Schleswig-Holstein, the northern German federal state, will be a digital pioneer region and the first German state to introduce a digitally sovereign IT workplace in its state administration. With a cabinet decision to introduce the open-source software LibreOffice as the standard office solution across the board, the government has given the go-ahead for the first step towards complete digital sovereignty in the state, with further steps to follow.
The some 30,000 public employees will replace Microsoft Office with LibreOffice, Windows with a yet-to-be-determined Linux desktop distro, and use Nextcloud, Open Xchange/Thunderbird, and the Univention Active Directory (AD) connector to replace Sharepoint and Exchange/Outlook. The state also intends to replace Telekom-Flexport by an Open Source solution.
“The use of open source software also benefits from improved IT security, cost-effectiveness, data protection, and seamless collaboration between different systems,” says Dirk Schrödter, digitalization minister for the German state of Schleswig-Holstein.
“We have no influence on the operating processes of [proprietary] solutions and the handling of data, including a possible outflow of data to third countries,” he adds.
“We have a great responsibility towards our citizens and companies to ensure that their data is kept safe with us, and we must ensure that we are always in control of the IT solutions we use and that we can act independently as a state.”
As The Document Foundation, the organization backing LibreOffice, put it, “The term digital sovereignty is very important here. If a public administration uses proprietary, closed software that can’t be studied or modified, it is very difficult to know what happens to users’ data.”
Then the brutal reality hits: Your app vendor, “We don’t support that.”
What’s an app vendor here? Or what does that mean in general? I feel like one of the reasons given on other (failed) attempts to switch to libre software has been that other public places / ministries etc still using MS had incompatibilities with e. g. Munich’s FOSS stack. Though I think this is something you could overcome if you wanted to, it’s not like these problems don’t exist (and probably have solutions) elsewhere. I think FOSS software has come pretty far in the last years, I haven’t booted my Windows partition in months, so I have a tiny bit of hope that they can make it work.
Libre office and Linux desktops are not line of business apps. They are platforms to run/supplement line of business apps. There are very few line of business apps that run HR, the finance department, EMR if you’re in a hospital system, etc, etc, etc as open source or run on open source solutions. For decades Open Source advocates kept thinking it was the ability to run Office that shut down “The year of Linux desktops!!!” But that isn’t it at all. It’s those specialized apps that run the businesses that prevented it. I work in a hospital system, our line of business app is Epic or Cerner. Apps that digitize the health records. The requirements to run these apps is Windows Server, because that is what the front ends are built on. And these apps, especially the front ends, are heavy and complex. Any attempt to turn them into web apps has failed miserably because the performance just isn’t there vs running say, the Epic/Cerner front end in a Citrix solution. Client-Server isn’t dead, it just doesn’t get sexy press anymore. Obviously if you work in web development, it is a very different story. But even in those shops, I’ll bet the business support apps (HR, finance, etc) run heavily on Windows.
Lord knows I’ve tried to advocate for open source solutions where I can, but if the apps the business picks to suit their needs only runs in Windows? You’re infrastructure has already been chosen for you. And THAT is what the average wannabe IT person on the internet doesn’t understand in the slightest.
Most specialized software are web apps running in a browser hosted on the cloud these days. I’m sure they exist, but I couldn’t name any HR, ERM, CRM, … software that’s not a web app.
The desktop OS is becoming irrelevant. That’s why those who want a Mac or Linux notebook can make it work, at least from a purely technical point of view; i.e. if the company allows it. That’s also, why there will never be a year of the Linux desktop. (I mention Macs here, because while OS X gets some commercial software that you won’t get on Linux, it’s not that much outside of some niches)
There will never be a year of the Linux desktop because you gain very little from replacing Edge on Windows with Firefox on Linux (a different software that does the same thing). However, you loose some specialised software and your IT supplier, your IT service provider, half of your IT staff and some of your non-IT employees’ skills. This does not sound like a good business case.
Linux on the desktop never happened, because Linux on the server replaced desktop applications.
If talking about a closed source app, their whole goal is to move off of hosting closed source systems.
Article says the decision follows a successful pilot project, so they’re willing to absorb the short term costs. Optimistically in the long run, the symbiotic benefits of having a government entity using and supporting a full FOSS system will be huge.
“Good thing there are other app vendors.”
And you’ll get the same story.
Depending on the field, perhaps, at least at first. But the more organizations that switch, the more demand there is for support, which is how we eventually get it.
In the meantime, there is usually another way to get things done. Props to this German state for stepping up. Digital sovereignty is important.