At this point all tech is big business. Microsoft or Apple. Azure or AWS. Google Apps or Office. Even dealing with Red Hat feels like you’re dealing with big tech.

And the thing is 99.99% of the time everything works just fine. I think these governments often struggle with moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.

▲

dietr1ch 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.

Until you have companies trying to intervene.

If Universities are publicly funded by the government, and those companies do stuff like spying on, or silencing public officials, then why should the government finance those companies?

I think its nuts that the EU has seen spying, access from services taken away, yet continues to fund those foreign companies. Are the Open Source alternatives worse? Would change suck even if the alternatives were better? It doesn't matter really. It makes no sense to pay to keep your bad deal running.

▲

kenjackson 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Unfortunately part of it is that it likely goes both ways. For example illegal subsidies to Airbus. And US companies still buy Airbus. I think all of these go into the calculus of the decisions to purchase though. It’s likely you value open source much higher than they do based on your own principles.

	▲	edwinjm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		What’s the alternative? WTO says US gave illegal aid to Boeing https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/wto-says-us-ga...

▲

LtWorf 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

USA does corruption and also does threatening if you try to not use their companies. I've read an interview to a mexican minister who basically got direct threats from the USA ambassador when the government decided to stop using windows.

▲

whynotmaybe 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Gov don't move because it's not worth the risk for people with decision power. If you succeed, there's no big win to tag on your resume, if you fail (the most likely to happen) you're out.

Moreover, the people working for the teams that should make the migration usually don't want a migration, so you have to perpetually convince them of the future gains.

For the last 10-15 years, very few revolution have been made in gov ICT. Most of the job is usually rewriting existing app in a recent language or creating apps for not critical features.

▲

Workaccount2 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's like the proposals to get rid of daylight savings time. People get ruffled when the time jump happens, so conversation of getting rid of it bubbles up.

But then a week later everyone has adjusted and the motivation to fix it is forgotten.

▲

vikingtoby 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Red Hat is IBM, the OG big tech really

	▲	hx8 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'd say Bell is the OG, which was founded about 40 years before IBM.

▲

exasperaited 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Governments also don't move to open standards because open standards doesn't have a hospitality suite to invite them to at football matches or Cheltenham.

One of the most remarkable things in British politics in the last 25 years went almost unremarked upon, in part because it happened in a reactionary way.

Blair/Brown's New Labour got so deeply into bed with Microsoft that it caused the coalition government that replaced them to develop a point of agreement and move government functions off Microsoft to open standard formats, and that change stuck. Hence this weird little country that has so many problems has accidentally good IT for anything that they rolled out, there's a lot of open data etc. etc.

That would never have happened if their decision was being guided only by lobbyists; it happened that it was so strengthened by the major tech giants working with the other side.

EU governments can absolutely do this; I find it difficult to believe universities cannot.

	▲	graemep 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That is a tiny part of it though. Lots of government functioning depends on big tech clouds. The NHS depends on AWS. A lot of the private sector does too. Everyone depends on Apple or Android phones. Card payments (and the government is pushing a move to cashless) rely on Mastercard and Visa. Windows increasingly requires logging in with an MS account. In the meantime govt and big business are pushing people to use mobile apps more, increasing this dependence. Moving to a different mail server and office suite keeps the ICC working, but does not really protect people at the ICC from US sanctions. Their lives can be made very difficult: https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitall... I think this bit of the article is a critical problem: >By outsourcing the management of IT systems, these educational institutions are losing technical knowledge and control. As a result, they are becoming increasingly dependent on big tech, putting academic freedom and independence at risk. All of this is fixable but its expensive to fix. No one is motivated enough to spend the money.