Its kind of funny to me that by pushing data harvesting of OS’s and office data then selling it to 3rd parties Microsoft has probably become the biggest security threat to the US government, maybe ever. And its all because the US refuses to pass basic consumer privacy protections.
Microsoft knows the government needs something, and is insistent on squeezing as many of your tax dollars from them as possible, or leaving us all vulnerable.
Capitalism is terrorism.
Literally the plot of the new fallout show
oh do I need to watch that?
I would recommend.
Once the government switched to Linux en-masse, Microsoft will have no leverage whatsoever, no solution they can possibly propose will beat free software.
LibreOffice is totally adequate for most government jobs.
It’s not like there’s no precedent, Germany’s government already switched to Linux
The only possible way to generate money is through the use of online document editing services, but Google Docs pretty much cornered the market here.
I just want to clarify that a german state switched. Not Germany.
And, IIRC, it’s just a trial to see if it will work.
Edit: I should have read the article linked in a comment above…
“As spotted by The Document Foundation, the government has apparently finished its pilot run of LibreOffice and is now announcing plans to expand to more open source offerings.”
“In 2021, the state government announced plans to move 25,000 computers to LibreOffice by 2026. At the time, Schleswig-Holstein said it had already been testing LibreOffice for two years.”
So, it seems the trial may be over and they are migrating for good.
I’m honestly surprised the us govt hasn’t developed their own pos locked downed Linux os.
It seems the baddies are way ahead of the curve:
LTT had a video on using North Korea linux
Blue Star OS?
Blue stripe os
Back in 2000, there was something like that for the kernel with SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux). Which continues to live in various distributions’ kernels. Not a full O/S though, and not generally regarded as a PoS.
Even if libre office didn’t offer those features, I’d be willing to bet the gov could donate 1/100 what they pay Microsoft in a year to have them implemented.
seriously. or just say “America’s gift to the world” and wave their dicks around over in house programmers adding it.
Just for the record : Schleswig-Holstein is only one of Germany’s 16 states. Let’s hope the rest of Germany will follow.
They can also just use Office online. That should be good enough to get people to switch without a huge disruption in efficiency.
You underestimate how much people rely on Excel macros.
Yeah, but there are alternatives, so it at least provides a smaller change than completely switching to something else.
Yeah but years of macros over macros that keep the business running won’t be easily ported to a new solution.
Sure, and being forced to redo it is probably a good thing in the long run.
Maybe they’ll get a developer to build it into a reusable product instead of relying on Jim in accounting to fix the macros to get it working after an update. Or maybe they’ll realize they could get the same result with a pivot table and clever formulas.
I agree with you, but nothing is more permanent than temporary solutions.
Your response is the rational one, but rarely the one taken.
It works and the new solution would cost time and money, we can’t have that.
Yeah, this is government, not a nice FOSS project. :)
France is here a better example. The Gendarmerie has its own distribution based on Ubuntu called GendBuntu. The state developed Tchap, a messaging system based on matrix. And many are looking to Linux to simply cut the cost like the french army.
Side note: The app Fedilab has its package name based on the french government open source projects (fr.gouv.etalab.mastodon).
Unfortunately, LibreOffice is still garbage. Microsoft it miles ahead in its apps compared to the Linux equivalent. There isn’t even a good OneNote alternative on Linux.
What is specifically broken or missing from LibreOffice?
As for OneNote alternatives, this one does a pretty good job: https://xournalpp.github.io/
Many things. The biggest issue, I’d say, is the unability to create tables in Calc. This severely limits productivity.
And I use both OneNote and Xournal++, and the latter isn’t really a replacement to the former, save for a few features.
Nah, Office 97 was the last decent one, Office 2003 is trash due to app menus all messed up. LibreOffice is modelled after Office 97.
sure its fun to shit on public servants being old and not wanting to change from microsoft office. there is more then a little truth in that.
but IT departments are often staffed with techs that cant and dont want to do anything but microsoft, it really doesnt matter how much better linux is.
As an IT sys-admin, you’re largely correct. We are losing the essence more and more of proper sys-admin work.
IT staff are becoming more ecosystem maintainers than actual integrators and solutions experts. Instead of doing deep research on the problem and architecting actual solutions, many sys-admins just send off a quote request to a single external vendor and then call it good.
