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The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source

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597 points doener | 4 comments | 07 Dec 25 13:21 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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GnarfGnarf ◴[07 Dec 25 13:48 UTC] No.46181666[source]▶
I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic sovereignty. I'm sure Microsoft, under orders from the U.S. government, could disable all computers in any country or organization, at the flick of a switch.

Imagine how Open Source Software could improve if a consortium of nations put their money and resources into commissioning bug fixes and enhancements, which would be of collective benefit.

Apart from a few niche cases, the needs of most government bureaucracies would be well served by currently available OSS word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and graphics software.

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jll29 ◴[07 Dec 25 14:00 UTC] No.46181734[source]▶
The sabotage scenario is perhaps less likely than the alternative scenario of industrial and political espionage.

There are also practical advantages: the ability to fix a bug in-house instead of waiting for a technology giant from another continent.

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lo_zamoyski ◴[07 Dec 25 14:04 UTC] No.46181754[source]▶
> the ability to fix a bug in-house

Yes, but bureaucracies make this impossible. If you have worked at a bank before, you'll know how difficult it is to make a change to some in-house piece of software. And that's a bank, not a gov't institution. Think how much more friction there will be in the latter.

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1. grim_io ◴[07 Dec 25 14:19 UTC] No.46181838[source]▶
The culture can only change when it actually becomes possible to make any changes to the systems.

If all the software one institution uses comes in the form of proprietary binaries, there is simply no need to even think about making policies about fixing those systems in-house.

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2. nickff ◴[07 Dec 25 15:36 UTC] No.46182433[source]▶
These institutions don’t bother making fixes where they can, so it seems unlikely that giving them more options will change much. Ironically, things like windows auto-update being the default probably actually help their IT departments maintain some level of security
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3. grim_io ◴[07 Dec 25 15:38 UTC] No.46182452[source]▶
Auto update is not rocket science. Linux distributions have it too.
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4. 1718627440 ◴[07 Dec 25 17:17 UTC] No.46183288{3}[source]▶
Yeah and it is better. Most things can be updated without a reboot and even for the kernel, you can either live-patch it (not always possible) or reboot only the kernel.