Schleswig-Holstein’s migration to LibreOffice reaches 80% completion, with a one-time €9 million investment on cards for 2026.
I’m always excited by these kinds of headlines! I hope they stick with open source and don’t switch back.
The best thing about this is that eventually these organizations are going to want features and fixes that don’t exist yet in the open source software they’re using, at which point they’ll have to invest in development. If this becomes a trend I think it will mean more stability and more functionality in open software in general.
Not just that, it’s also beneficial to the organization because that can just… implement it themselves, and then do a pull request, instead of being reliant upon a corporation to care about your desires. Literally a win-win. I hope state actors come to realize that sooner rather than later, it only makes sense
I look forward to EU Linux.
SUSE, Manjaro, Alpine Linux, CRUX, and NixOS are all technically European (as are many others).
Mint is also european (based on Ireland), even though it’s based on Ubuntu and Debian,
both of which are American (but Debian is FOSS)Edit: Ubuntu is based on London and was founded by South Africans, but has propietary snaps (disabled on Mint). Debian was founded by an American but is FOSS so it operates worldwide.
All FOSS operates worldwide; the point of FOSS is that it provides a paradigm that directly counters the false-scarcity that (often capitalist) systems induce.
(not directed at you, of course)
And Mint has heavily invested in a version that goes to Debian skipping Ubuntu, I think it should have reached stable status by now.
Isn’t Ubuntu South African?
The word yes
The company no, it’s British or something
Guix, btw.
Sure, but I mean a distro developed/maintained/curated officially by the EU or one of its member governments.
I’m all for it, but I am not sure any more wath the political trend on surveillance.
I’m not overly concerned with an organization trying to build surveillance functions into an open source operating system.
Hard pass. I’m not interested in any software curated by a western government.
Or eastern for that matters
ah, well then, RedStar OS is for you!
I’m not sure a government can have the agility necessary for keeping a good track of good decisions over a reasonable amount of time.
I’d bet it would take a planification similar to building a nuclear reactor or an airport: over budget, blown over scheduled time, fulfilling specs on paper but not in spirit, and used only when people have no other option ( goes without saying all governments are a monopoly, you can’t have 2 bodies having powers over a particular geographic place).
On the other hand, a government organization might do a better job of keeping track of development goals over time. It might be slower than independent open source projects, but it would probably also be more stable than most Linux distros. Enterprise-level software has different requirements and different development cycles from consumer-level software. Having a competing option for Red Hat could only be a good thing.
I’d bet it would take a planification similar to building a nuclear reactor or an airport: over budget, blown over scheduled time, fulfilling specs on paper but not in spirit, and used only when people have no other option
It’s not as if they’d be starting from scratch, it would most likely still be Linux. But they might bring more focus to long-term stability and especially cybersecurity implementations to meet government security requirements.
You can help here: https://eu-os.eu/
They actually seem to run into it pretty quickly. The 20% have not switched, because LibreOffice seems to lack features.
Which is always a concern … but at the same time, the more often organizations switch, the more people realize the benefits and eventually, the switch will stick permanently.
I perceive that the ground is prepared well enough for many of those to just stay. And contribute a bit.
Linux ecosystem is very solid, I don’t get why governments would prefer proprietary code, specially after all NSA debacle.
Support contracts aren’t always a thing for FOSS projects, and companies need support contracts to get support from the source when dealing with P1 outages and the like.
And states like bavaria are hard prone on windows because Söder has a small prick and “is not like those northeners”
More likey they are prone on it, because they get a cut from it. There is a big Microsoft office in Bavaria.
Didn’t that one just “accidentally” happen when München started building their LiMux distribution, and after Steve Ballmer went to visit them personally?
I heard about that story as well, not sure how factfull it is, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
eh söder doesn’t decide everything personally
i would be surprised if windows is actually in the backend anywhere
linux is hard to sell as frontend to the average worker tho
Minister presidents do decide such a thing. They can say which system the state administration uses. See Schleswig-Hollstein, NRW
Considering they mainly advertise for windows admins they very likely use winserver I guess.
I still remember when Bavaria was one of the first to use Linux.
Great, but they should donate some of the saved money to open source projects they are using to make sure they stay updated.
While the biggest state in Germany decided to make a deal with Microsoft for an estimate of 1000 Million Euros:
(Article is in German) https://www.heise.de/news/Vertrag-soll-bis-Jahresende-stehen-Bayern-will-in-die-Microsoft-Cloud-11066618.html
Bayern is a bit of a conservative shithole if you ask me. Since 1957 the CSU party has always won the leadership of the state executive. They are constantly hindering green energy production and they suck BWM-cock regarding internal combustion engine cars. It does not surprise me, that they are shit on this question too.
Edit: Ups, wahrscheinlich hätte ich dir das nicht erklären müssen, wenn du ja deutsche Heise Artikellinks postest… Ich lasse es jetzt aber für andere Leser stehen.
Many more governed could and should inspire!
Schleswig-Holstein is shaking out to be such a good example of Proven Track Record ™️ for use of FOSS software in public administration, or any large organization really.
Anybody advocating for other public administrations to migrate can point loudly at Schleswig-Holstein that it’s been done before and how to do it right. No more “that would never work” from the proprietary nay-sayers
Sweet! And turning around and reinvesting that money is the right move!
Bravo Deutschland!!!
if this were a socialist country, libreoffice would’ve been used a lot more than microsoft office. seriously!
oh and this is my 250th comment here on this lemmy instance. seriously!
Fantastic news, the more of these we have the easier it becomes
I saw you can run old versions of Microsoft office via wine for free, is that technically legal such that they can do that?
Depends on the license and version. I do know some old office versions are “forever” use since it was before madness became standard practice. Now how useful old office versions would be? No idea, however Libreoffice is up to date, useful and open.
It’s not one that you previously bought, it just appears as an option in the software manager.
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I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about, as it is way off topic and I couldn’t find anything on it in this article.
But if you’re referring to the Tesla gigafactory in Brandenburg, that’s a different state, different state government making the decisions.
All in all: non-sequitur.