The research, quoting, planning, implementation, configuration, testing, monitoring, and maintenance are all outsourced. The sys-admins are just left with a simple web dashboard or desktop app that they often don’t even understand well, and a support line for when things need to get fixed/upgraded.
It’s a glorified help desk position in many cases. I’ve worked with several 10-15+ year admins that don’t even know how to spec out a server, how to architect a basic network topology, how to optimize a SAN or NAS solution, etc.
They go with the default without a second thought. Email = O365 Office apps = MS Office suite Virtualization = VMware/Azure/HyperV Servers = HP/Dell
And because they are used to it, it propagates onward. If you want to break out of that, you have to be intentional every step of the way.
On the other side of this, you have company’s that are in tangential fields looking to grab up a piece of that pie. Electricians, low voltage companies, fucking furniture companies (oh, we totally do audiovisual, that’s similar enough), the C-suite is trying to force their way into this new golden goose and expecting their staff to be able to handle this without training, time, or real hands on experience. And, no, a 2 day workshop from a manufacturer isn’t really “training”, at least not the only training needed…
It’s no IT… it’s what everyone knows and what developers make their software for. Most enterprise software is windows designed, it’s an ecosystem that’s very hard to break away from.
This hits the nail perfectly, as well as users just only knowing Windows because it’s the first type of device you learn most likely through the schooling system.
- IT I do run Linux myself and plan on deploying more Microservices through it.
Most enterprise software is more complex and heavy than it needs to be.
Most enterprise software has to meet constantly shifting goals requirements certifications and regulations.
In most cases it’s complicated because it has to be and because it’s been driven to be complicated over time to meet the complex needs of the business.
The software will represent the business, if the business is too complicated then the software will be too complicated. It’s impossible to separate the software complication from the business in that sense.
Fair.
but IT departments are often staffed with techs that cant and dont want to do anything but microsoft, it really doesnt matter how much better linux is.
Yeah, I’ve met such. When they encounter the need to use Linux, their critique of it is connected to the first link in Google not working by copy-paste.
Well y’all decided that finding and keeping zero-day exploits were more important than contacting the companies to fix them because you looked at both approaches and decided that intelligence gathering scale > cyber security robustness.
Now for all governments in the world: install Linux already and get it over with. Cut your dependence on an abusive and crappy software vendor
I cannot disclose any details but this article vastly undersells the risk and how exposed the US is. It is definitely goes well beyond government exposure.
It’s not like theres’s an NSA backdoor key called NSAkey in windows or something…
Windows is not the problematic Microsoft product. Not even close. If you understood how much of the US infrastructure and controls are consolidated under Microsoft cloud services, you’d never sleep again. Cloud was fine back when it was a product catering small and medium companies but when large corporations started migrating their critical infrastructures to cloud services to offload responsibilities, we really went off into the weeds.
No need to be quite so cloak and dagger mate, it fairly obviously to any one who pauses to think.
People have been calling out the problems of corporate oligarchy for more than a decade. This is merely part of that .
It’s systemic risk, not merely technical
its not cloak and dagger, its ‘whatever you do, don’t open the breaker box. you will die.’
Forgot about that one. Let’s share what Wikipedia has on it : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
Whoever uses Microsoft products should be aware from the start that security is a low priority for them. If you can accept the risk, fine. If you can’t, think about the consequences.
The US at least has some degree of control over Microsoft. How much worse is that the EU is still not developing an own OS/distro?
- SUSE is an in germany founded company (now in Luxembourg)
- https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/
- Not having a government directly develop a “blessed OS” is probably for the better
I am not talking about a OS for the general public, but specifically for the administration.
And this will work much better with a unified attempt. If the EU would be taking OpenSuse for this, this would basically be the end of OpenSuses independence… I’d like it to be GNU/Linux based though.
Wouldn’t they just get enterprise SUSE licenses instead? Why bother with openSUSE?
There were grassroots movements like the Limux project (Munich using a custom Linux distribution). But that got shut down by Microsoft bribery (not confirmed, but MS did build a new headquarters in Munich…).
Yeah, that was a shame. But I really think we’d need a shared OS for all administration units of the EU (from EU level down to munipiality levels). Would be much easier as the private sector could also adjust to it.
Time for linux
No
Which then raises the question: why isn’t the US using open source software everywhere, paying the same -or very likely - much less to maintain and expand said software? Can you imagine the money stream towards thousands of devs fixing any (but, feature or security) issue, which they would already do for free? Finally some recognition and so on.
