France has a real edge over American companies by being the dominant player in the CAD world, it’s always surprised me that they nerfed that advantage by tying to an American operating system.
None of this is a major national advantage for any side. It's bizarre to think that the US or France would treat this as some kind of mark of national influence, since if anything happens to these top three vendors, there are lots of other vendors waiting in the wings. It's not like a national oil reserve, where it's important that you have a reserve of CAD software available for your engineers.
Are people designing aircraft carriers in Fusion?
Don't get me wrong, I understand that AutoCAD is extremely important for architecture and the death grip that AutoDesk has over that industry needs to be broken for the benefit of all of us, but from my understanding Dessault Systems makes software that is used for totally different purposes and is of vital strategic importance for a nation that wants an independent MIC which France obviously does.
So it seems foolish to me for them to have their own CAD software that can and is used to design weapons but be dependent on an American operating system produced by a particularly unscrupulous company who is obsessed with tighter and tigher control and has definite ties to the US intelligence apparatus.
Check out: https://www.army.mil/article/249241/armys_powerful_open_sour...
But I would assume defense contractors -- the private firms like Lockheed -- are probably using commercial software. The US military is pretty bureaucratic and is filled with bespoke stuff, whereas the contractors are basically businesses and would use whatever is common in commercial business world.
I don't know, but I have watched people designing high-speed trains in CATIA.
I lost count, it's how many attempts again? Fill me in.
Only place I know that went back to MS is Munich city council. After MS put a big research office in the town.
But certainly we are already at stage where Windows NT can be regenerated on the fly from a prompt anyway, aren’t we?
Otherwise, there is also ReactOS that could be leveraged on for that kind of scenario. I wonder where it would stand by now if all the money that governments around the world spent in Microsoft license would have been invested in it instead.
Legacy app compat is actually an argument for moving to Linux.
I haven't played with other windowing systems to judge too much. And just picked right from screen shots/gifs to not need to try.
0: https://www.canada.ca/en/government/system/digital-governmen...
1: https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
2: https://github.com/canada-ca/
There's still a great deal of Windows usage, but hopefully that will phase out with the passage of time. Canada's bureaucracy moves slowly, at the pace of generational attrition. It won't be until the last GenX retires that they could even meaningfully begin transitioning the average office worker away from Windows.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/federal-phoenix-pay-sy...
But also, Canada loves to burn money on American suppliers. It's probably why the recent interest in _Buy Canadian_ has the American administration annoyed.
Link 0 and 2 are essentially from TBS and CDS. They coexist together. They are essentially working at the very top as entities that gather information from other departments. They can do whatever they want because they help write the rules.
I'm not trying to discredit your post, just saying that as someone who has brought OSS tools to development at the government and tried to use OSS tools for client (I failed at that), it is nearly impossible at the moment. We are married to Microsoft and its cloud.
I do agree, that it may take an entire generation because right now, 190+ departments are not exactly jumping to FOSS, and in many situations, they are down right told you are not allowed.
In addition, the current de facto document management system is from OpenText. Although many just use Sharepoint Online.
Ironically, as everything moves to the cloud, it would be easier to move to a solution that is FOSS based, and based in the cloud. Technology has matured enough that you don't need executables on a desktop, you just need a browser pointing to a website.
Thus was obvious decades ago. And open source is the key model for collective development in a secure manner for disparate countries to secure their software base.
Alas, I fear they will only concentrate on the server side. The securing of the desktop should be a parallel concern as well, to help prevent your citizenry from becoming DDOS slaves.
Do they realize they need to pick a LTS distro now? You can't mix and match distros without having a massive IT and user retraining budgets.
All distros are basically identical. The only real difference is whether you spell "package manager" as apt, yum, or dnf.
But isn't linux US tech? The blueprint, UNIX was a US project, torvolds works from the US. the original userland GNU was a US based project. The new userland systemd is a US based project.
If you want to discuss it on that level, it if Finnish tech imported to the USA, inspired by a Dutch implementation of a research OS.
On a more serious note, Linux has been developed by many individuals all over the world, you can't put a nationality stamp on it.
Linux Mint (the distro I use) was started and is led by French developer Clement Lefebvre.
QEMU and FFmpeg are among the notable projects started by French developer Fabrice Bellard.
VLC was started by students of École Centrale Paris.
These are just the things that I know about as an American, so I'm sure there are more.
As for "security" and "antimalware" solutions being ready, I don't think there is much difference between the OSs there. Windows is no candyland either.
As always, they will need competent people in the right places to pull this through. Tech is just an enabler.
However comparing apples to apples, what makes you say this isn't ready for government usage, when it's ready for trillion dollar big tech companies' majority of their workforce? (Aside from Microsoft, Apple obviously). Large employers like IBM etc also must be using red hat or some other distro
Personally I think we are at an interim period for a big player to emerge and take over this space. If enough governments in the EU start switching over to customized linux distros theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro with proper MDM and GPO-like management functionality baked in .
On top of that it could be great to see SteamOS continue to gain share and become more than just something people run on gaming purpose hardware.
And thirdly would love to see a more simplistic but super lean and functional OS built on something like the BSD.
Microsoft bought Nokia's devices and services division for Windows Mobile in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mobile
And even without a big player, the number of people who are entirely operational with just a browser at work is huge.
Many SMEs already realized they can switch seamlessly between Windows and OS X / MacOS and I see people working on either one or the other. For example a desktop PC running Windows and a Mac laptop is not uncommon.
I switched an employee at my wife's SME to... Debian! And the transition has been more than fine: they live in the browser (Google Workspace, paid company subscription). Unattended-upgrades, a user account that cannot sudo, and that's it.
The number of desktop PC running Windows that are actually glorified browsers has to be through the roof.
Once people realize there's no need to pay the double-whammy Microsoft tax (pay for a new Windows / also pay for a new PC), suddenly installing Linux becomes an option.
Now I know: using Linux and Google is not "getting rid of US tech". But it's "getting of Microsoft" and that is fine with me. I'll never ever forgive the mediocrity this company has brought onto the world.
josefritzishere•1h ago
_verandaguy•1h ago
recursivegirth•1h ago
By luck and happenstance, I tuned into the Omacon conference this morning and my perspective on personal computing very much aligns with theirs. Would encourage a least watch the kickoff keynote if the VODs drop.
htx80nerd•1h ago
the main thing that keeps people locked in is (a) "Im use to windows" and (b) MS gives them some special contract to keep them.