[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.

[mixmastamyk]

The difference is that because of open-source there would be competition in those services. And they could take any of it in house at a discount with reasonably priced govt workers. IOW, they'd have choices instead of handcuffs.

They'd be in better situation on all counts. It pays to think ahead to the future and remove dependencies. Where do you want to be in five years? Still in an abusive relationship?

[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)?