Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia are switching to OpenTalk for teleconference. It's really wild to see things actually happen - not just research grants and talking.
I noticed a similar thing as an European with COVID. Noise from a new disease came from China, so everybody is a bit scared and does nothing. Then Italy got the full blast of it, overloaded hospitals and all. This somehow made it real. People in our ingroup were suffering. At that point, governements got actively involved.
The Microsoft vs ICC situation seems similar. IT independence is now taken serious at governemental organisations. Our ingroup got a problem.
I wonder if it's because of the ICC, or in general because suddenly US cloud providers ended up in the same category of Chinese cloud providers: under the regime of a ruler and subservient "parliament" who can make a new rule as they wish...
Munich switched to Linux in 2012. But they switched back to Microsoft in 2020 because they never could get it to work completely. At least not to the level of comfort in the old system. Open source has its advantages, but MS dominates the business world because of its tech support that is truly second to none on that scale. If Europe wants independence, they need to support local businesses and not just technology.
Well, Minich's return to MS tech oddly coincides with MS Germany moving their HQ there (and the ruling party change in the city); it's of course hard to explicitly call backroom deals on this (even though ex-mayor seems to be doing exactly that: https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/), but it might be that the decision wasn't fully technical.
Employees do not participate in the procurement process. It boils down to the requirements and how does it affect possible bidders. Most of the requirements can be easily met with OSS, there were prob others plus the drop of the price from MS
I think you are not familiar with how governments work. They are not going to rely on a random git repo, they are going to have contractors to ensure a basic level of support and bug fixing. And some contractors to ensure development and availability of tooling. And deployment and integration. They are also going to test, audit and validate updates, not just pull from remote.
Also, in some cases there are research agencies doing some work as well (sometimes they have been doing it for a long time on not-so-sexy but vital projects like Inria and the open source tax code in France).
The product is a vehicle. Governments are looking for an assurance. That comes from the reputation of the system integrators/contractors.
That said, Birmingham UK turned a £38 million Oracle Financials project into a £90 million failure after including re-implementation costs. That kind of stuff probably isn't replaceable, simply because they spent all the money.
The last thing we need is cheap consulting messing with open source projects. I don't want TCS and Accenture developing libreoffice or stuff like that and turn it into shit
It seems to be working for QGIS, where multiple consulting companies provide probably the majority of the project's manpower. It's certainly a change from fully-volunteer-driven FLOSS without deadlines or promised features, but I think it's for the better for such a large project.
I wouldn't call it a shallow dismissal. If you used Libreoffice you already know the current state of it. It is slow, buggy, way behind in features compared to MS Office and the UI is a mess. If I tried to take Excel away from my co-workers and gave them Libreoffice Calc there would be a riot.
Governments don't generally get Bob from accounting to install it on a spare laptop they have lying around. There's a contractor involved that will also be tasked with fixing bugs and other improvements and change requests. As long as the software is GPL improvements will flow back upstream somehow.
It doesn't seem like it, but can someone shed any light on whether La Suite Numerique (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en) and the Territoire Numérique Ouvert are related?
I don't think so. "Territoire Numérique Ouvert" seems to be a private project that would give tools to the "collectivités territoriales" (i.e. mayors and local people).
La Suite Numerique is a bunch of tools for a more global population. It's mostly for government workers I guess but it looks like anyone can use it. The most famous tool is Tchap (see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)>) which is used by cops in France as a secure messaging platform.
I found it hard to even bid to solve problems for councils locally. The requirements are mental sometimes, there is a reason the company would focus on consumers rather than gov sales. This in turn makes it easy for the large corps to win over contracts. There needs to be more willingness to engage locally with the engineers to help them setup and run OSS systems. With the new generation this could become true.
I said this before, but will say it again: Trump is pure evil, but he is having positive (unintended) consequences. One of them will be is the migration he is triggering away from Big Tech.
