Last time I had to fill out a government form in Canada, it was a PDF that only opened in the Windows desktop version of Adobe Acrobat... Even the Android version couldn't open it. Super annoying and completely unnecessary.
Edit - I don't even care if they keep their server code proprietary. But just use free formats, save our taxpayer money on stuff like Windows and Office licenses, and make it easy for citizens to interact with them. I'd even rather they hire some more local devs than send money out of the country.
> Last time I had to fill out a government form in Canada (...)
Without any evidence, let me argue why maybe it shouldn't. In the past, a common opinion that I have heard is that open source is more secure because all the code is out in the open.
The recent xzutils backdoor attempt [1] kind of led me to believe it's not really true, it's only true if many good-actor eyeballs, which are willing to donate their time for public benefit, are on the code.
Almost all of the government's code that I interact with are web apps that are potential targets of foreign adversaries -- tax filing web apps, prescription + vaccination scheduling web apps, family benefit applications, and more. (This is not in Czechia, but close.)
Now, would I want to read that web app code? Not at all, I couldn't care less about it. However, foreign adversaries would love to immediately start analyzing it. Extracting the entire country's health data or tax data would be a goldmine.
And even though there probably are several people actively paid to maintain security of these systems, I feel that the foreign adversarial agents would be much more motivated (and better paid) than government employees/software developers.
You could make a opt-out for national-security purposes for the code, but I feel almost all the code a government works on would have such an impact when compromised.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
(Disclaimer: I am a huge supporter of open source in general, contributed to the Linux ecosystem in the past and in my current job as an academic, almost everything I do is available out in the open in some way or another.)
And it's not like there haven't been vulnerabilities found in proprietary software, despite them paying people to keep things safe.
I would also argue that you could take all the $$ paying for proprietary software and contribute it to people who are making the open source software, making the reliance on "free" eyeballs less of an issue.
Meanwhile the XZ backdoor was found in Sid, Arch and pre-releases of Fedora and openSuse. It never actually made it into any numbered release of Fedora, openSuse, Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat or Suse distro. It's actually a pretty big win and the system worked as intended.
Open source and Linux are doing just fine security-wise.
Also, none of this has anything to do with using offline tools like a word processor to make documents.
I would maybe not go quite that far. That it got caught was mostly a confluence of lucky breaks and accidents. The second version of the exploit would likely have not been detected if not for the fact that the first version of the exploit had a couple of programming mistakes that attracted some attention to itself.
It was caught before any distro released with it. The system worked.
We have more or less immutable history of every change leading to every release of open source software. Any backdoors you previously created under an identity could burn that identity forever. That history is not available for proprietary software. If someone adds a backdoor in proprietary software for two years and then removes it in later versions, it's totally likely it'll never be noticed.
Thinking that open source software is at greater risk of being backdoored is akin to thinking most trees in the world grow along the road, just because you drive everywhere and have never been inside a forest.
[0]https://www.gov.br/governodigital/pt-br/plataformas-e-servic...
Look at berlin / ms
My hunch is that if maintainers were to invest into making it look more like Office 365 (purely in a cosmetic way), the opposition to using libreoffice would reduce significantly.
And for the old timers that will run to "Office 2007/10/13 was the best version and had the old UI". I get it and agree, but the average person likes nice things that look up-to-date.
It's more that someone somewhere gets their % when selling them the commercial software, be it Microsoft or someone else.
fsflover•12h ago
diggan•11h ago
FOSS is already in the blood of Europeans, now we just need the legislators to realize this is a good thing, and foster the ecosystem even more!
jnurmine•9h ago
Anything funded with public money should have same proportion going back to the public (the organization running the area which funded it).
For example: a 100% EU money funded innovation should be free for everyone to use within EU and outsiders should license a patent.
50% public funding from state of Norway, then state of Norway has 50% ownership.
And so on.
fsflover•9h ago
holtwick•8h ago
Europe: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/petitions/de/home
Germany: https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/epet/startseite.nc.html
fsflover•8h ago
Ongoing discussion:
Digital Minister wants open standards and open source as guiding principle (heise.de)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44198171
ahartmetz•7h ago
The new digital minister seems to be doing well. He used to be CEO of an electronics retailer with mixed to negative reputation in nerd circles, but he also has a physics degree and has software experience in the trenches, so I wasn't sure what to think of him.
holtwick•7h ago