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.
Nobody’s mentioning the article says “the United States imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.”
Which means that US companies may not provide services or products to the ICC. Sure it sucks that Microsoft complied but the federal government is to blame.
“Under President Trump, the US has taken a decidedly less friendly stance toward the European Union and its member states. These geopolitical tensions mean that it is up to the business community to smooth things over. Microsoft, for example, is adamant that it will defend itself in court if Washington demands access to European citizens’ data. In fact, the encryption and access management of sovereign cloud services should make access from outside the continent technically impossible”
Do people really still need to be explained why proprietary software is bad?
I have zero understanding of why an organization like ICC would use it? Any court needs to be independent, and using proprietary software clearly compromises that. The same goes for public services. And private enterprises should of course avoid it in their own interest.Open source proponents have tried to explain this simple fact for more than 20 years. But 90% of people simply don’t care even just a little.
A lot of people I know haven’t heard of it or barely know anything
There’s not much in terms of social media presence, and outreach for FOSS/OSS/Open Source Linux overall
Every new generation has to learn themselves hard way about proprietary software, fascism and market failures, it seems.
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.”
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.
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.
I know it with SAP, but I am young (not really) and from Germany, so that checks out.
I’ve been attempting to convert as much of my digital life to open source alternatives over the last few years, and I can’t tell you how many people tell me it’s unsafe to do since “just anyone can work on it”. Most people really believe capital = expertise, and that’s a hard nut to crack.
That’s been one of the cornerstones of Microsoft propaganda against open source. So it’s not strange that the uninformed are exactly that, uninformed.
It’s worse when the professionals fall for it, and fail to recommend good solutions to politicians.Capital IS expertise. Expertise in command and control, thus shaping the narrative in order to bend it to their will.
I don’t even understand that. The still-thriving, 30-year history of video game warez really says otherwise.
Those people are those without passion. I’d pay $50 for any FOSS I use regularly
I did, in fact! I bought Immich for $100, and you know what? I don’t regret a god damn thing. It has been a stellar replacement for Google Photos, which was an app I depended on every day for, God, like 10 years now?
What did you use it every day for?
I have an eidetic memory, so, I use it as a journal.
Do people really still need to be explained why proprietary software is bad?
The degree of overreach by a US company, in this instance, is shocking. Yes, you can go spill a gallon of ink talking about how American software companies have been the tip of the spear for intelligence gathering, propagandizing, and sabotage. But I would say that an international business with a huge future stake in European implementation of their software spiking a criminal court’s Outlook servers over prosecution of an ongoing genocide is a new low.
Open source proponents have tried to explain this simple fact for more than 20 years.
Open source is a far cry from bulletproof. We could just as easily see Mossad fucking with a poorly implemented Linux iteration of an email distribution agent. But then the assumption is that the Israelis - being heavily integrated into the European socio-economic system - are on Europe’s side. Similarly, Microsoft and Google are supposed to be agents of the Big Friendly American Security State. The thing that shields you from the evil Slavs and Huns and Muslims, not the thing that stabs you in the back.
Part of this is corruption (Big Tech lobbyists effectively bribing public official to adopt their software), part of it is laziness (corporate sales reps go out of their way to make early adoption relatively easy and backload the real costs until later), part of it is the networking effect (thanks to the above there is an abundance of Microsoft-centric IT companies and experienced users who have already adapted to the privatized frameworks).
But this isn’t a problem you can simply explain your way out of. Ultimately, you need a structural change in how these institutions do business. You need ICC that has insourced its IT and is capable of self-administration, rather than a bunch of outsourced flunkies who exist as a way to pad a contractor’s wallet. You need a public that is adopting good IT practices at the grade school level, rather than feeding at the trough of private subsidies and philanthropies to defer the up front cost of technical education. You need an IT community that is well-organized and unionized and hostile to the corporate model of development and distribution of for-profit systems. Not a bunch of freelancers that see Microsoft Certification as a meal ticket.