Don't count your chickens before they hatch. Europe is likely to get in as many civil society and foreign aid funding cuts as they can while Trump is in office. It's Trump all the way down.
There's been plenty Republican presidents who did evil things and mixed it up with acceptable or even positive change. Trump is the first one who's actually an evil fascist at heart. That's the difference.
You are for or against fascism.
The bipolar tribalism is in the viewpoint, there are tons of political groups out there that are not fascist, saying that Trump is pure evil doesn't exclude being open to multiple alternative and having various aligments with thoses.
No there isn't. In fact proprietary projects are very happy to run "npm" or "pip install" or the java/go equivalents and install whatever.
I expect most projects don't even check they're not violating licenses or ever audit any dependency… let alone do a security check on who the authors are.
Also just FYI, russians are not stupid. If they want to contribute malware they won't do it from their kgb email address. They will create a fake identity with a very standard WASP name.
Yes, but you have less people that can look at such commits. It's not so easy to claim that one is intrinsically more secure than the other. As someone in the cybersecurity field, I prefer FOSS software. But the situation is more nuanced than how you present it.
Don't forget, "open source" is not enough: we need _lean_ open source and I do include the SDK (then programing language).
That for software/protocol/file formats (and hardware programing interfaces...).
It is much easier to say than done, and when you read that, often it is to apply pressure on microsoft pricing only without a real intent to start to "digitally assume themselves".
Keep in mind: there is ZERO, Z-E-R-O, economic competition with big tech as they are backed by funds with thousands of billions of $ and they their billions of $ too. They will spend anybody out of business (~usually 5-10 years, even longer), and "buy" anybody (then throw them away once lock-in is assured).
For instance: libreoffice is horrible (c++ grotesque syntax complexity is the culprit), PDF file format is insane (I cannot event download the specs with noscript/basic (x)html browsers!). Better write simple utf8 text files along with some PNG images mkv(AV1/OPUS) video if needed.
Basically, you need to generate programmatically the PDF files of the administration since there are no "reasonable" (as far as I know) open source software to do so (often c++, then excluded de-facto).
I agree with you that the PDF format is insane (I have had my head buried in the spec for the last month) but it has won in the marketplace. It's unlikely anything can supersede it now.
Microsoft had a technically strong alternative but it was far too late.
We generate pdf files using weasyprint (convert html+css into cool pdf files), I think tools like this are very valuable and practical for building higher-level pdf-generators tools.
Yep, in-house PDF generators should be some sort of good middle ground, but I dunno if this 'weasyprint' is open source, is _lean_ open source? (no c++, java, etc).
When dealing with an ultra-complex file format which cannot be dodged, usually a good way to deal with it is to only use a very simple but coherent subset and enforce this usage with validation tools.
For instance, the web, noscript/basic (x)html (or you are jailed in the 2.5 web engines of the whatng cartel).
With PDF, I dunno much of the format (since I did not manage to download easily the specs), but when I have to print some text, I have a very small PDF generator for that (written ~25 years ago, so no utf-8 for me).
But what's important: such attempt must be sided with re-assessing the pertinence of the usage of the information systems, and yes, it will annoying and much less comfy and that MUST be acknowledged before even trying.
And big tech is not the only one trying hard to do vendor and developer lock-in.
You can learn more about weasyprint on their website (https://weasyprint.org/ ). It's an open source Python package that can be launched using cli or from Python code.
It uses pypdf, which is "pydyf is a low-level PDF generator written in Python and based on PDF specification 1.7" (from their README at https://github.com/CourtBouillon/pydyf ).
Compile a minimal python interpreter with tinycc &| cproc &| scc, run this pydyf and you should be good to go :)
Hopefully, its API a C API bridge for interop.
But pydyf pretends to go up to PDF 1.7: this is kind of arrogant due to the file format complexity.
