[WaryByDesign]

It's... an admirable goal, but it pretty much remains to be seen if "France"[1] follows through.

Previous attempts to "ditch Windows" have not ended that well. Munich in 2003, the entire Federal German government in 2009, Munich again in 2013, Munich again in 2021, and so on. Most common end-result: back to Windows.

Breaking points are typically the lack of an "Office 2016" compatible suite, lack of "Adobe PDF" tooling, and a mishmash of legacy apps. The latter seems trivially addressable by a "Remote Desktop/RemoteApps" environment, but there are definitely issues, mostly surrounding printing and clipboard handling.

All of that can be solved, but definitely requires more funding and, crucially, coordination, beyond "Open Source Cures All."

[1] Oh, I just love it when an entire culturally-diverse region gets lumped in together, or, when, as in this case, ~6M French government employees are treated as a homogeneous group.

[ricw]

Munich is a bad example - they were effectively „bought out“ by Microsoft by investing hugely into the local economy in the form of offices and employees. It was also two parties that kept flip flopping with different priorities. Linux itself had some hiccups but was fine from what I recall.

[WaryByDesign]

> they were effectively "bought out" by Microsoft

Yeah, let me dispute that. They were, at least on three occasions, forced to roll back due to "citizen sent me X and can't open it" and/or "sent Y to citizen and they can't open it" concerns.

Mind you: these issues still persist in a fully Microsoft/Adobe "solution environment", but less so than in the "disregard all and move to Linux" situation.

And to be perfectly clear: that's all unacceptable. But it adds another, say, EUR 2B to the equation.

[gus_]

https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/

It doesn't matter if this or that doesn't work. Or if Microslop pressures to continue using Winslop.

Now the reasons are geopolitical.

[Akronymus]

Werent the munich government employees quite happy with linux, but microsofts lobbying with their headquarters got them to switch back?

[Slothrop99]

Were they? Sounded like they stuck with some terrible old version of OpenOffice ("brokenoffice"). Users don't really care about the OS, its the apps.

[WaryByDesign]

I'm not aware of Microsoft's economic footprint in the Munich region, but I doubt it's significant.

The complaints that lead to the several-reversions-to-Windows at the time, as I recall, were all around "citizen sent me X, can't open X"

And those are all addressable issues, but not without significant know-how and funding.

[LtWorf]

> I'm not aware of Microsoft's economic footprint in the Munich region, but I doubt it's significant.

Perhaps be aware before explaining everyone how things really are?

[samsk]

Earlier attempts were mostly about money and ideology. Now its a question of security, thanks to one 'clever' 'businessman'. So thanks to his _great_ efforts, it might actually work out this time.

[atherton94027]

You must be German — the French state is a lot more top down than Germany with its regions, so generally these kinds of mandates get applied broadly

[WaryByDesign]

> You must be German

Oof, that's just offensive!

Anyway, most German Linux 'mandates' were indeed regional, and (for good reasons!) failed to migrate 'upstream'.

Whether the French mandate takes hold remains to be seen. "We're not Germany" is not the end-all argument it might seem to be to you.

[atherton94027]

Sorry I didn't see your reply, what was it about?

[mixmastamyk]

If they only diverted 10% of the budget from MS to solving issues they’d have had a solution a decade or two ago.

[WaryByDesign]

I'm... not so sure? The French government has, widely seen, 6M employees. Given retail pricing of EUR200/seat/year (and they definitely have a better arrangement), that's 1.2B, and I'm not sure that's enough to provide an identity management plus office apps plus file storage solution? And at 10% of that? Absolutely forget it...

[mixmastamyk]

All of that came about without them spending anything. So the extra is just to fix bugs and do integration work. StarOffice (LibreOffice ancestor) existed in the 90s—I used it and it was fine for government work.

File storage? Cheap by Y2K as well.

[WaryByDesign]

[flagged]

[dang]

You posted this text in 5 separate places. Worse, you edited 7 previous comments by gutting their original text and replacing them with this same tantrum. That's abusive.

I'm not going to ban you for this because everyone goes on tilt sometimes, but please don't pull a trick like that on HN again.

I've restored the text of the 7 edited comments to what it was before you vandalized them. I've also canceled the downvotes on those posts because I agree with you that the downvotes were unfair. (At least I think I do - I didn't read them closely and don't know the context.) I hope the latter feels at least a little bit like a good faith gesture, because that's how I'm intending it.

(The 5 comments that only ever said "[Yeah, if I'm just gonna be down-voted to oblivion regardless of my participation in the comments, good luck with your 'meaningful discussion'}" remain downvoted and flagged since obviously they were against the site guidelines.)

[mixmastamyk]

It's really cheap to run FOSS on commodity PCs in the twenty first century. Hetzner is very reasonable in the cloud more recently.

It's not a binary switch either, you build the platform bit by bit every year and roll it out to more and more workers. Four dimensional thinking, that could have succeeded already, a decade plus ago.

Sure a few components would have to be written in the meantime. Just a few million a year would be a huge boost to gaps in FOSS.

[danny_codes]

You’re saying a government couldn’t take open source building blocks and run.. office apps with basic security and.. file storage? For $100M a year? This could be done with a 30 person team

[2000UltraDeluxe]

30 people managing the hardware? Sure, if you get good deals on the hardware itself, the employees stay healthy, and you have everything so centralised you don't need multiple people on call.

Centralising things to that level and supporting the users of the entire government structure of a country the size of France -- one of the countries the sun _never_ sets on -- while it's transitioning from decades of Microsoft dependency to an open source ecosystem? Heh, no.

[mixmastamyk]

Hetzner exists.

The claim above of 30 is not particularly important, the point is to lean on the community. Millions a year would get you incredibly far. Many are already helping for free.

24/7 linux webservers existed already by the late nineties.

[2000UltraDeluxe]

"Helping for free" doesn't cut it when dealing with governments. Even if everyone had gone the Linux route 20 years ago we'd still have an entire ecosystem of commercial businesses selling and operating it; imagine what Red Hat would look like with Microsoft actually out of the picture.

We'd have just as many consultancy firms and layers of beuraucracy without Microsoft, and France wouldn't be operating their entire government IT stack, all the way down to individual workstations, that much cheaper than it is now.

[WaryByDesign]

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying, If your mythical 30-person teams were achievable, a lot of major US 'cyber'security firms would be in major trouble. Pop-quiz, hotshot: what does Citrix (market valuation: USD 16.5B), technically, have over your team (market valuation: USD 0B)?

[fxtentacle]

Munich led to "all of Schleswig-Holstein" in Germany. 44,000 Exchange mailboxes replaced with Open-Xchange. 25,000 Windows+Office desktops replaced with Linux+OpenOffice.

[WaryByDesign]

Nope. That was rolled back: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

And, again, I'd very much like Microsoft to lose here, but, there are real issues here

[fxtentacle]

Munich was rolled back but inspired SH to do it instead of them.

[bornfreddy]

Motivation matters.