[Y_Y]

So why don't national governments and local councils, create and maintain software for the public good, like toilets?

I mean this in the euro-socialist model. If that's anathema to you, substitute charity or benevolent technocrat.

[zaarn]

The EU has a lot of software projects and a lot of them are open source (EUPL licensed, which is compatible with most other FOSS licenses, it's sort of a EU-compatible GPL). The problem is that most of it is self-dogfooding software, ie, software that meets the needs of the EU governance, which is not necessarily something that is a need in a lot of other institutions like corporations.

You're, however, free to release software under EUPL to indicate you support the EU in the free software effort.

[chrisseaton]

Software often doesn't look like a good idea up-front, so nobody would pay for it up-front.

If you went to the government or a charity in 2003 before Facebook and said you wanted funding to build it because it'll be critical to society in the future, you'd be laughed out.

[dnautics]

And there's no guarantee that what you would build wouldn't be horrible in the same way because it might be inherent to social media (vs inherent to ad-driven social media... I don't know but no one has the data), or possibly horrible in a completely different be way from how Facebook is horrible now.

[chopin]

That's a good question. On the one hand, probably there would be much being developed which isn't used (like the search engines subsidized by the EU). On the other hand I'd love to see a real OS/Desktop alternative being developed. I use Linux now, but I think to be used in Enterprises or public service it lacks features as good central maintainability (where Microsoft really shines). AD integration is really difficult with Linux Desktops and I am not aware of any (good) alternative to group policies.

I absolutely loathe the fact that Windows (and Windows 10 specially) is used in public services.

[kriro]

"""I use Linux now, but I think to be used in Enterprises or public service it lacks features as good central maintainability (where Microsoft really shines)"""

I think in a Linux only environment maintainability is pretty good. Especially for centralized software rollouts and updates (and security fixes) I prefer Linux over Windows. There's virtualization and software packaging solutions in Windows land but from my experience the things that work best are usually from third parties, cost quite a bit and don't work all that great in many edge cases.

For user management in Linuxland, Kerberos for authentication and LDAP for authorization works pretty well. But AD in Windowsland is very good.

As you said, the problems start once you enter a mixed environment (which is pretty much always the case). I'm not sure if the blame should be put on Windowsland or Linuxland in mixed environments but it's usually put on Linux.

[chopin]

Any good literature how a proper Linux only landscape is maintained?

Previously I had an AD domain running (to integrate Win7 machines) via Samba4. When I switched the Win7 machines to Linux, I found usage awkward (performance, strange user names such as [e-mail], slow shares). I switched to local users and sshfs instead of shares. This would make for a more convoluted onboarding of new users (which is not a use case for me). However I'd be interested how this would be solved in an Enterprise environment.

[tonyedgecombe]

If central government develops something then I would expect it's going to be specific to their requirements. Local government on the other hand could get huge benefits from sharing code.

[fghtr]

There is a petition about it:

https://publiccode.eu