7d ago

German state gov. ditching Windows for Linux, 30K workers migrating

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/60886715

Schleswig-Holstein, one of Germany’s 16 states, on Wednesday confirmed plans to move tens of thousands of systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The announcement follows previously established plans to migrate the state government off Microsoft Office in favor of open source LibreOffice.

27 comments

FYI, the Linux trademark, the Linux Foundation and Linus Torvalds are U.S.-based.
- And? The licencing is completely open and not chained to a single country nor single corporation.
  
  Still, it's probably off-topic in the "buy from EU" community. No EU products are involved here.
  
  What about OpenSUSE, Ubuntu etc? Both European based firms. Calling the linux kernel and coreutils American is a pretty big stretch considering their licencing and global contributor network.
  
  What about OpenSUSE, Ubuntu etc? Both European based firms.
  Canonical (based in London) is not really "from the EU" anymore. ;-) No, I know what you mean...
  However: Yes, those are European Linux distributors. They distribute an U.S. operating system kernel together with an U.S. userland (GNU), an U.S. init system (systemd), several U.S. desktops (most commonly, Gnome, although KDE is German, at least)...
  If you get your Windows installation from an European distributor, is it a European product?
  considering their (...) contributor network.
  Microsoft has employees in Europe. Does that count? If it doesn't, why does it count for Linux?
  
  It seems like you're being unnecessarily pedantic.
  So, I'll Well, Actually you: They're not 'buying' anything so it doesn't matter what the source is. It isn't the "OnlyGetFreeStuffFromEU" community after all.
  
  You've completely ignored what I said. Comparing linux to Microsofts European operations is bizarre given that Microsoft produce a paid for product which uses telemetry out the wazoo to get even more money from the end user and which is closed source compared to a completely open source peer reviewed kernel development proceedure which is free to be used and tweaked however a entity likes.
  Its irrelevant where the not for profit foundation happens to be based, and if they do go off the rails the entire thing could be forked quite easily.
  Even the Russians and North Koreans as paranoid as those entities are trust linux running on sensitive machines, and as seen with Slesvig-Holsten so do German provisional governments.
  Also the UK is (for now) still broadly included in the buy european campaigns alongside Norway, Switzerland, Ukraine etc. Although if you'd really wanted to target Canonical for not being European you should've pointed to it being based on Debian.
  
  Is there an EU operating system you'd recommend here?
  
  Honestly, the EU seems to be not the best place to write operating systems.
  The most actively developed version of Plan 9, 9front, is from Germany, but that's not what most people want to use, I guess. Best I can do is non-American (OpenBSD). I'm open for ideas myself though!

27 comments