That's why such tools are not enough: what's important is to evaluate and to assess a subset of the PDF format, that to reduce significantly the technical cost of ownership and exit cost, and maybe use such tools to write also validation tools in order to enforce the usage of that subset of PDF.
Very often, complex file formats (open or not) end up being generated and consumed by one program.
A warning: big tech and its minions will fight super hard everything that is simple, stable in table and does a good enough job (like noscript/basic (x)html for nearly all online services as they were working a few years back).
> usually a good way to deal with it is to only use a very simple but coherent subset and enforce this usage with validation tools
You’re right, that’s exactly what we do. We support a growing subset of HTML and CSS that’s documented. We also use the W3C testing suite for HTML/CSS, and PDF validators, on top of custom unit tests.
> And big tech is not the only one trying hard to do vendor and developer lock-in.
We "only" follow open specifications and refuse vendor-specific features to avoid lock-ins (equivalent closed-source tools love that). And we even love the other open-source "concurrents": ♥ to Paged.js and Vivliostyle, try them, they’re great too!
"Open" is not enough anymore: it also has to be lean, stable in time, and able to do a good enough _pertinent_ (can be very subjective) job (and in the case of software, that includes the SDK, for instance if some c++ or similar are around, it should be excluded de-facto for obvious reasons).
It is _EXTREMELY_ hard to justify an honnest and permanent income writing software... REALLY HARD.
Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia are switching to OpenTalk for teleconference. It's really wild to see things actually happen - not just research grants and talking.
I noticed a similar thing as an European with COVID. Noise from a new disease came from China, so everybody is a bit scared and does nothing. Then Italy got the full blast of it, overloaded hospitals and all. This somehow made it real. People in our ingroup were suffering. At that point, governements got actively involved.
The Microsoft vs ICC situation seems similar. IT independence is now taken serious at governemental organisations. Our ingroup got a problem.
I wonder if it's because of the ICC, or in general because suddenly US cloud providers ended up in the same category of Chinese cloud providers: under the regime of a ruler and subservient "parliament" who can make a new rule as they wish...
It's *almost* like those research grants and talking laid some groundwork ;)
sure, but international politics was probably a little more than the straw that broke the camel's back.
Munich switched to Linux in 2012. But they switched back to Microsoft in 2020 because they never could get it to work completely. At least not to the level of comfort in the old system. Open source has its advantages, but MS dominates the business world because of its tech support that is truly second to none on that scale. If Europe wants independence, they need to support local businesses and not just technology.
Well, Minich's return to MS tech oddly coincides with MS Germany moving their HQ there (and the ruling party change in the city); it's of course hard to explicitly call backroom deals on this (even though ex-mayor seems to be doing exactly that: https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/), but it might be that the decision wasn't fully technical.
I’m not sure “they could never get [Linux] to work completely” is a fair summary of what happened.
There’s a Hacker News thread here that goes into more detail:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21497372
Tech support is clearly very important but I have a hard time believing there wasn't a great amount of lobbying involved as well.
There was, but not from Microsoft. It was the employees who were not happy with the new systems.
Employees do not participate in the procurement process. It boils down to the requirements and how does it affect possible bidders. Most of the requirements can be easily met with OSS, there were prob others plus the drop of the price from MS
The reason is bribery.
You say that like you expect us to know what Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia are.
GIYF
Look, don't make do more work just because you are from some insignificant part of the world no one has heard of.
Tell your Tourism department to do a better job.
:-)
Article says they are switching to OnlyOffice.
It looks and feels very similar to ms office (So easier to adopt than libre)
https://www.onlyoffice.com/document-editor.aspx?docs=downloa...
https://www.onlyoffice.com/spreadsheet-editor.aspx?docs=down...
(Edited to remove statement saying paid product, as it's free with enterprise offerings as below)
I thought at first it was a typo of OpenOffice. Turns out that is not the case.
I think OnlyOffice focusing on web based collaboration only is on point. It is what organizations want today and what users expect.
