Why would they choose Fedora?
If they genuinely want indpendence, choose an independent distro… not a derivative.
They are hanging their coat on RedHat instead of Microsoft.
I don’t think so. With Microsoft conforming to sanctions against the ICC’s head prosecutor (a really visible person), you can bet every country is now analyzing it’s dependence on Microsoft products.
The sanctions against the ICC’s head prosecutor really told every country to analyze their dependence on Microsoft, as they might think: “we could be next, for simply doing what the USA doesn’t like.”
You can bet Microsoft is now lobbying with the USA’s government to get those sanctions removed. This was an idiotic decision of Donald Trump. He’ll notice as countries will stop using Microsoft’s products over this and go for open source solutions.
Yes, but after all the “opensourcing” project was abandoned.
The same could happen in Denmark, as governments come and go…
Would be nice! What we (addicted Linux users) lack is a noticeable desktop user mass.
Having a non-negligible -say 15%- market share on desktop would lead the hardware manufacturers to consider a correct, real support for Linux for their hardware. (Now it’s mostly the other way around, Linux supports the hardware.)
That would also cause software developers (not just of opensource but also of the commercial softwares), to make their products available on Linux.
So the world of Linux would benefit a lot if Denmark succeeds with that switch, and possibly other countries follow…
I hope they don’t expect the switch, the maintaining and operating to be free -despite Linux itself is free- but I think they are going save a heap of money by not paying for licences, and unnecessary hardware upgrades (for example 6-7th gen. intels are more than sufficient for office-like tasks, but with end of Win10, and the new Win11 official requirement of at least 8th gen intel, those computers cannot be kept running safely, thus they should be thrashed: what a waste and cost)
That amount of money could go to Linux experts (sysadmins) to keep the system running, donated to FOSS developers, etc., so in a short period the saving is not that much, but in the long run it shurely pays off very well.
Not to mention the privacy (I mean even country-wide, so not to store government data in Azure or such an off-site server park).
Not really.
Everything starts out as dreams(thoughts). A book exists in the authors head, long before he puts pen to paper.
It is our way of mapping a path ahead, before we move.
Your Open source government map may indeed come to fruition, but it will not happen if no-one bothers to think of it.
The big roadblock I see is lazy public service officials wanting the easiest off-the-shelf solution. Buying Microsoft is a way of contracting out your problems.
Microsoft is king in the office space, OEM end-user desktop, and gaming sectors.
That being said, people have become aware feasable alternatives actually exist.
That alone will encourage Suse (German) and Ubuntu (British) to work harder on getting the government desktop in the EU.
Both of them are big players who have experience and a considerable network of partners all around the world. These partners can provide all kinds of help. I wouldn’t be amazed if both distributions start offering SLA’s suited for government use.
[quote=“Xander H, post:14, topic:13729, username:xahodo”]
I wouldn’t be amazed if both distributions start offering SLA’s suited for government use.
[/quote] I wouldn’t be amazed if both distributions start offering SLA’s suited for government use.
That would be a really good start.
Something that works off the shelf is what government departments will adopt.
Is there some way we can communicate to these EU guys that Fedora was a really poor idea.?
Over the years people have encoutered difficulties with LibreOffice which, in discussions of the bug reports, were attributed to subtle but irremediable design faults in the ODF file specification. They seem to be worse than critical for school, business and administrative uses. The ones I recall are:
Impossibility of locking the formating and page layout of the Calc spreadsheet while enabling the user to input data. I installed WPS office just to see if it works in that respect, and the first time I tested that it displayed a huge and boastful pop-up.
No way of dissociating “regional” (including language) settings from number, currency and date formats.
I haven’t followed these for a while, don’t know whether they can be or have been fixed, and think the subject should be discussed here. We should not be naive about the potential risk of big FOSS development teams getting infiltrated.
Personally, I think Fedora is as good a choice as any for the purpose under discussion. Making a non-Microsoft decision was the big leap. There are probably 25 distros as good as Fedora and they’re just little leaps, easily implemented. Besides the real decision was for Libre Office instead of M$ Office.