Comment on A German state is ditching Windows and Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions

Toes@ani.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  If governments actually employed most of the developers who build their products, and cut out most of the private middlemen consultants, managers, sales staff etc they could 1) build an engineering capability without surveillance capitalism, focused on data security and privacy 2) save money 4) create productivity multipliers by unifying and sharing code for common functions across governments around the world 5) return our tax dollars to us through FOSS software that benefit us, instead of enriching big tech corporations already richer and more powerful than most nation states.

  For example, covid tracking apps — instead of every dumb cunt government paying tens/hundreds of millions for consultants to reinvent the wheel or reskin someone else’s code, they could have had in house devs coordinate common FOSS codebases and collectively saved 80% of the cost. This is the same for most services using proprietary software.

  Politicians are criminally corrupt idiots though, so they’ll continue enriching big tech and surveillance capitalism at the expense of civilisation.

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  • barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If governments actually employed most of the development teams who build their services, and cut out most of the private middlemen consultants, managers, sales staff etc

    You mean this? They’ve been working on it for a while, this is about adopting stuff they’ve already done.

    For example, covid tracking apps

    Germany’s is open source. Developed by Telekom and SAP, most of the money didn’t go towards development (it’s simple enough of an app, after all) but infrastructure and end-user support. You can’t just tell random FLOSS people to deal with 80 million DAUs.

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    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yes. I’m aware there are a few who appear to be moving in the right direction, but I have strong doubts it’ll become more than an outlier.

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  • Reverendender@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You’ve got my vote

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  • perviouslyiner@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Example: theregister.com/…/local_council_tech_struggles/

    Maybe if they collectively owned a software company it would be more responsive.

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