You can actually use it for free, I don't know if that's just for private use, or if it's something like Nextcloud that you can self-host for free.
Thanks, found the GitHub for it
https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/
What's the open-source equivalent of a collaborative platform like Sharepoint? Without that, it's going to be tough to migrate most organizations.
It would be fair if we'd see an increase in government funding of open source projects.
Or at least the government could pay for security audits.
I think you are not familiar with how governments work. They are not going to rely on a random git repo, they are going to have contractors to ensure a basic level of support and bug fixing. And some contractors to ensure development and availability of tooling. And deployment and integration. They are also going to test, audit and validate updates, not just pull from remote.
Also, in some cases there are research agencies doing some work as well (sometimes they have been doing it for a long time on not-so-sexy but vital projects like Inria and the open source tax code in France).
The product is a vehicle. Governments are looking for an assurance. That comes from the reputation of the system integrators/contractors.
That said, Birmingham UK turned a £38 million Oracle Financials project into a £90 million failure after including re-implementation costs. That kind of stuff probably isn't replaceable, simply because they spent all the money.
this scares me.
The last thing we need is cheap consulting messing with open source projects. I don't want TCS and Accenture developing libreoffice or stuff like that and turn it into shit
It seems to be working for QGIS, where multiple consulting companies provide probably the majority of the project's manpower. It's certainly a change from fully-volunteer-driven FLOSS without deadlines or promised features, but I think it's for the better for such a large project.
Don’t worry, it’s not cheap!
Libreoffice is already shit. It works don't get me wrong but the project is far behind where it should be.
From the guidelines:
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
I wouldn't call it a shallow dismissal. If you used Libreoffice you already know the current state of it. It is slow, buggy, way behind in features compared to MS Office and the UI is a mess. If I tried to take Excel away from my co-workers and gave them Libreoffice Calc there would be a riot.
Governments don't generally get Bob from accounting to install it on a spare laptop they have lying around. There's a contractor involved that will also be tasked with fixing bugs and other improvements and change requests. As long as the software is GPL improvements will flow back upstream somehow.
Sometimes the contractor is a different department of the same government or a state enterprise. The point is -- somebody has to own the risk
I thought that in government everybody and thus nobody owns the risk?
They do. Take a look at things like NLNet, which is largely EU-funded:
https://nlnet.nl
NLNet funding has been cut:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/17/foss_funding_vanishes...
It doesn't seem like it, but can someone shed any light on whether La Suite Numerique (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en) and the Territoire Numérique Ouvert are related?
I don't think so. "Territoire Numérique Ouvert" seems to be a private project that would give tools to the "collectivités territoriales" (i.e. mayors and local people).
La Suite Numerique is a bunch of tools for a more global population. It's mostly for government workers I guess but it looks like anyone can use it. The most famous tool is Tchap (see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)>) which is used by cops in France as a secure messaging platform.
Almost certainly related. Im sure Lyon won't just use those tools, but im sure they'll also be front of the queue for consideration.
I'm not sure either, but those seem like completely parallel initiatives, with overlapping but not quite identical feature sets.
googling a bit (as a french speaker with no specific knowledge about these): doesn't seem like it
I found it hard to even bid to solve problems for councils locally. The requirements are mental sometimes, there is a reason the company would focus on consumers rather than gov sales. This in turn makes it easy for the large corps to win over contracts. There needs to be more willingness to engage locally with the engineers to help them setup and run OSS systems. With the new generation this could become true.
Do they need an intranet wiki/web page solution to replace Sharepoint as well?
I don't know. But if they do, they would probably go with the french XWiki. It is also already part of the german OpenDesk Project
Well open-source projects are free. Why pay for editing Software while you can get it for free in 2025 ??
You're very very wrong nowadays, see https://code.gouv.fr/fr/ and https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/datasets/socle-interministeriel-....
Thank you. Baseless cynicism gets tiring. Not that governments are perfect, but overall it works better than people credit them for.
