In peaceful times, people cling to broken systems simply because “that’s how it’s always been done”. Comfort is a prison.
This crisis is a great opportunity to screw Microsoft.
Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.
Canadians should be agressively lobbying their politicians to embrace Linux and the open source ecosystem. Call your representatives. Write to your city council. Contact your town IT department. Do it now.
you can install linux today and drive adoption instead of waiting for rich people to save you from microsoft.
Canadians won’t do shit on this front.
I’m literally watching a “merger” in the financial industry, where the smaller player, who used a linux-based back-end stack for the banking system, is being forced to adopt the ‘industry standard’ of the larger financial institution – the industry standard being a US company system, running on Microsoft products, and using an Indian company, running the online banking in Microsoft’s cloud. Having a ‘sovereign’ local community credit union isn’t enough to get members/loans apparently.
Even had an opportunity to ask the new CEO about whether they thought it was a prudent move, given the constant news/trade tensions (admittedly, prior to the most recent issue) – and the CEO’s response was basically “I have a piece of paper from a third party that says there’s no risk, so shut up”. Also, the very accurate comment of “I don’t think the back end matters to people in general, no one is going to move their accounts just to be with a sovereign setup, if they can get a slightly better rate elsewhere”. And you can’t really argue that, seeing as the smaller company that’s being ‘merged’ couldn’t leverage it to gain memberships.
The regulators don’t only not care about this sort of thing, they encourage industry to move things into US tech giant clouds. It’s hilarious, the BC outsourcing regulations say to avoid concentration, but the regulators themselves practically disregard it and demand everyone use Microsoft, and FISERV (a US backend banking host provider that provides core services for like 80% of the credit unions around). The regulators themselves are in US tech giant clouds. There’s practically no chance that our government actually takes any kind of stand against Microsoft or US tech giants.
Every country not the USA should be embracing Linux regardless of trade disputes. A foreign company putting there proprietary software in your country’s government infrastructure always come with uncomfortable security realities, you can be held hostage in an ecosystem that may no longer match your goals quickly, it becomes financial handcuffs.
It’s a shame that so far only Germany, France and China seem to understand this
Germany has understood it for many years, what they lack is the conviction to follow through and stick with OSS.
Shared Services Canada (SSC) renewed its agreement with Microsoft Canada to procure software and services for the Government of Canada. In addition to the services renewed under this agreement, SSC will now be able to provide all public servants with access to Office 365, thus laying the groundwork for a digitally-enabled public service.
I work in government IT in Canada… that shit ain’t happening. I have been laughed out every time I’ve mentioned it for years.
Curious, did you mention this after annexation threats? I could understand before the second Trump term as most countries assumed that the US “checks and balances” wouldn’t allow a president to just lob grenades everywhere including at the US’s own feet.
Doesn’t matter if someone higher up is no longer laughing. All the people you heard laugh will be getting direct orders from above them to start pushing changes
I have been laughed out every time I’ve mentioned it for years.
I got approval from my managers and IT to install a Linux based OS on my work desktop, then a half-wit Windows-fanboy dev chimed in claiming our insurance would not cover the operating system if there were ever a security breach, data loss, etc. to say I was infuriated was an understatement.
All we use is a Web-App to accomplish our tasks, no in-house proprietary executables or anything along those lines, hell they claimed their Web-App wouldn’t work on Firefox browsers, which of course was a lie.
Wow, I guess that makes sense. But if they were going to move to a significant count of Linux machines I would assume that an enterprise edition (like red hat) would probably be covered by insurance. Since they then have someone to blame.
our insurance would not cover the operating system if there were ever a security breach, data loss, etc
This person was lying to you.
Oh I know, whenever he sends out an email for an update to the web-app I react with a “😢” in outlook every time because he’ll just push updates without having anyone test them.
This is not a software company at all, lately he decided to write his own PDF editor and switch out the one he found on GitHub for it, well the folks in the shop certainly weren’t happy to find out they couldn’t print drawings anymore or that mobile devices had poor compatibility with it.
he’ll just push updates without having anyone test them.
This person is a clown and shouldn’t be allowed near any production stuff.
I would bet top dollar that he pushed back on Linux because it scares him.
Unfortunately he and the President and COO are all buddy-buddy so whenever people attempt to provide feedback that can improve their workflow it’s greeted with immediate pushback from the other executives.
Like I said, not a software company so we only employ 2 developers, he wrote majority of the web-app so he knows all the in’s and out’s and has been with the company for 10+ years now so his job security has been set in stone for quite some time now.
Something hilarious happened last week where he went on vacation and scheduled an update to occur on the Friday, well sure as shit he didn’t test it and our weekend shift had to endure a whole lot of SQL errors.
Not saying it’s a great career move (pushing FOSS), but things do change over time. 25 years ago we hired an ex-FDA employee as a consultant, he was available because he had championed harmonization of the US medical device regulation with the new ISO regulations to make a more uniform global framework for companies to comply with… yeah, before his time, but apparently - in an otherwise anti-globalization administration, the idea of globalization of medical device regulations is finally taking hold at US FDA…
exactly; i lost track of the number of times a government has stated an intention to ditch microsoft only to have them quietly withdraw it later.
