eines starken Digitalstandorts in Europa kann so Wirklichkeit werden, weil wir unsere öffentlichen Budgets nicht mehr nur für Lizenzgebühren aufwenden müssen, sondern in echte Programmierungsleistungen unserer heimischen Digitalwirtschaft investieren und damit Wertschöpfung und Arbeitsplätze vor Ort schaffen."

They talk a big talk about digital Sovereignty in Europe and then clicking on the English link of the page makes the page disappear. The key underlying factor of a strong open source strategy is a big enough market to justify the upfront investment in writing the code. I'm sure the state wants to talk big about open source and Europe but when it actually comes to collaborating with multiple partners, especially from non-German countries, things are going to fall flat on their face.

With translation services so good and available nowadays, English shouldn’t be a prerequisite for collaboration with other countries, especially when English isn’t even the prevalent language of those other countries.

Excellent news, hopefuly a rollout to the rest of us at some point!

Directory server could be Samba4, but I guess if they aim for Linux on the desktop, FreeIPA would probably be the better bet.

Though the choice of email software is interesting; Grommunio from Austria is literally a drop-in Exchange server with support for MAPI, MAPI over HTTP, RPC over HTTP, ActiveSync etc. But again, I guess with a move to Linux you just need something support Cal/CardDAV and IMAP.

> Umstieg von Microsoft Office auf LibreOffice

> Umstieg des Betriebssystems von Microsoft Windows auf Linux

Would Google Docs/Sheets/Slides be allowed under Schleswig Holstein's open source strategy even though Google services are not open source? I could see some users preferring Google Docs/Sheets/Slides over LibreOffice and make the switch from Windows to Linux more palatable.

> I could see some users preferring Google Docs/Sheets/Slides over LibreOffice

Google Doc always stores the files on the Google server, correct? In that case that is most likely an absolute show stopper for a German state authority.

Given that they're moving to Libreoffice, I imagine the collabora integration with Nextcloud (which is, IIRC, a VNC like interface to Libreoffice), would be a better bet.

Functionally, sure. But a lot of their concerns are about data sovereignty after an European court had issues with M365. Given what a stickler for compliance MS typically is, I don't imagine Google would fare any better.

That totally sounds like LiMux in Munich. I hope they are more successfully than Munich who rolled back to Microsoft after a decade or so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

Any ideas why they rolled back?

> In November 2017 Munich city council decided to revert to Windows by 2020 with all systems being replaced by Windows 10 counterparts. Some of the reasons cited were adoption and users being unhappy with the lack of software available for Linux. A report commissioned by Munich and undertaken by Accenture, found the most important issues were organizational. > > In 2018, journalistic group Investigate Europe released a video documentary via German public television network ARD that claimed that the majority of city workers were satisfied with the operating system, with council members insinuating that the reversal was a personally motivated decision by lord mayor Dieter Reiter. Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich.

Basically corruption.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

And for the documentary (watching it now, thank you!): https://archive.org/details/das-microsoft-dilemma

Two major reasons coinciding at the right time:

* They were alone. Munich is a big city ("biggest municipality in Germany" (there are bigger cities, but those are states as well)) but being an outlier complicated many things. For instance the software to order password from the federal printing agency was Windows only and required integration with hardware like fingerprint reader and stuff, being sole outlier makes this hard.

* Microsoft moved their German headquarters from a suburb to the city, thus pays local taxes.

German state Schleswig Holstein is rolling out their Open Source strategy

Toll, aber normalerweise sollten HN-Posten mindestens auf Denglish sein, oder?

genauly

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