The petition is open to all EU resident. The goal is to replace all Windows in all public institution in Europe with a sovereign GNU/Linux.
If the petition is successful it would be a huge step forward for GNU/Linux adoption.
dunno how many online petitions actually worked, but “kay guys… now… linux!” ain’t gonna work.
That’s a parliament petition. If it succeed it is forced by EU constitution to be turned into an EU law.
That tool is offered to EU representant to create a kind of referendum and accelerate the adoption of a law through direct democracy.
I think you’re a bit mistaken. Per https://www.edf-feph.org/enforcement-toolkit-european-parliament-peti-committee/
“The Petitions Committee does not have investigatory nor enforcement powers and it can only adopt non-binding recommendations. Nevertheless, it can be a good tool to draw political attention to specific matters.”
At most, it makes the parliament have to look at the proposal and decide if its worth looking into or not. It doesn’t force anything.
Unless I’m looking at the wrong kind of petition to the EU Parliament?
Double edged sword. Forced adoption of a shitty distro, or a really locked down/limited system might not be a step forward at all.
From memory, Germany did this many years ago, and ended up rolling it back?
From memory, Germany did this many years ago, and ended up rolling it back?
The city of Munich deployed their own custom Linux systems many years ago. But since it wasn’t really maintained and updated, the user experience was pretty bad and the city’s employees were unhappy. Then Micro$oft lobbyists also came in and made them switch - by threatening to move their German headquarters out of Munich, which would cost the city lots of tax revenue.
You think that Microsoft lobbyist would have had any traction if the user experience was any decent?
Of course not. They wouldn’t have had any reason to switch.
That is the biggest issue with Linux at the moment. It takes more maintenance than Windows. And there are a lot less people with the knowledge to setup and maintain those environments.
At the end of the day, the point of those environments is to allow the user to work in them. But if the user is unable to work properly because of the environment, then that environment must be changed. It is as simple as that.
Of course not. They wouldn’t have had any reason to switch.
Of course they would? Millions of euros of tax revenue sounds like a pretty compelling reason to me. This is why Micro$oft’s “lobby efforts” should be labeled as what they are: Nothing more and nothing less than corruption.
It takes more maintenance than Windows.
If you create your own distro, yes. But there are countless noob-friendly distros like Mint, Ubuntu and Fedora that they could use with practically 0 maintenance required. Also, compare the 2004 desktop Linux experience to now. Having used Gentoo Linux compiled from a stage 1 tarball back in 2002, I can tell you: the differences are tremendous. Many of the issues they had can be directly attributed to OpenOffice and it’s bad compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats, which has long been replaced by LibreOffice. It still worked out pretty well for them, over a period of 13 years. And it saved the tax payer millions of euros of Microsoft’s stupid licensing fee for their proprietary garbage.
No, it isn’t a double edged sword. Even a mediocre distro would be better than Windows, any distro would be cheaper than Windows, and there’s no reason to choose a bad distro anyway.
No one wants to choose a bad OS environment, it will become one due to security or other non-negotiable requirements.
They aren’t going to just toss Ubuntu on a box and call it done. Itll be locked down, limited, and horrible to use. And users who dont know any better will blame “Linux”.
A government SOE Linux just isnt going to be a good ambassador for general desktop usage.
Solution: don’t ship a shitty distro. This is the sort of issue that actual IT professionals need final say in. Not the MBAs. Not the politicals. The people who actually know what they’re doing. Additionally, years ago Linux was in a much different place. It’s really matured into something more suitable for both the average end user as well as professional adoption.
Thats the problem though, there are near infinite ways for someone along the way to completely fuck it up, and very few ways to get it right. And security concerns are almost always going to make the distro worse for the users.
And even if it was left to IT professionals, they are just as capable of making it a mess on their own.
We could say that about every single general decision that anyone in the world has ever made. It’s a truism which tells us almost nothing about this situation.
That argument would be fine, if only the Linux community could actually agree on what is a good distro.
Basically everyone in the community agrees that Mint, Ubuntu and Fedora are the best choices for new users. Mint and Ubuntu are pretty similar, so they don’t require separate maintenance effort, and supporting Fedora is not that hard, if you already support RHEL, CentOS or another rpm-based distro (which are pretty common in the enterprise space). For all the desktop applications, Flatpak exists and is agreed on as the standard format by most of the desktop Linux community.
Personally, I think it depends on the sitch. Something immutable would probably be the better go for people coming from Windows and would help with IT costs since all systems would be, at their base, the same. No one is going to accidentally install something that breaks their system. And the main drawback of immutability (less control over the system) wouldn’t be a problem because people shouldn’t be installing things on government systems that are outside the scope of their job.
EDIT: In a sentence: a good distro is one that’s good for your organization.
a really locked down/limited system might not be a step forward at all
Depends what you mean. Locked down as in hidden from the public (I don’t think that’s legal anyways because of the GPL) would be bad. But locked down/limited from employees so that they can’t bork the system is good, imo.
The latter, and it is good from an organisational perspective, but its never a nice experience, and for many, this will be their first real experience with a Linux.
