Comment by rdm_blackhole | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdm_blackhole | Hacker News Reader

It's always the same issue.

If you want to move away from <insert US tech giant>, you either need to embrace Linux and open source software which requires the state's employees to learn a new "stack" of applications which means they need to be given appropriate training or you need to have you home grown solutions that are as easy to use as their US counterparts and were developed within the EU by the EU's member countries with the EU's values embedded in them.

The first solution is not going to happen, as Linux is still relatively unknown all things considered and I don't see the French government employees learning how to use this OS and/or the applications running on it by themselves.

Secondly in times of budget cuts like in France currently, the government is not about to rip all the Microsoft products off and replace them with something that would take years to transition to and cost a fortune to implement.

So that leaves the homegrown solution. Unfortunately the work to move off of Microsoft et al should have started 10 years ago but it hasn't. Europe has completely dropped the ball on tech and now it's coming back to bit it in the ass.

The Draghi report from last year was supposed to kick things into gear but we will be lucky to see anything coming through within the next 5 years and by this stage the US tech giants will have entrenched themselves even more in the EU.

I am sorry to say but this is a failure that will resonate for the many decades to come.

I doubt that the average employee could tell Linux and Windows apart if you applied a Window-style skin to Linux.

But at least in Germany, I've seen Windows being written into agreements between state governments and trade unions representing clerks and employees. Good luck changing those without a negotiation running 3 years.

Lots of people would be disrupted by having to move off MS Office. Not insurmountably so, and MS ironically helps make the case that people can learn new things by often changing their own product interfaces.

If you really want to smooth out the transition, there's also companies which would be happy to help you setup and maintain your office environnement on Linux.

A cool idea could be to build a replica of Windows, but running Linux and market it to municipalities, NGOs and State entities.

> I doubt that the average employee could tell Linux and Windows apart if you applied a Window-style skin to Linux.

It doesnt really matter if the UI is the same or almost the same. We are talking about rolling out an entire new suite of tools to every government worker in a given country.

It would take years to plan the migration, then start deploying it in stages to the less critical services of said government while you work out all the kinks.

While that is happening, you most likely will need to support both systems for a while so that you have a fallback if things go wrong with the new system.

Then you will need to train all these employees properly so that they can potentially troubleshoot some of the issues they encounter and give them enough time to become as productive as they were before the new system rolled out.

> But at least in Germany, I've seen Windows being written into agreements between state governments and trade unions representing clerks and employees. Good luck changing those without a negotiation running 3 years.

And there is that too. I am sure its the case in many countries.

Finally this migration if successful would not bear any fruits to the person who initiates it at best because by the time the roll out is complete this person will have moved on to another position, be elected somewhere else or retired.

But if it goes badly, you can be sure that this will be used by the opposition political parties to attack the governing party and accuse them of bringing the entire country's services to a stand still.

It's definitely no "let's just do it over the weekend" job, but otoh, you don't have to do it all at once, nobody uses every tool. You'd probably need to still roll out by unit or at least in waves (e.g. for the unit that handles building permits, which is much less complex).

I do agree that there's no good incentive. The other reason I've learned is their organizational issues: heavy focus on certifications, much lower salary vs private industry, heavy on the bureaucracy and office politics, and a lot of dead weight. That doesn't get you skilled people with plenty of motivation, and you get the outcome you'd expect.

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