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0 pointsshagie2y ago0 comments

The issue is not "Microsoft Office vs Libre office" but rather "how much does it cost to necessary up to the support necessary for the government office in order to support Libre office?"

Things like "ok, we can't use one drive - need a different tool," "can't use Sharepoint, need to use a different tool," and so on.

The market is there. RHEL and similar are well established.

In order to make this a "we should do this" either government IT funding needs to be significantly increased (that is difficult in the current political climate in most places) or the support offerings and staff needed for the average user (using Windows, Sharepoint, Word, Excel, Teams, and Project) needs to be competitive with the pricing that Microsoft offers.

That should be "simple" - make a company that offers the same level of support as Microsoft does for a packaged suite of software that includes easy installations, appropriately locked down desktops, call center, and so on.

And if that can't be found at the same price that Microsoft offers - then we return to the "increase government funding."

Saying "we should outlaw government spending on closed source" misses a lot of the tools out there that are needed to keep things running. Is there a FOSS (with support contracts for the stack) alternative to Cerner or Epic? SAP? ArcGIS? And that's not even getting deep at all into the niche SaaS tools that some pieces use for specific problems.

The market is there and state and local governments would likely jump at the opportunity to switch if there's a company that can offer the same functional stack with the same support for the same price or cheaper built on top of FOSS. Otherwise... persuade those state and local governments to staff up to the necessary levels to be able to hire people able to customize and support the FOSS to fit their needs and be prepared to financially support that decision.

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marcosdumay2y ago

> Cerner or Epic? SAP? ArcGIS?

Of those only ArcGIS isn't a basic CRUD, and yes, there are plenty of open source replacements for it. It's in fact way behind the open source tools.

There aren't for the others, because they are about paying a company so you can use its other customers data, or paying it to get overpriced consultants. None of them are about software.

vonseel2y ago

Epic/Cerner/SAP may be CRUD apps with clunky and outdated interfaces, but I wouldn't classify them as basic. Those applications are massive and have a ton of legacy code to connect different things. I'd suspect much of the rest of their staying power does lie in the company's scale and relationships, as well as their domain knowledge. It would cost massive amounts to build a viable competitor to any of them, and you'd need people who understood the problem space well enough to know what code to write. Doesn't matter if it's just a basic CRUD app built on top of a standard RDBMS, if you don't know what features are needed.

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