"Government wants to move to LibreOffice from Microsoft"
Okay great but are they also going to contribute toward its improvement, or are they just going to expect an off-the-shelf perfect equivalent again and give up in 6 months because "employees had trouble getting used to the new software"
Like, there's all this talk about 'digital sovereignty' and yet they constantly miss the most important part of actually achieving that: you need to figure out who your 'community' is, and *help to make it stronger*, not just take from it
Instead, we mostly just get governments paying consultancies to deploy and manage these things under the assumption that this "builds a local economy" and helps keep things running, completely failing to understand the underlying dynamics and economics of FOSS projects and what their role in them should be
"Ah well but the way FOSS projects work doesn't fit into the tendering and purchasing procedures of the government, so they have to hire consultancies"
I literally do not care. It is the job of the government to adapt itself to the needs of society, not the other way around. This is not an excuse. Go fucking fix it.
@joepie91 The past decades, any organisation screaming "Let's go FOSS", seems to get approached by a MS salesperson that offers them cheap shiny licences for 5 years and then the decisionmakers quickly budge.
So, any time I hear some org say it, I'll won't hold my breath. I'll cheer when I see they actually /do/ successfully do the entire transition.
@joepie91 Are you trying to say that collaborative open projects expect you to collaborate? Nonsense! /s
I feel like there are multiple problems here, though. There is a bias towards commercial products, for sure. But there are also other problems. From talking with people, it seems like there's a money/labor issue, and there's a "contributing" issue.
The first one - it looks like many organizations have money, but not a lot of people doing work (or they have a lot of people that are working ineffectively). So they try to buy their way out of problems. There's no obvious way to throw money at open source - there are no sales managers, no paid plans, no paid support.
The second one - it's usually highly non-trivial to actually contribute back to software. UI/UX issues are often underprioritized, and merely reporting on an issue requires searching issues through Github and writing a good bug report - which isn't very easy for non-technical people.
@KFears All these things are true, but they're also not excuses. Governments should be hiring technical people themselves who *also* work on contributing back to the software they are using.
There's this incessant drive to outsource everything, particularly in Europe, and that's ultimately at the root of all this and it needs to go. It's literally just a mechanism for funneling money to private industry.
@joepie91 Yep... Europeans just love to outsource their shit to other countries. Sometimes to Murrica, sometimes to consultancies that hire third-world country workers. I'm working at a consultancy, and holy shit, does the industry love outsourcing.
I can see some business purpose in this, because when you hire a consultancy, you technically get a contract where warranties and liabilities are written down. And open source is always "no warranty, no liability". But considering that those are almost never needed in practice, and outsource work is usually shit, this really strikes me as a cultural problem.
I do think it's rather bizarre how open source is quite similar to very poorly funded public research, yet the actual industry is largely "real estate" business with gazillions of shady subcontractors.
@joepie91 I hear a lot of "But I don't know how to use it" from people when suggesting to something that does the same job in the same way (e.g. Signal, LibreOffice, Mastodon), and now I'm wondering if they have the same issue when using a door lock they've not used before. "Oh, it's an Ingersoll door lock: I don't know how that works, I use Yale!".
This is not subtooting a specific government by the way, it seems applicable to almost every "let's go use FOSS!" move from the past decade