this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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The world should wake up from tech dependence. Let the EU massively invest in FOSS.

Edit: as raised by comments, my title was not incorrect but did omit that it's actually the US that imposed sanctions, to which MS chose to comply. Changed the title.

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[–] [email protected] 112 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (24 children)

Do people really still need to be explained why proprietary software is bad?
I have zero understanding of why an organization like ICC would use it? Any court needs to be independent, and using proprietary software clearly compromises that. The same goes for public services. And private enterprises should of course avoid it in their own interest.

Open source proponents have tried to explain this simple fact for more than 20 years. But 90% of people simply don't care even just a little.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

Just speaking as someone in the field, you would be surprised at how many IT decisions happen the way they do because nobody wants to be the one who gets called when an ornery geriatric complains that LibreOffice doesn't have the 'mail merge' button in the right place.

The old saying goes, "nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco."

[–] [email protected] 28 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

You are absolutely right, and I can understand that for a company IT department, but for public institutions, there are so many factors that speak for using open source software.
Public institutions have requirements of for instance transparency private businesses don't have.
Here universities have been aware of this for all of those 20+ years, and usually the ones that advice governments come from universities.
But somehow monetary interests comes in between, and lobby their expensive proprietary solutions. And that's the real problem I think, proprietary vendors have loads of money for lobbying, while open source has almost zero.

The old saying goes, “nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco.”

That would be IBM, and that saying is from way before Cisco was even founded.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

The University where I studied switched from Linux to Windows because to many people complained that it was "too hard". Even the computers in the library that were just for searching books aka 90% of the time just using the browser were switched from Linux to Windows because the students complained. I now work in a job where most of our customers are public institutions and you won't even get our IT department to let go of decade old outdated software. Too many old people who will throw a hissy fit if anything suddenly looks different from what they've been used to for 30 years.

My contract also won't be renewed. My bosses reason that he explicitly told me is: I don't fit in because I ask too many questions like "Why don't we use better alternatives for X software." We do "project planning" with email-chains and Excel sheets. No, we can't have any project planning tools, because this is what the 60-year old colleagues have been doing since their first day 43 years ago. If it was good enough for them back then it's good enough for you now. That's just how we do it here, since you can't get used to it we're letting you go. Etc pp, you get the idea. And the people in the IT department are the same! Never change a running system, it's worked for 40 years now, no need to try something new.

There's just no way you'll get a public institution to switch to open source. Everybody over 50 will scream bloody murder about having to change how they work and it'll be changed back in no time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

I know someone who retired early because our ticketing system changed.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I know it with SAP, but I am young (not really) and from Germany, so that checks out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Here I was hoping leaving the States would free me from SAP

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

No, if you are headed for Germany... It's probably worse here, since they're a german company.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

shaking, crying, throwing up

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