Re: Germany looking to end reliance on US tech giant

Microsoft isn't garbage - it's just that commercial software development doesn't work as well as the Linux-style collective development. Google isn't all that evil - it's just constrained by commercial considerations in much the same way that Microsoft is.

No human construct will ever be totally reliable. Provably correct software was a fad at one stage, but my impression is that it turned out to be an unattainable ambition.

Whoever you hire, possibly the developer. Paying for open code is possible.

As you know there's an European Union and even your hypothetical OS's are probably GNU\Linux, not that hard to interoperate.

So what, release format have nothing to do with code openness.

And the notion that access to the source code means you can pay someone to audit it for you is provably effective. As if the large software manufacturers haven't had loads of serious vulnerabilities. Particularly Microsoft.

Having Microsoft accountable doesn't actually mean anything.

But the people in the political decisions we're discussing did. It's the people they hired who briefed the politicians in this matter in the first place. I haven't saved the discrete EU organization links but the FSFE page is a good entry point for those articles.

Open source has nothing to do with that, same argument can be made for switching proprietary vendors. It's called 'vendor lock-in'. The Linux environment has avoided that better and is currently an informal standard across many platforms.

How does public source code hinder that? Rather than merely trusting the vendor you can observe development practices at any time ensuring there is discipline and accountability.

What does that have to do with code licensing? At worst you get the same negligence you might have gotten from a bad proprietary vendor and at best you can actually secure your enterprise by auditing the code. What $tep$ protect one from an irresponsible proprietary vendor?

Its? Whose? And "pretend"?

And again the licensing of the code does not exclude commercial contracts. There can PAID STAFF either on the development side, the user side or both. An open project can also disregard

Which mechanisms? Microsoft just two years ago had a massive breach of security on their cloud offering:

If you want a secure service you have to invest in it, no surprise. That's true for both proprietary and open solutions. With proprietary services the only option is to leave and that's what these customers are doing. With open software not only can you audit the development but you also can switch developers and keep the code, licensing allowing for forks.

Rather than fretting about interoperability nations and institutions can create software jointly (which is what is being arranged) and design in their mutual needs.

Your invalid argument rests on entities hiring services and not securing them, the good faith of proprietary vendors and magical thinking. In reality FOSS software is not fundamentally compromised. The amount of FOSS software that's involved on the transmission of these messages is proof enough of that. Internet rests on NGINX and Apache just fine, Linux and BSD are widespread in secure applications and so on... Every major corporation integrates FOSS software in their product nowadays.

The notion that an entire country is choosing one system over another is exactly the problem.

My shop gave up on Microsoft ages ago, when MS changed their EULA to allow them to read and use any user data for any purpose.

I have no idea why anyone is still using their stuff at this point. Certainly it’s not a national security or patriotic issue.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That's how small firms work. Bigger firms hire their own domestic expert

- who usually has good contacts in the development community.

There's plenty that real people can do. Some chunks of Linux are generated by groups within the software industry who want a particular bit of Linux to work better to serve their particular interests. Presumably they'd like to sell their improvements, but they would freeze then out of a lot of productive conversations.

That's the lowest level of involvement. There are higher levels.

This isn't the only business model available.

There are other possible treadmills. Some may pay better than yours.

Belgium has proportional respresentation. It's hard for a Trump-populist to get much power in that kind of political environment.

In the adjacent Netherlands Geert Wilders got 30% of the vote at one point (so his was the largest party), but all the other political parties banded together to keep him out of executive power.

People know how to use them. Familiarity breeds a lot of justified contempt, but training people to use better software costs time and money, and the MS/Apple products mostly work well enough.

I once had a project on the V93000 wafer tester. They needed someone who could handle TDRs and TICs while not being shocked by 10 M lines of "user land" source code. That intersection is small :-)

The wafer testers run Red Hat Linux which is excellent. RedHat support costs an arm and a leg but is worth every penny.

Do you see it as a problem to tag the relevant language packs? That is so retro. 30 years?

That was not Microsoft, that was IBM. On the 370 command line, the '/' denotes an option and IBM still had the illusion that they would be king of the hill forever.

cheers, Gerhard

RedHat is a different kind of vendor from Microsoft.

The Linux environment is international. The relevant language packs just give access to a common core of software. Google translate doesn't change the meaning of the message. There are real problems in providing perfect translations, but program language packs don't need perfect translation.

The lack of comprehension is all yours.

Fighter jets are extremely complicated beasts.

Nuclear weapons are a lot simpler. and quite few people have developed their own, all independently, and all of them produce the same mushroom cloud. Fission bombs do come in a range of sizes, fission-fusion bombs can make a bigger bang, and fission-fusion-fission bombs can be even bigger and quite a bit dirtier (as lots of neutrons can convert lots of U-238 into lots of Pu-239 very quickly).

