Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software | Hacker News Reader

Switzerland mandates government agencies use open-source software

tomshardware.com

129 pointsStratoscope32 comments

Excellent, good for them! I don't understand why other governments don't follow suit, or why people are opposed to it. There might be some valid cons about requiring the use of FOSS (e.g. LibreOffice vs MS Office), but the part about requiring government sponsored code to be released as open source is clearly good for governments. Having the code freely open is good leverage against greed and good insurance for vendor failures.

Probably makes it harder to outsource inflated projects to contractors and makes them more publicly liable because now the public can audit them.

There’s no workable Excel alternative, FOSS, OSS or paid. You can deal with the word processor and presentation software, but Excel is alone in a class for itself.

Also not sure how you deal with LDAP/Kerberos - is samba good enough for large deployments?

FreeOffice PlanMaker is an Excel clone for Linux and Mac. Not sure what corner cases it doesn't cover though.

Hem... I fail to see a single reasons to use a spreadsheet or create slides in PowerPoint alike software actually...

We can compute easily in R, Python, Clojure, also with some wrappers from Jupyter to R-Studio to Clerk for those who want it, personally I present in org-mode (dslide) with easy and no extra overhead. Maybe it's about time to teach administrative people how to use a computer...

This seems like something almost every government would have already done. Open source software means they aren't locked into a single vendor and can hire anybody they wish (including their own internal developers) to modify their software to meet their needs. With proprietary software, a company like Microsoft or Apple can change your software whenever they want and however they want even if that isn't in your interest.

From the perspective of a consumer, being able to hire your own developers to modify your software is basically useless. But this is very useful if you're the government and have relatively unlimited funds taxed from your subjects.

> This seems like something almost every government would have already done.

Yes, thank god we have legal corruption aka lobby. /s

It’s only responsible to use tax money in ways the resources used revert to its internal markets as much as possible.

What good is Swiss tax money that creates jobs in Redmond?

I think this is probably not seeing the forest for the trees. If using LibreOffice and NextCloud (or whatever) ends up costing more than ~€40/headcount/month in admin, hosting and productivity, then the Swiss citizens are losing out on this decision.

But it'd be Swiss IT guys getting paid, right? That money goes back into Switzerland.

Well it's either getting a positive RoI or not, if you just want to give Swiss people some tax revenue back, why not just give them a tax cut? Losing productivity is money that's just being thrown away, even if you ignore all the additional operating costs, I don't think you'd have to lose much productivity to make up the difference. I'm not sure what the average pay of Swiss civil servants is, but I can't imagine one standard E5 license (~€40/month) is far off an hours work.

First, I am a Swiss developer so that's my perspective.

Because long term if we invest in domestic ability to support, debug and improve software is a benefit. Getting actual control over the software deployed, rather then just what Microsoft want's you to get.

Switzerland is behind in Digitization, and having an increase amount of open software to interact and build with makes a hell of a lot of sense. A you do digitization, every part of the software from every deparment needs to interact with every other software. Having this stuff be open source based on open standards, supported by local developers who can make this happen is vital.

We should not just hand our IT infrastructure to Microsoft and Oracle, just as we are not handing of our railway system to Virgin (looking at you Britain).

Of course if its just about LibreOffice, there is no point, we need a much more systematic, wide-reaching long term digitization plan, and open source must be a big part of that.

I frankly don't care if short term it costs a bit more,

> I frankly don't care if short term it costs a bit more,

Indeed. It's an investment in developing local capabilities.

> if you just want to give Swiss people some tax revenue back

But they don't just want to do that. I'm not an economist, but I don't think RoI ("return on investment") means the same thing for a government that it does for a corporation. Any money "thrown away" comes back in some way, which creates many opportunities to kill two birds with one stone.

How much do Swiss citizens pay for LibreOffice support? My guess is they pay less than they'd pay for an Office subscription.

Really curious to see what turns up. A lot of stuff like geo-data and tools [1], as well as meteorological tools and models [2] were already partly public. Having worked for the federal administration and using their IT at least a few weeks yearly, the rest is mostly Microsoft and SAP software, or classified software that they can’t and won’t release.

In Switzerland, a lot of public services are located at the « Cantonal » (i.e. state) or « Communal » (i.e. city) level, which AFAIK isn’t affected by this.

[1] https://github.com/swisstopo [2] https://github.com/MeteoSwiss

> Really curious to see what turns up

Bill Gates and Nadella talking to the head of Swiss government and making him an "offer" ? /s

Good. I would like to see an industry wide movement away from proprietary formats as well, especially Office or Adobe related formats.

As long as companies can recover from Crowdsrike like failures and as long as the greed is big, it won't happen.

[dupe]

Some discussion a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40852084

and this week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047172

Munich tried switching to open source (from MS Office) back in 2003.[0] It was a bit of a rough road, though I suppose no more so than many rollouts of software to enterprises. SAP implementations are a case in point. [1]

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/108-do-all-sap-implementation...

edit: typo

So they finally agreed with with the arguments of this petition: https://publiccode.eu.

Good. This will probably also lower the conflict of interests with regulations and collusion temptation.

Misleading title, it says they only have to open-source software when that software is explicitly written for use by the government.

Does that also cover public healthcare ?

Unless that software was written explicitly for the government, then no. Title is misleading

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