| ▲ | exasperaited 5 hours ago | |
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. | ||