No, me or they actually aren't because I'm engaging with your inane and unreal "FrancOS" examples. Are countries purchasing their own insular Windows or Office or Exchange or whatever, now? WindowsFR? Do you believe what keeps them from doing so is Microsoft won't sell it to them?

Maybe provide some tangible examples of what interoperability issues you have in mind because I'm not seeing it. Let's dispense with the <Country>OS strawman now.

Yes, I mentioned the EU. Not my fault you associate that with "forcing". The EU as a whole functions as an interoperability interface between countries BY CONCENSUS. It exists in large part so that countries don't need all to run the same systems to coordinate with each other — it provides its own interfaces for them to do so.

Then you know many large FOSS projects (Linux distros including) offer paid support or you've seen how in certain FOSS projects the consumer hires the developer or has their own developers contribute.

You still have alternate vendors. There's no reason you can't go back to Microsoft or whomever in the future. What's the alternate vendor to Windows?

I changed my diet long ago and I do exercise. You're projecting. These admonitions about FOSS aren't new and they're not impossible to heed.

First you conflate states and corporations and now you conflate corporations with "folks". How many "folks" pay for and use Windows support?

I don't know how you do things. Western European countries all have IT agencies and these interface with users and vendors. Whenever a downstream user needs support they do not reach out to the vendor's support, they reach out to their IT agency. That's the PAID STAFF state-side.

These agencies are the very ones saying that given vendors' current terms, political demands and infrastructure and user's needs they need means to contract FOSS software alongside proprietary. Currently there are no set frameworks for public contracting of open software like there are for proprietary vendors.

On top of that European countries and EU offices are concerned with data sovereignty at the moment. They're exploring hosting their own data or at least prioritizing European providers over American ones due to increasing legislative incompatibility and American providers not honoring European data regulations (or making it very expensive). EU economists also hope to kickstart an European tech sector. Due to all of that, they're obviously hoping to be able to build on FOSS rather than develop from scratch both for interoperability and cost.

Just like every corporation since M$ and now including M$ has done. Open source software is a major part of software corporations and Microsoft has become one of its major parts: see their github repository for examples of it in their products, see their acquisition of GitHub, see their takeover of Python, etc...

Google, Meta, Amazon, etc... all largely build upon open software and they deal with your objections just fine.

What does it matter how they feel? Their bottom line is unaffected and they do not change.

I have just demonstrated to you that MS doesn't. Apple does not provide services at the institutional scale we are discussing.

Yes but that is amplified by all the *You*s doing it for *EVERY* tool they use. Literally the benefit of it being public.

"Folks" don't represent institutions.

Not only is that another hypothesis, not the current state, it transparently reduces to: "If they explicitly choose not to inter-operate they won't create interoperability."

No s*it, just like proprietary vendors don't unless they have to.

Myriad of reasons why one picks a vendor. Thank you for validating my claim that opting for FOSS is as valid as proprietary offerings.

Addressing the article again, something that's missing from it is that countries aren't moving from M$ arbitrarily nor are they making a sweeping decision to prioritize or singularly choose FOSS. M$'s recent terms also have changed to the point that countries do not want to renew that specific contract: notably cost has increased markedly and they're more and more moving away from offering products + support to a consolidated managed cloud offering where not only do they hold all the data but do charge for a myriad of services that may or not be what institutions want to purchase. This mounts upon the concerns I've previously wrote of.

I don't know specifics but I saw nationwide drops or massive scaling back of Microsoft products in 2023-2024. It isn't surprising that institutions do not want to be locked into massive cloud deals. How many "folks" pay for M$ 365?

You get a support contract.

You can also actually report a bug, and if it is real, it gets acted on. Way easier that on Windows. Me, Joe Nobody, have reported bugs that got acted and solved in weeks.

Windows? Never.

...

This is very important for us. Microsoft doesn't keep our data secret from the USA. They don't honour our privacy laws.

Countries can't enforce laws on other countries. Thus they move services to where they have jurisdiction.

Depends on who you report to and what is their policy.

On the kernel I am using, for example, I get the same version with all the problems found during the month solved.

And they were attributed to him.

Allow me to clarify:

The source article and this discussion is specifically about procuring

There is no DICTATING involved. The government and it's agencies are simply dissatisfied with Microsoft's offering and looking elsewhere. Germany is not alone in that.

You either didn't read the article or somehow managed to catastrophically misinterpret it. It seems like you think the German government is about to mandate Linux and ban Microsoft or something?

D> MS tries to address I18N/L10N *in* their product offerings. And, those

Most FOSS products address localization themselves nowadays. Even if nobody wanted to pay for it there are so many crowdsourced tooling it would get done instantly.

States like everybody else these days are developing first for smartphones and the web and they already have employees doing this. Getting away from MS means they get to standardize with the web tooling.

Why would I use your dhcpd.conf? Why would France use Germany's? Those examples make no sense. It is fine to customize your system to your needs, I'm sure most of us do in this list.

