The EU is pumping a lot of money into FLOSS, often not even for administrative use (like, say, lemmy gets EU funding), but at far as adoption rate in administration is concerned well the Commission is one of the worst offenders. As in municipalities realising they can’t fully switch to LibreOffice because they need to apply for EU funds and the commission only accepts .docx. Parliament happily spending money on something and the executive getting around to getting its shit together are two different things.
OTOH it’s not all about Microsoft and the like, a lot of administrative software is special-purpose, written by private companies according to specs, paid for by public money. Making that kind of thing open source is a no-brainer. It’s also a way better use of money to improve and customise some open source ERP than to go to SAP and get a customised solution there.
And a lot of that has to do with lacking competency in administration – outside of police, specifically IT forensics, it’s usually quite dire. States have no issues figuring out whether a blueprint makes sense when they’re issuing building permits, road and railroad engineering, of course they can do that, but IT? Nope. Bring in the private consultants and private consultants are basically the marketing arm of big software companies.
foliekatt@feddit.nu 2 days ago
I know what FOSS and OSS is, but what is FLOSS? Search gave me only dental hygiene results.
barsoap@lemm.ee 2 days ago
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
The FSFE has an overview over the various terms but tldr FLOSS is the one that has the least amount of neckbeards breathing down your neck because it a) includes both free software and open source and b) includes the “L” that clarifies that what’s meant is free as in speech, not free as in beer.
…and I guess it’s about software hygiene?
foliekatt@feddit.nu 2 days ago
Thank you for the explanation and link!