Finally they’d have software that they can trust and rely upon, it’ll kill one huge company and spawn hundreds of smaller companies. Win-win all around
Because there is seldom a good replacement for the majority of software that enterprises use.
As much as I like FOSS it’s significantly harder to fund.
With proprietary you keep the source code, ship the app, collect data & sell it, and charge for a premium /subscription. They then use that money to fund talented devs and give them deadlines to make good software.
With FOSS it’s largely contribution work by people who work on it in their free time. They use donations or paying for enterprise support, and if they do add a subscription service / premium version you can just modify the code and get it for free.
That’s largely why FOSS software is behind, what’s the direct incentive for someone to make it good?
An administration that were really looking to liberate itself of proprietary software and develop a sustainable policy would analyze its needs and look for software that matches them, not shape their needs around the proprietary software they’re already using.
If you start by thinking “what software does things exactly the same as this one I’m using” of course you’ll never move on. Microsoft obfuscates their software on purpose so you can never find 100% compatible stuff.
You’re living in a fantasy land. The software you’re referencing, largely doesn’t exist how a corporate environment utilizes it. Even just excel, the employees need it, you can’t teach someone 5 years from retirement a new spreadsheet program. Sure you could buy licenses from MS, but I bet if big organizations started doing it, they would stop. Or only sell the entire MS suite at some insane price. Adobe? Haha
If its anything like the private sector its a mostly a liability thing. If something is wrong with the program, you can sue the vendor. With open source… Thats a lot harder to do. Large groups wont use the thing if you cant put the blame on someone else when it breaks.
Because open source doesn’t have support contracts
I’m sure there are other companies, but here’s Red Hat’s Support options.
Really? Maybe ask redhat? Ubintu? And those are the large ones, there are loads of companies that give support contracts.
I feel like they are so close to an epiphany……
Another subscription model, you mean?
I’d focus on enforcing standards and interoperability first, in a serious an highly punitive fashion for offenders.
If you can read/write your spreadsheet using any spreadsheet tool or OS you’re half-way there and will’ve severely hampered the old embrace-extend-extinguish (it’s still a thing).
Unfortunately the ISO certification process for office document formats was subverted by Microsoft to require their OOXML formats instead of the ODF (Open Document Format) that was being prepared for this role. And then they continued by not implementing the certified format correctly in Office anyway.
As a result it’s virtually impossible for any law-abiding, taxpayer-answering government to argue for adopting ODF over OOXML
It’s also impossible to find any other software that supports existing documents, because Microsoft introduces differences from the spec on purpose and any software that tries to stick to the official OOXML format can’t process them 100% correctly.
Any government that wants to wean itself off Microsoft documents would have to first conduct an investigation, explain why ODF is the better format, demonstrate that Microsoft doesn’t follow their own spec, then accept the fact they’re gonna partially lose their existing documents if they move away, and only then they’d be able to start the process of looking for ODF-supporting software and companies, and convert their docs and processes.
demonstrate that Microsoft doesn’t follow their own spec
I genuinely feel bad for MS devs because of all of the garbage that they have to deal with because of scummy management and the Balmer years.
Time for a change!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Interview Microsoft has a shocking level of control over IT within the US federal government – so much so that former senior White House cyber policy director AJ Grotto thinks it’s fair to call Redmond’s recent security failures a national security issue.
Grotto this week spoke with The Register in an interview you can watch below, in which he told us that exacting even slight concessions from Microsoft has been a major fight for the Feds.
“If you go back to the SolarWinds episode from a few years ago … [Microsoft] was essentially up-selling logging capability to federal agencies” instead of making it the default, Grotto said.
Grotto told us Microsoft had to be “dragged kicking and screaming” to provide logging capabilities to the government by default, and given the fact the mega-corp banked around $20 billion in revenue from security services last year, the concession was minimal at best.
Add to that concerns over an Exchange Online intrusion by Chinese snoops, and another Microsoft security breach by Russian cyber operatives, both of which allowed spies to gain access to US government emails, and Grotto says it’s fair to classify Microsoft and its products as a national security concern.
But what can be done to solve the problem when 85 percent of US government productivity software, by Grotto’s reckoning, and even more operating system share, belongs to Redmond?
The original article contains 352 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 35%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
