Is the shift to open source etc inevitable due to the enshitification of commercial products as their owners slide into low margin low growth?

I hope these governments moving to open source can work together and assist in making a more modern and featured open source office suit that has a better UX. I say as someone that almost exclusively uses LibreOffice, it's still a pain to use for anything but the most basic (or esoteric/extreme, like CLI stuff) use cases.

Great that it’s OnlyOffice and not surrendering control to a single company and using Google Docs.

> Microsoft Chairman and General Counsel Brad Smith dismissed such worries

Every time I read this guy’s name, I remember how he made false statements to the US Congress about the Golden SAML vulnerability by claiming that Microsoft had no knowledge of it when in reality, they had known about it for years and buried it for the sake of making money. Nothing he says is credible.

That said, going with open source solutions is not getting away from US companies, but that is not what is needed here. What is needed is getting away from Microsoft, which cannot be trusted. They have had a pattern of poor security decisions for the sake of making money that has persisted for decades.

By the way, it does not matter how good end users are at security when Microsoft is making decisions that undermine it. For example, the hack of RSA Security occurred by exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft software. Those vulnerabilities were there because Microsoft’s management prioritized making money (adding insecure features) over writing secure software. The single best security decision any organization can make is to ban Microsoft software and services.

Good luck. I tried to replace office and failed. It’s just impractical if you really want to get something done to use anything else.

> the city's collaboration suite, Territoire Numérique Ouvert (Open Digital Territory), is being developed in partnership with local digital organizations and will be hosted in regional data centers. This homegrown solution is designed to provide secure, interoperable tools for videoconferencing, office automation, and document collaboration.

It's nice they're not just moving to a fully baked solution with no control on it, potentially staying stuck there, and instead secured local developers who can help iron out the issues or move to other alternatives if push comes to shove.

Noting that onlyoffice is developed by a russian company, which attempted to hide its russian ties through shell companies.

The company develops its product in russia and presents itself in the Russian market as a russian company

The article doesn't mention which Linux distribution was chosen. I'm curious about that, since in my opinion it can make or break the project. It's also possible that multiple distributions were used for different cases, which could make sense.

As for user-friendly options, I think Ubuntu and Mint are the best choices right now, with Mint (Cinnamon Edition) being a better fit for users coming from Windows, which seems to be the case here.

Also, I recently switched from LibreOffice to OnlyOffice. I find its UI and UX much better. That said, I'll look into the licensing aspect mentioned in the article, maybe LibreOffice aligns better with my values.

Public sector migrations from an incumbent may the hardest ones of all. Most migration projects fail, but over time, they harden the target platform sufficiently well that eventually one works. And then another one does. And so on, until the target becomes so solid that people no longer choose the source in the first place.

The first Solaris to Linux migrations were horrible. The first prem to AWS migration moves sucked. So it goes.

However, in public sector, failure poisons the well. The peanut gallery claims waste of taxpayer funds. The incumbent starts astroturfing and lobbying against the target. Its an absolute shitshow. Other public sector entities, without the ruthless commercial imperatives that might override fear in a commercial environment, fear to jump in. And the whole thing wilts.

It will be very interesting if the fear of US hegemony is finally enough to overcome the fear of failure.

I feel it's the right time for the EU to focus on developing an administration focused Linux Desktop distribution.

All the ingredients are there, just a solid governance structure is needed to consolidate efforts of development and maintenance.