The French government has been investing in open source for quite a long time now, just not on sexy and high-visibility projects.
Finally, the year of the Linux desktop!
I said this before, but will say it again: Trump is pure evil, but he is having positive (unintended) consequences. One of them will be is the migration he is triggering away from Big Tech.
Don't count your chickens before they hatch. Europe is likely to get in as many civil society and foreign aid funding cuts as they can while Trump is in office. It's Trump all the way down.
Away from AMERICAN big tech
Well, I'm a FOSS supporter but, given the current situation, I would be happy if we had European big tech.
Trump is teaching the world a lesson that they will remember in their bones.
Everyone is either pure good or pure evil now, huh? Red team or blue team, compromise is anathema, the centre a desert.
FWIW I’m no fan of Trump, but I’m even less of a fan of this bipolar tribalism.
There's been plenty Republican presidents who did evil things and mixed it up with acceptable or even positive change. Trump is the first one who's actually an evil fascist at heart. That's the difference.
You are for or against fascism. The bipolar tribalism is in the viewpoint, there are tons of political groups out there that are not fascist, saying that Trump is pure evil doesn't exclude being open to multiple alternative and having various aligments with thoses.
Nope, nobody claimed that everyone is pure good or pure evil. The claim was just about Trump.
[dead]
[flagged]
I'm thinking more: maybe we'll see an increase in commits from dubious hacker groups.
Who is going to audit these open source projects?
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22410164/linux-kernel-uni...
Seems there's more than one country doing malicious stuff on purpose.
Non-paywalled: https://archive.is/cBIzm
You mean de-paywalled ;)
In particular the people who study and work at the government funded European universities tuition free.
Most universities have a computer science department, that has a security group.
As a part of European CS bachelor's students study the Linux kernel.
CS students are not expected to do security audits in production software.
And if they do, it will certainly not be exhaustive. Nor will it be at a pace in which software is typically released.
It's funny that you think proprietary code is audited.
Well, I suppose there is a tighter control on who is allowed to commit.
No there isn't. In fact proprietary projects are very happy to run "npm" or "pip install" or the java/go equivalents and install whatever.
I expect most projects don't even check they're not violating licenses or ever audit any dependency… let alone do a security check on who the authors are.
Also just FYI, russians are not stupid. If they want to contribute malware they won't do it from their kgb email address. They will create a fake identity with a very standard WASP name.
I don't think that's true. Accountability will give proprietary projects an extra edge in terms of security.
Plenty of people think the earth is flat. Unfortunately beliefs' power to shape reality is rather limited.
Is this your standard analogy when you disagree with someone?
Yes, but you have less people that can look at such commits. It's not so easy to claim that one is intrinsically more secure than the other. As someone in the cybersecurity field, I prefer FOSS software. But the situation is more nuanced than how you present it.
That is also why I wrote people who study and work.
Security is generally better in linux based ecosystems than windows.
Microsoft also don't do sec audits - if you want a sec audit on your stack then you buy it.
It just turns out that it is much easier to audit a Linux based stack that a Windows based one
Don't forget, "open source" is not enough: we need _lean_ open source and I do include the SDK (then programing language).
That for software/protocol/file formats (and hardware programing interfaces...).
It is much easier to say than done, and when you read that, often it is to apply pressure on microsoft pricing only without a real intent to start to "digitally assume themselves".
Keep in mind: there is ZERO, Z-E-R-O, economic competition with big tech as they are backed by funds with thousands of billions of $ and they their billions of $ too. They will spend anybody out of business (~usually 5-10 years, even longer), and "buy" anybody (then throw them away once lock-in is assured).
For instance: libreoffice is horrible (c++ grotesque syntax complexity is the culprit), PDF file format is insane (I cannot event download the specs with noscript/basic (x)html browsers!). Better write simple utf8 text files along with some PNG images mkv(AV1/OPUS) video if needed.
