> The goal is not only to save costs, but above all to gain digital sovereignty.
> [It's true] that open source is not necessarily cheaper, [..] it requires investment. But the money flows into internal infrastructure, into the further development of Nextcloud, LibreOffice, and other similar systems, instead of proprietary ones.
> Schleswig-Holstein pursues an "upstream-only strategy," meaning that developments flow directly back into international projects. The state does not want to maintain its own forks, but rather contribute all improvements directly to the main projects, thereby contributing to development for the benefit of the general public.[1]
On a side note, the real key to the project's success is that it's supported by a coalition of the conservative and green parties. They actually value digital sovereignty and longterm cost savings. Contrast that with Bavaria, where the MS lobbyist managed to get them to sign a longterm Office 365 contract…
[1]https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/hintergrund/Interview-Wi...
You know they want sovereignty.
WRT the criticism on this move by "the opposition" saying, ""It may be that on paper 80 percent of workplaces have been converted. But far fewer than 80 percent of employees can now work with them properly.""
I think this natural pressure will also be helpful for re-tooling IT infra and support companies to being more sovereign.
I've been doing m365 and azure for more than three years by now and I just feel terrible. Especially regarding some of our customers, which are small gGmbH (kind of NGO). Instead of making a secure, privacy focused offering we just sell them the usual m365 package. We basically push them into the data industrial complex just to get some collab tools and mail.
Stormshield is a very good product but it's mainly designed for industrial scenarios and lacks some features that are essential for an enterprise NGFW (i.e. the protocol inspection covers very few protocols compared to PA/Checkpoint/etc). Unfortunately the enterprise NGFW scenario is dominated by US or Israeli companies, even if some niches brands like Stormshield for OT and Clavister for telcos are Europeans
Stormshield firewalls can certainly be used in enterprise settings. OT environments are an added bonus where Stormshield firewalls can be used as a protective layer.
Stormshield's IPS is its major strength, being very well integrated in the overall firewall design. The whole firewall rulebase is designed in terms of its IPS; I am not aware of any firewall on the market that has such a nicely integrated IPS.
Also, at the point where one runs out of IPS options to configure, whereby I'm not referring to signatures in the general sense of the term, and one also has adapted all of Stormshield's available signatures to the needs of the particular environment, the real fun of creating new custom IPS signatures begins.
Stormshield's roots date back to 1998's NETASQ, and so I would say they are of a similar pedigree as Check Point, in terms of their history.
Disclaimer: I'm a Stormshield Platinum Partner and hold a CSNTS.
So I guess "digitally sovereign" in the European Union could mean using a combination of GPL style free, open source (BSD and other similar licences), proprietary European "homegrown" products.
I guess Genua is another good contender in this market.
Here in Denmark, the previously unthinkable is happening: because of Schleswig-Holstein's leadership in moving to OSS, the Danes are now seeking to learn from the Germans (or at least, that particular set of Germans) about digitalisation! That trend, plus the Danish government's all-in-on-vendors/consultants approach to digitalisation, will likely open a sizeable market - and the traditional vendors like Netcompany have taken a large beating in public opinion themselves, so it's a good time to start something in this direction.
And at the Digital Tech Summit in Copenhagen this year, digital sovereignty (and the lack thereof) was a very prominent theme across both public and private sector talks. As was the comparative advantage the EU has in _trust_, and how that helps e.g. businesses around cybersecurity, privacy-oriented SaaS, and data management expand even outside the EU - which makes it extra infuriating to see continued political interest in things like Chat Control and cracking down on GrapheneOS. This trust is IMHO pretty much the only advantage the EU has in the global tech marketplace, and we're busy throwing it away.
Power differences, contractual leverage, vendor lock-in, motivation versus costs to make changes, etc.
Then watch the Scale 22x talk of the former Mexican CTO, because those stories are so close to industrial espionage it's absurd what kind of influence Microsoft has over diplomats and ambassadors. [2]
German govt has been a bit embarrassed by this.
Edit: I mean from a society perspective you pay a tiny bit more for a real gain, without reducing labour from the private sector.
Regardless of the coding, one would first need to be familiar with git or VCS in general.
Also, you would want people to go back to normal jobs when they can. This would lead to short stints for all employees which I've always found to be one of the best predictors of bad outcomes
I was unemployed for a while in 2008 and I'd have loved it if I could have got paid minimum wage for working on open source rather than just getting jobseekers allowance and searching for jobs that didn't exist.
Plus I'd have learned some valuable skills that would help me find work anyway. And it would have increased the numbers of IT savvy workers. Seems like a win-win-win.
