We're seeing a lot of initiatives across Europe and the EU to replace Microsoft services with #Linux and #OpenSource solutions.
This could be massive for Linux and the entire community, so I'm sharing my thoughts on why this is happening, why it's great, but also why it could still very much die down very quickly:
What’s more interesting is that Gawkowski – the ministry of digitisation affairs – has promised they would sever ties with Big Tech corporations. Oh boy, how were we naïve when believing in this…
Of course this won’t happen in entirety on day one – public administration’s IT systems are deeply ingrained with Microsoft solutions. Eventual complete replacement plan may require a lot of time to execute in full: drawing out cost charts, signing contracts with IT firms ready to take on this task, and maintenance of such systems after migration.
Krzysztof Gawkowski did NOTHING to push this forward. Instead, he said that Poland should “reap benefits from Big Tech’s investments in Poland”, signed a contract with Microsoft and Google on their “e-skills” programme, and Polish MoDA has used bogus argumentation when I presented my partial digital sovereignty plan to them. Eventually my legislation proposal reached the Polish parliament, but I am afraid this may be turned down, too.
What’s the conclusion I have drawn out? Do not believe politicians blindly. End of story.
@thelinuxEXP thanks for covering this. Finally switched to watching your videos on PeerTube, the extra effort to upload there as well is much appreciated.
On the topic, as a EU citizen it gives me a lot of hope to see multiple initiatives do this at the same time. It's indeed a big opportunity which hopefully is being seized and will have impacts for a long time. I do wish it did not hinge so much on unfortunate stuff happening in the US, but well that's politics :)
@thelinuxEXP I started recently a boutique marketing team and one of our principles was to use (as much as possible) software developed and hosted in the #eu
It's not still entirely possible (for example, some Clients insist on using Google Drive), but our internal stack is almost completely EU-based.
@karol_pieknik @thelinuxEXP US tech doesn't appreciate quality. Stuff used to be marketed to us in terms of quality. Not anymore. Not for a long time.
Until I started programming things that go into people's skulls the place I'd worked that actually appreciated quality the most was a slot machine manufacturer--they wanted their games to be really good looking and addictive. If places had a quality management system it was never exposed to me.
Tech space is the worse. Fast money they see.
@thelinuxEXP Accessibility is also an issue. Linux is not great in this area and places like the EU don't appreciate things being left like that. Hopefully this cause Linux to improve rather than this effort fall short.
There's plenty you can do before you run into trouble with the correct configuration. There's a blind user here though that's often posting the issues they run into.
@thelinuxEXP This is always awesome if anyone is taking the initiative to move away from Microsoft and Google. As we've seen a lot can happen, but I'm definitely seeing a huge rise in popularity for open sourced and I hope things continue.
As I remember being able to convince my highschool computer teacher to start allowing me to use LibreOffice, my whole school ended up trying to use it all year. And it's start anyone can at least attempt to start using #OpenSource software or spread words
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