Basically, you need to generate programmatically the PDF files of the administration since there are no "reasonable" (as far as I know) open source software to do so (often c++, then excluded de-facto).
I agree with you that the PDF format is insane (I have had my head buried in the spec for the last month) but it has won in the marketplace. It's unlikely anything can supersede it now.
Microsoft had a technically strong alternative but it was far too late.
FWIW I distribute HTML with embedded images instead of PDF usually.
And I think you can do the same with <audio> and <video>...
What was that Microsoft alternative called?
XPS
dude... 'it has won in the market' : with those words, you have already lost to big tech...
Good luck changing reality.
With "people" like you, linux or any open source alternatives would not have happened.
You are part of the problem dude.
We generate pdf files using weasyprint (convert html+css into cool pdf files), I think tools like this are very valuable and practical for building higher-level pdf-generators tools.
Yep, in-house PDF generators should be some sort of good middle ground, but I dunno if this 'weasyprint' is open source, is _lean_ open source? (no c++, java, etc).
When dealing with an ultra-complex file format which cannot be dodged, usually a good way to deal with it is to only use a very simple but coherent subset and enforce this usage with validation tools.
For instance, the web, noscript/basic (x)html (or you are jailed in the 2.5 web engines of the whatng cartel).
With PDF, I dunno much of the format (since I did not manage to download easily the specs), but when I have to print some text, I have a very small PDF generator for that (written ~25 years ago, so no utf-8 for me).
But what's important: such attempt must be sided with re-assessing the pertinence of the usage of the information systems, and yes, it will annoying and much less comfy and that MUST be acknowledged before even trying.
And big tech is not the only one trying hard to do vendor and developer lock-in.
You can learn more about weasyprint on their website (https://weasyprint.org/ ). It's an open source Python package that can be launched using cli or from Python code. It uses pypdf, which is "pydyf is a low-level PDF generator written in Python and based on PDF specification 1.7" (from their README at https://github.com/CourtBouillon/pydyf ).
Compile a minimal python interpreter with tinycc &| cproc &| scc, run this pydyf and you should be good to go :)
Hopefully, its API a C API bridge for interop.
But pydyf pretends to go up to PDF 1.7: this is kind of arrogant due to the file format complexity.
That's why such tools are not enough: what's important is to evaluate and to assess a subset of the PDF format, that to reduce significantly the technical cost of ownership and exit cost, and maybe use such tools to write also validation tools in order to enforce the usage of that subset of PDF.
Very often, complex file formats (open or not) end up being generated and consumed by one program.
A warning: big tech and its minions will fight super hard everything that is simple, stable in table and does a good enough job (like noscript/basic (x)html for nearly all online services as they were working a few years back).
Hi, WeasyPrint/pydyf dev here!
> usually a good way to deal with it is to only use a very simple but coherent subset and enforce this usage with validation tools
You’re right, that’s exactly what we do. We support a growing subset of HTML and CSS that’s documented. We also use the W3C testing suite for HTML/CSS, and PDF validators, on top of custom unit tests.
> And big tech is not the only one trying hard to do vendor and developer lock-in.
We "only" follow open specifications and refuse vendor-specific features to avoid lock-ins (equivalent closed-source tools love that). And we even love the other open-source "concurrents": ♥ to Paged.js and Vivliostyle, try them, they’re great too!
How about typst, do you not consider that competition??
[dead]
"Open" is not enough anymore: it also has to be lean, stable in time, and able to do a good enough _pertinent_ (can be very subjective) job (and in the case of software, that includes the SDK, for instance if some c++ or similar are around, it should be excluded de-facto for obvious reasons).
It is _EXTREMELY_ hard to justify an honnest and permanent income writing software... REALLY HARD.
What on earth is "lean open source"
IBM has some cool AI tools for PDFs that I used for some side project toys: https://github.com/docling-project/docling
[flagged]
> Your unrelated, idiotic disdain
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html