Maybe it's wishful thinking, but this just seems to me like treating the symptoms instead of the root cause.
9 out of 10 times I’ve been part of the buy-side, proprietary software has won due to the support. Even more so when the end users aren’t technical people.
If the software doesn’t come with support options from the vendor, you’ll have to look into third-parties for that - which means another entirely own contract, and set of people to involve.
I don't see how tying yourself to a single vendor is advantageous at all.
You can say the market might emerge if the large corporations or government agencies started shifting that way and generated demand for it, but those entities aren't known to take risks.
I do know my mother is a customer with her business
Getting another contract ?
If the press and opposition don’t get you, the time to get a new contract will.
To be explicit, if governments want to use open source software, which seems like a pretty good idea, they of course need to be aware of the fact that lots of it is hobbyist stuff tossed out into the public square with no quality guarantees.
To use open source code, the governments will have to fork and audit the code, and provide customer service for what is now their software. It can be done and it seems like a great way to make this stuff available for the non-technical community, but it isn’t free, of course.
Why would they do this? It’s not like they fork and audit the code that they’re using now. They just trust that it’s safe because they paid for it. Which probably sounds incredibly stupid to anyone who’s ever worked for big enterprise, or just followed the news really.
At least the government can bring the CEO before congress and waste his day.
With open source code the responsibility is taken by the user instead. For me, and probably a lot of people here, we all mostly just ignore that, but it’s fine, because we’re free to ignore our responsibility to ourselves. In the case of a government supplying open source code to their citizens, the responsibility defaults to the provider, that is, the government.
> With open source code the responsibility is taken by the user instead.
What is RHEL?
I guess what I suggested might be more intense than what they do, not actually sure what their workflow is. But it seems like the level of diligence that a government ought to apply, right?
Sure, this is why you outsource everything to the cheapest labor possible. It’s easy to say you did your best if you had a team of 40 people all drooling over the keyboard, and the best of them managed to hit the spacebar to commit.
Then you complain that competent employees just cannot be found.
The state using FOSS is great but that seems quite orthogonal to preventing monopoly abuse by proprietary software vendors. We can do both.
Edit: I think you may be implying that having a variety of choices available would sufficient to prevent monopolies. That's not true as long as you have multiple companies able to cooperate in doing things like bundling, etc.
AFIK, at least a few countries & research entities over there are using FOSS, at least in part, as well as promoting it.
Hypothetically just because a Government is using FOSS to operate does not mean a company can not still break antitrust rules.
It is trash in the exact same way that GIMP is trash compared to professional tools.
The quality just isn’t there, and the quality will never be there so long as design decisions are made by anything resembling a democracy.
The open source model works for code. It does not work for design, and open source developers somehow believe they are as good of a designer as they are a developer, and that has never been true for anyone, ever.
Asking that someone be forced to switch to Linux from Windows or Mac is akin to forcing them to use GIMP instead of Photoshop, and if that sounds like a perfectly fine thing to you, you are blind to some very important things. Being blind to those things is fine so long as you’re aware of that blindness.
The Linux desktop is a pile of userland crapware piled into a trench coat, pretending to be a real desktop operating system.
Your idea of what a desktop OS should be feels subjective. I'm using Linux as a desktop operating system for 20 years, I've used Windows before, I use Windows sometimes even today (currently only in VMs dedicated to malware analysis and reverse engineering tools), and - to me - Windows is much more annoying. This feels like personal preference and not an objective statement like you did.