"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"
@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.