Yes, there are many distros and they're all interoperable. Maybe you're trying to say interchangeable? That would be unneeded redundancy.

As I'm sure you see now this isn't what being discussed. I am not advocating mandating FOSS or banning proprietary or somehow state mandating software.

I'm objecting to your objections which I now realize stem from confusion about the matter at hand.

No, nobody is making a GermanOS. German public workers don't need their computers to interoperate with their Spanish counterparts.

We're discussing public offices. They print paper or send a PDF or an email it doesn't matter much which OS they do it from. No German DMV office is going to have their own custom dhcpd configuration much less need to sync it to another country.

Again, not at all about folks. Like I wrote governments already *have* developers developing public webpages and services, public mobile apps, public databases. Dropping Microsoft allows them to integrate the missing pieces into their current workflow, unifying deployments.

To be clear, John or Jane Doe have nothing to do with it. We're talking about the internals of public offices and services. Private individuals use whatever they want, so do corporations. That's not and has not been at stake.

This is a matter of government procurement.

No, they are trying new procurement to address the concerns I specified earlier. The political aspect is small. If Microsoft addresses those concerns, provides a better offer or pays off the right people they might change their mind. Doesn't seem too likely.

Once more, irrelevant for public institutions. I don't know a single one running Apple software and I've never heard of Apple even participating in public bids for software.

No mate, they're hiring software for public institutions. They're not mandating anything or banning US software or Microsoft. Once more they are seeking to terminate their Microsoft contract and move on to a local solution.

It has nothing to do with anyone else but that governments institutions. This is a matter of government procurement, not DICTATING anything.

Once again nobody is outlawing anything in this matter.

These are government IT agencies developing government services. They provide support to public workers using government IT services.

Citizens are tangentially affected by such a change, likely not to notice it at all.

Wow, you really made up a scenario there.

They didn't "freeload", we're arguing contracting. They're paying for that Microsoft software. The United States did not develop computing by itself and has not given it away for free (except for FOSS developers).

Nobody has developed a large platform from scratch since the 60s. Software is built on reuse and layers of abstraction. You were making statements about security and now begin a tangent on "innovating" a software stack from scratch instead of reusing trusted components and contributing to them.

Maybe you feel your government isn't, mine isn't doing too badly. Projecting again. Contracting public software tips the scale but contracting private firms doesn't? Government deals are MS main source of income.

Nobody is but your McCarthian immagination of Europe is quaint. Your premature leap to such dramatic conclusions is filled with prejudice about Europe and the European Union. You should try to be a bit more critical of inflammatory "news". A good start would be making sure you read the article before ejecting such preconceived notions about its subjects.

They will certainly try.

And forcing MS to redevelop it each release. And letting Google finally eat their lunch on office software. And allienating their customers further.

Yeah it's a change that would drive more existing customers away which is the point of the article you didn't read.

The same FOSS products have when they support proprietary formats, allowing interoperability. Walled gardens need customers before walls.

There has been no proprietary Apache successor. It was trumped by NGINX and now Caddy is the new kid on the block, both open source.

Companies seeing shortcomings in OpenSSL for example aren't working on proprietary replacements, they're developing open alternatives and hoping to standardize them.

You and everyone else, that's one of the motives European governments are procuring open software .

I have provided adequate detail of their shortcomings. Ignoring it and trying to substitute in that poor strawman is bad manners.

That's a lot of tools. A lot more than a single vendor has.

They do. Once more that's never been at stake, please read the orignal article.

That's not at all what's at stake here, disregarding what's a myopic interpretation of the subject matter you seem to think this is about. Again, procurement for public institutions. No mandating of dhcpd configuration.

They already have Linux techs because they're developing for web and mobile first. Not many developers are specializing in Windows anymore. Developers and techs all come with a grasp of *NIX out of university nowadays, seeing as it powers mobile and web stacks, services and products that aren't Windows. The future isn't looking bright for Windows and its new developments move it ever closer to *NIX. Mobile tech has all but supplanted desktop technology now. The hot new stuff runs on the web or *NIX. So really by taking on more Windows experts you're taking in what will soon be dead weight.

This isn't about subsidizing, it's the government procuring for the government.

Cheers.

Yes a major advantage of version control being ubiquitous in public code. You can trivially see changes and even cherry pick them and build your own as I'm sure you know.

You'll find most of the world participates in trade agreements that do not support such actions. See the World Trade Organization webpage for an explanation.

Even ignoring that, those are hostile actions nobody is interested in taking. There is no interest in outlawing Microsoft or any other business and governments try to arbitrate with foreign companies diplomatically.

Inertia. It's hard enough getting a large organization to standardize on anything, never mind a nation, never mind all the nations of the EU.

Nor is one approach intrinsically more secure (in any way) than any other - whatever becomes big becomes worth penetrating, and will be. And no commercial entity has a prayer against the intelligence agencies of major states.

This whole thread is pointless, but long.

Joe