I hope Holstein prepared the switch well and kill off any Microsoft stuff as quick as possible. Nothing is worse than co-existence with something hostile which doesn’t want to be compatible.
* No Dual-Booting
* No VM
* Especially no WINE (your ducked with every odd update)
* And by the love of god, hit everyone with a bat which tries to ship incompatible files (MS-Office, ppt, xls, pst…) to you. Links to “Microsoft Teams”? Hit harder and show no mercy :)
* Make plan.
* Used standards wherever possible.
* Switch file-formats and external platforms before. Use a standard distribution and DO NOT MAKE YOUR OWN DISTRIBUTION. If you have a big IT department with hundreds of employees, maybe an own repository with your custom software.
* Enforce all suppliers hard to support Linux natively! If not? Drop them. Search a honest company which gives you also the source.
* Avoid the usual mistake like “this a local support company” or “their offer is cheaper”
* Don’t purchase shitty hardware. ThinkPads are a good start, but we speak about printers, NFC, label writers, scanners and so on.
The remaining 20 percent of workplaces are currently still dependent on Microsoft programs such as Word or Excel, as there is a technical dependency on these programs in certain specialized applications. According to Schrödter, however, the successive conversion of these remaining computers is the stated goal.
PS: And don’t repeat Munich! Munich is “HOW NOT”. Three distinct IT-Departments. And the next major was “convinced ” with tax money and a Microsoft Headquarters. Result, it is worse than before.
This kind of suggests that they have a bunch of VBA scripts in the tax department and the legal team are dependent on sharing 'track changes' in contracts. It will do the world a favour if the VBA is forced out. Don't know what they will do about 'track changes', it is ubiquitous in the contract world. Hopefully they will force government suppliers onto the libre alternative.
And searching the web for “Excel government failure…” is an adventure.
Excel is a shell script containing data. Minus well defined syntax and a proper change log. I see the nice point behind using Excel, it is a “visual” shell script containing data.
It’s a tremendous mis—allocation of public resources. Hiring local people to tailor the free software which already exists and contributing those changes back to the world would spend fewer of those dollars and spend them locally, and be pro-social at the same time.
So I don’t hate this story. I love it and see it as a massive win.
Assuming you just replace a proprietary software ecosystem with an Open Source one and immediately get the same thing for free is a very naive view that will get you in trouble.
Having said that, as a German, I am very happy this switch happens and seems to have some backing in the local administration at least. But it's still a high-risk wager and I'm afraid it'll turn out like the LiMux project in Munich, which was eventually (and cleverly so) framed as the origin of all problems in the municipal digital infrastructure. In the end, it got swapped out for a new Microsoft contract in a wonderful example of lobbyism and bribery, and Open Source and Linux have been discredited, to the point no winning mayor candidate can ever bring it up again as a viable alternative.
Yes, this is what I’m talking about. Hiring people and developing expertise instead of paying expensive consultants is a preferred use of my tax dollars.
> But it's still a high-risk wager and I'm afraid it'll turn out like the LiMux project in Munich, which was eventually (and cleverly so) framed as the origin of all problems in the municipal digital infrastructure.
While this may be true, there are also quite prominent cases where the massively expensive foreign consultant solutions have also lead to disastrous project overruns.
Maybe this was true at one point in time. But now, it just pays for AI/Copilot and your latest support chatbot.
Given this understanding, the best away to achieve the desired outcome is to get creative about aligning incentives at the top of org structures where resources are allocated.
I really don’t understand what this means; could you please explain it? It comes off as ‘mushy’ consulting-speak to me.
They're out of their minds if they're donating nothing to Libreoffice, though.
In the current cancel culture even if you use *GPL licenses you get attacked for not being MIT or similar. But mysteriously never a peep about Big Tech making billions off open source without giving back even a tiny 1% to the projects. Insanity.
https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso...
Building a new street? The cheapest bidder wins.
Cuts to social security? As long it saves money in the short term in doesn’t matter if the long term costs will be higher or if the cuts don’t make sense.
They are contributing actively it seems, so even better.
I get that 9 million sounds like a lot, but it's much, much lower than what they would've paid to Microsoft anyways. And those 9 million are advertised as a "one-off investment", while their contract with Microsoft was perpetual.
How about instead you donate the same amount of money you would've paid to Microsoft anyways to fund open source projects you rely on? At least for one year, then drop it down to some arbitrary chosen percentage of that cost. That way you can still advertise it as a cost-cutting measure, and everyone would benefit.