Market share of linux in canada has been gradually increasing for around 2 decades (download the CSV for a clearer representation of the data). the more popular linux becomes the more likely it is the government will switch to it (more software support, funding etc).
I have been laughed out every time I’ve mentioned it for years.
You were laughed at? Really? Why?
I’ve witnessed this firsthand. Its because Microsoft has consultants embedded in the government and they have so many of the higher up bureaucrats under their thumb so brainwashed that yes, they laugh at attempts to deMicrosoft. Its ludicrous to them to abandon Microsoft.
Microsoft has consultants embedded in the government
Consultants? You mean lobbyists? This sounds like bribery.
It’s so fucked up.
“consultants” in that they are basically a mixture of cultists and also very aware their future is Microsoft or bust.
I fought and lost to get a simple LAMP box to run a web app for my squadron using software written by dozens of others in my specialty. We lost because a lt. Colonel with a guaranteed seat at Microsoft just said no.
Bureaucracy hates change of any kind.
And we just signed a new deal with Microsoft - after all this trade war stuff started happening.
If even Germany can, so can Canada.
Does Germany actually use Linux and Libreoffice or is it still just one or two states that flip-flop when Microsoft shows key people a bag of money?
A good majority of European countries have switched to Linux or FOSS solutions for governments or militaries.
France’s federal police have been using Linux for over 15 years now.
Well every single time an article is posted about Germany, it turns out it’s a single state and that they reverted a few years later.
And here in Estonia, government departments are actually trying to get their private contractor companies to switch to Teams for “ease of communication”. That’s how bad it is. Yes, the official stance is “we’ll see about using FOSS more”, but that’s not reality.
I suspect a good majority of European countries still use Microsoft on most of their government computers. France and Denmark are making the move, but not sure if anyone else is unfortunately.
Well every single time an article is posted about Germany, it turns out it’s a single state and that they reverted a few years later.
You’re thinking of the story about Munich from over a decade ago. And that story is more complicated than the media does it justice for.
But to summarize Munich: they did a pilot switching to Linux. It went very well and started a full rollout. Microsoft jumped in with money under the table and promised to setup a new Microsoft HQ in Munich for switching back to Windows. New government came in and said “uh, no. We’re not ditching Linux and our very successful pilot.” So now it’s mostly a hybrid setup.
Ditching Microsoft is only a pure benefit.
Linux is free, better maintained, and way less troublesome for proper work. Microsoft ecosystem is just an illusion of comfort that keeps breaking itself the moment it encounters a printer, a virtual machine having issues, or whatever else.
Better invest that money into real human employees rather than paying for all the licensing costs.
While at it, the cybersecurity mafia should also get sanctioned out of existence by making the SOC 2 charade an irrelevant thing. It’s just an overpriced, silly report, not even a proper certification anyway.
There’s basically zero chance of this happening.
Agreed. My workplace is practically drowning Microsoft apps and our IT department has actually- where I’ve been able to see it happen- ask copilot for answers to incredibly basic things. None of them are going to be interested in thinking about switching. And despite all the talk about retaliation, I have zero faith in our country making any material change. They’re simply too enamoured with US corporations.
Exactly, and it would be a monumental project that would take years to do even if there was will to do it. Canada is entirely dependent on the US in terms of tech, and that’s not going to change any time soon.
There’s basically zero chance of this happening.
Never say never.
If you told me that Donald Trump would be President and that he would threaten Greenland and Canada, I would have called you insane.
And yet here we are.
It was pretty clear to me that Trump would likely become president, and there’s very little to be surprised about the US retrenching and trying to secure resources right now. Seems to me that you just haven’t been paying attention to what’s actually going on in the world.
that was very predictable, the us is a rabid fascist dog, canada is a vassal state, it won’t do anything daddy usa doesnt tell it to do.
especially, a lot of tech CEOs who supported trump are tech CEOs, and dropping the facebook / instagram / etc platforms would seriously hurt their budget.
We should. My university has a specific contract with MS that says our data cannot leave the campus or the country. I had a MS teams meeting with a lab in Toronto in which we discussed very specific chemical compounds that were unusual. With 48 hours, everyone at that meeting got emails from a chemical synthesis company soliciting to sell us these compounds.
I have seen this happen repeatedly as the result of a MS Teams meeting.
That’s awesome. If I had to guess, the data of the Teams call might not leave Canada but it might be stored temporarily in a Canadian Azure dc where it’s STT-ed, transcript analyzed and matched to whoever’s bid to be called up. The bidder could be an American firm and the call to it isn’t the Teams data so “no foul” been committed. 🤭
E: some might call this industrial espionage.
My university has a specific contract with MS that says our data cannot leave the campus or the country.
That contract is worth nothing due to the Cloud Act.
And stop paying for Windows while we’re busy getting rid of it!
I remember growing up being taught Windows, not how a computer works or a how a kernel communicates with the installed hardware, looking back at our education system it certainly frustrating and I doubt we’ll ever see any significant change.