Right now Linux is “That nerd OS”, if this goes badly, for millions it could change to “That OS they forced on us at work, where I can’t XYZ”
Edit: on the GPL front, GPL doesn’t require that you publish your code to everyone, just to the recipients of your binaries. And you only have to give it upon request. So they definitely could keep it somewhat under wraps if they wanted to. If they are smart, they’ll follow the Munich model and stick to upstreaming any changes they make.
Edit: on the GPL front, GPL doesn’t require that you publish your code to everyone, just to the recipients of your binaries. And you only have to give it upon request. So they definitely could keep it somewhat under wraps if they wanted to.
When I said “hidden from the public”, I was meaning refusing to disclose the source code even when asked. I do wonder how the laws would apply to government organizations violating copyright 🤔. Like what if it was the OS for some defense system? I’m not sure a government would be too keen on disclosing that — even if it was requested though some sort of freedom of information request (if the respective country has that) — and would rather classify it and refuse to disclose regardless of the license. I’m not aware of any precedent of this.
Yup, exactly, which is kinda my point. The OS given to users is gonna be heavily restricted, so no one is going to use it and then run home to install it on a home PC. Government OSs are just not good ambassadors.
Nope, not Germany. The city of Munich, and it was rolled back because a politician took Microsoft bribes and drank the Microsoft snake oil.
National governments should be harder to bribe than local ones, at least. Also harder to get them to adopt it in the first place though.
Apparently they are back on the Linux train as of 2020, so thats good news.
Until the next corrupt politician… but yeah, let’s hope Linux stays, this time around.
The 30,000 employees of Schleswig-Holstein’s local government will be moving to Linux and LibreOffice as the state pushes for what it calls “digital sovereignty,” a reference to non-EU companies not gathering troves of user data so European firms can compete with these foreign rivals.
Munich, the capital of German state Bavaria, switched from Windows to Linux-based LiMux in 2004, though it switched back in 2017 as part of an IT overhaul. Wanting Microsoft to move its headquarters to Munich likely played a part in returning to Windows, too.
Yeah, that’s the one. Gnome 2 in 2017 would have felt pretty dated. And the political reasons can’t have helped either.
So, it didn’t fail from a technical fault but a political one? I feel like you’re arguing against it but I’m not following how that has anything to do with the viability of it (especially if it worked for 13 years)
My main worry with Linux becoming more popular is that it will be attacked with more malware and viruses. I wouldn’t mind though if Linux programmers could come up with better protection.
Linux-based OSes are less uniform than Windows. They could and probably will be targeted, but exploits won’t spread because of how many verities they are and how different and incompatible they can be. Some, for example, don’t even use the GNU utils and userland.
Linux is already what a decent chunk of servers run, so I don’t really see it increasing malware.
The insecure parts of Linux is mostly on the DE side opposed to the core OS part that servers use. We absolutely will see more vulnerabilities in the future as Linux grows.
Many developments over the last few years have been for improving those aspects, e.g. Wayland is far more secure than X11 could ever be. There will be more vulnerabilities found, but it won’t be as bad as one might fear.
Most of the Windows malware gets deployed by some user downloading and executing random files they downloaded on the web. Since installing applications on Linux is usually done through some centralized package manager or app store (Flathub), it almost entirely eliminates this attack vector. Running random scripts from the internet by downloading them using curl and piping them into sudo bash is a whole nother issue though. Noob-friendly distros like Ubuntu should IMO have some safeguards in place to block these actions.
Since installing applications on Linux is usually done through some centralized package manager or app store (Flathub), it almost entirely eliminates this attack vector.
xz moment.
Yes, I see that weasel word “almost” in that sentence. I expect it’s going to be doing increasingly heavy lifting as Linux becomes a more lucrative target to attack over time.
Your point generally stands, though. Even if they’re fallible, at least someone is vetting it at all somewhere in this pipeline.
I feel like they don’t know the magnitude of that what means.
Very cool but unlikely to work
Could easily fork a distro and pay a government agency or independent entity the same amount as Microsoft is currently being paid to maintain the distro. Or they could put financial backing on any of the current commercial Linux solutions out there. It’s far from farfetched.
The problem is dealing with the application side.
Just one feature that’s massive - how many systems have automatic import/export using Excel file formats. Converting those processes will be a huge undertaking themselves, let alone how many other things that will require re-engineering. The scope and scale of this is staggering.
A better effort would be to convert a single, small organization in government, then the scope is limited, but you get to build the fundamentals, and gain the experience of interfacing with extant systems.
You realize the office alternatives have been able to save into native excel formats, even in various year varieties, for a long time, right?
I mean I’d be fine with BSD too. the point should be to force public institutions to use FOSS
That would be incredibly dumb. There are entire fields where the FOSS is just hilariously behind proprietary software (or sometimes the only option). Do you want to cripple public institutions by cutting them off entirely from proprietary software?
Switzerland already did it. Its brilliant. Instead of the gov pouring money into proprietary solutions to meet their needs, they can fund FOSS and benefit from the same software being funded by other governments and companies too.
Proprietary is crippling. Its only chosen due to corruption
“There are entire fields where the FOSS is just hilariously behind proprietary software”
- “hilariously”?
- Examples?
CAD, CAM, EDA, audio/video production (NLVEs, DAWs, synthesisers etc.).
There are open source options sometimes, but they are all faaar behind the commercial options. No fiscally sane business or government department would use them (unless they only need a small job, or are quite masochistic).
