Microsoft's ICC blockade: digital dependence comes at a cost
www.techzine.eu
In February, the United States imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. As a result, Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan has no

The world should wake up from tech dependence. Let the EU massively invest in FOSS.

Edit: as raised by comments, my title is not incorrect but does omit that it’s actually the US that imposed sanctions, to which MS just complies.

  • drewcarreyfan@lemm.eeEnglish
    44·
    15 hours ago

    Just speaking as someone in the field, you would be surprised at how many IT decisions happen the way they do because nobody wants to be the one who gets called when an ornery geriatric complains that LibreOffice doesn’t have the ‘mail merge’ button in the right place.

    The old saying goes, “nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco.”

    • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      14 hours ago

      You are absolutely right, and I can understand that for a company IT department, but for public institutions, there are so many factors that speak for using open source software.
      Public institutions have requirements of for instance transparency private businesses don’t have.
      Here universities have been aware of this for all of those 20+ years, and usually the ones that advice governments come from universities.
      But somehow monetary interests comes in between, and lobby their expensive proprietary solutions. And that’s the real problem I think, proprietary vendors have loads of money for lobbying, while open source has almost zero.

      The old saying goes, “nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco.”

      That would be IBM, and that saying is from way before Cisco was even founded.

      • Waldelfe@feddit.orgEnglish
        6·
        5 hours ago

        The University where I studied switched from Linux to Windows because to many people complained that it was “too hard”. Even the computers in the library that were just for searching books aka 90% of the time just using the browser were switched from Linux to Windows because the students complained. I now work in a job where most of our customers are public institutions and you won’t even get our IT department to let go of decade old outdated software. Too many old people who will throw a hissy fit if anything suddenly looks different from what they’ve been used to for 30 years.

        My contract also won’t be renewed. My bosses reason that he explicitly told me is: I don’t fit in because I ask too many questions like “Why don’t we use better alternatives for X software.” We do “project planning” with email-chains and Excel sheets. No, we can’t have any project planning tools, because this is what the 60-year old colleagues have been doing since their first day 43 years ago. If it was good enough for them back then it’s good enough for you now. That’s just how we do it here, since you can’t get used to it we’re letting you go. Etc pp, you get the idea. And the people in the IT department are the same! Never change a running system, it’s worked for 40 years now, no need to try something new.

        There’s just no way you’ll get a public institution to switch to open source. Everybody over 50 will scream bloody murder about having to change how they work and it’ll be changed back in no time.