ko kāihe ahau ✝️CERN MS costs increase tenfold, reveals it’s been looking at alternatives for a year.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/13/cern-microsoft-alternatives-project-open-source-software/
Dave Lane 
🇳🇿@donkey Just shows why it's foolish to invest in an infrastructure built on someone else's proprietary technology (for reasons I explain here: https://davelane.nz/mshostage) - I'm pleased they're making the move now, but they should've been smart enough to realise this could happen at any time. And now it's going to be very expensive and painful to change because they've allowed themselves to succumb to lock-in, not because the #FOSS alternative is painful.
@donkey Sadly for the taxpayers of the world, all of our gov'ts are in the same boat, but they've *always* been paying the 10x more amount... for the past 20ish years. Imagine if that $ had been invested in the local industry instead, and in local enhancement of #FOSS that everyone could've used instead...
Strypey@lightweight @donkey I was frothing at the mouth when I found out how much #CorporateWelfare the #NZ government has been giving FarceBook every year to "advertise" to its own citizens. It could have built its own social network system for that sort of money.
From the piece by @lightweight
> Your business is effectively a non-voting subsidiary of your supplier. At the very least, you have a potentially catastrophic dependence. The supplier could choose, at any time, to ... compete with you and take over your market
This has disturbing implications for an elected public government that has to pay FB - a anti-democratic private government - to commununicate with it's citizens.
@donkey
@strypey @lightweight agreed - there’s a lot of tension there between “where the people are”, “what we can afford” and the “what is best for democracy”.
@donkey @strypey Sadly, that conflict only exists for people without sufficient technical knowledge and strategic savvy to realise that it's not a "network effect" or technology problem. All could be sorted, as I've told them in the past, for very low cost using openly available software from the global digital #FOSS commons.
@lightweight @strypey yup. At least they seem to have listened regarding the paperless voting.., 😉
@donkey @strypey well, eventually even the gov't spy agency agreed that it was a totally unwarranted risk to take. But there are still people in Local Gov't especially who're committed to foisting online voting upon us because they don't "get" tech stuff (or, perhaps, how crucial it is that voters can trust our democratic institution & those administering it). I've talked to some of them.
@lightweight that's not the reason. Have you seen how much it costs to send a letter now? With the last users of snail mail moving to digital billing, and even the government moving to email and secure messaging within its websites, postal voting is rapidly becoming uneconomic. This is why digital voting for local body elections *will* happen. We can stick our fingers in the dyke, or we can put our energy into influencing *how* it happens.
@donkey
@donkey
Incident Creator ❎@strypey
The postal system exists in our technological society to produce an undeniable paper trail between all aspects of citizen /government interaction, not just voting. If necessary, that function needs to be retained as the cost of democra y.
@lightweight @donkey
The postal system exists in our technological society to produce an undeniable paper trail between all aspects of citizen /government interaction, not just voting. If necessary, that function needs to be retained as the cost of democra y.
@lightweight @donkey
@vik I'm sure as paper was replacing stone tablets people made similar comments. Even signatures on contracts are already being replaced by digital credentials. Paper will retain a role, just as stone engaving has (eg tombstones and other memorial plaques), but it's already becoming uneconomic for most uses. If you want to keep postal voting you have to engage with this reality or you will be ignored as failing to understand the problem. See:
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/102280745879927129 @lightweight @donkey
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/102280745879927129 @lightweight @donkey
Strypey (@[email protected])
@lightweight if you want to prevent digital voting in NZ local body elections, you need to come up with a financially *and* politically viable proposal for how to deliver and collect paper voting forms in the event of #NZPost shutting down their snail mail operation, or merging it with parcel post, raising the price past $5 an item (one of which now seems inevitable). I can't think of one. Make delivering voting papers gratis a compulsory pre-condition of operating a delivery business? @donkey