But 90% of people simply don’t care even just a little.
90% of people (honestly closer to 99.9% of people) don’t believe they have any say over IT policies at their own offices, much less at the scale of the a trans-national criminal court.
They do not genuinely believe they live in a democratic institution and roll over in compliance for fear of some form of reprisal, because that’s how they’ve been trained to behave from their earliest days of life.
It isn’t a matter of caring nearly so much as it is a matter of learned helplessness.
The degree of overreach by a US company, in this instance, is shocking.
Yes, but they do many other types of shenanigans that are against the interest of their users. Like snooping, and lock in attempts, stifling competition and charging high prices for services that cost next to nothing to deliver. Those things are completely apart from the fact that you have zero control with the software, or insight into back doors or other security issues.
We could just as easily see Mossad fucking with a poorly implemented Linux iteration
WTF? Talk about a straw man argument! There’s a reason some of the most demanding and sensitive tasks are completely dominated by Linux. Stock exchanges is is one example of that.
WTF? Talk about a straw man argument!
That’s not what a strawman argument is.
It’s exactly what it is, you build a strawman and then argue against it.
you build a strawman
You think Mossad is a strawman?
No, the argument you pulled out of no where that Mossad will deploly backdoors in open source is the strawman, the implication being open source bad, m’kay. Could they ? Of course but thats an entire separate argument.
Yeah this is bad but this kind of stuff is the thing that can only be done once. Very much like the Unilateral SWIFT BAN on Russia. This prompted all of countries in the world to create an alternative and so they did, this case is the same thing. It might take some time but countries will find a way.
Yeah this is bad but this kind of stuff is the thing that can only be done once. Very much like the Unilateral SWIFT BAN on Russia. This prompted all of countries in the world to create an alternative and so they did, this case is the same thing. It might take some time but countries will find a way.
I get that is what your gornment told you, but it literally is not true and there are plenty of sources to back that up.
Russia, on their own, started developing SPFS almost a decade before they were banned, because they were threatened with a ban in 2014 if they didn’t stop invading more after Crimea. So when they invaded again they were rightfully banned.
The SPFS functions with some banks covering about 15 countries, hoping for 20 soon. SWIFT is still happily used by over 200 countries.
Very much like the Unilateral SWIFT BAN on Russia. This prompted all of countries in the world to create an alternative and so they did
Lol, what? Where you getting all this propaganda from?
I mean that the SWIFT is a crucial infrastructure to the banking system all over the world because it allow banks to wire money from country A to country B. SWIFT itself is controlled by the US & EU but even then it was very rare that a country would be disconnected from the system. Until 2023, the only country that did get banned from SWIFT was Iran and it was allowed to come back under the 2016 agreement. In 2023, in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia was banned from SWIFT and this prompted many countries that do no have automatic alignment with the US & EU to develop an alternative infrastructure that would allow their banking systems to continue wire money internationally without depending on the SWIFT system. For example, Russia has the SPFS(System for the Transfer of Financial Messages), China has the CIPS(Cross-border Inter-bank Payment System) and the BRICS are developing the BRICS Pay which is to be an decentralized and independent payment messaging mechanism system.
The Microsoft situation is very similar in the sense of that the can do this once and after that many public institutions will change back to non-proprietary office suites. It might take a while but some of these institutions will do it.
The only one of those that both exists and competes with SWIFT as an international banking infrastructure is CIPS, and that already existed prior to the Russian sanctions. The entire world didn’t do anything in response to Russian sanctions, China saw an opportunity and used it to promote the alternative it already had and already wanted to expand.
On top of that SWIFT doesn’t even do payments. That is, it doesn’t transfer money, it provides a communication interface that banks use to talk about payments, the actual money transfer takes place separately via T2 (in Europe) or elsewhere via correspondent accounts.
If they tried to handle actual money they would not have the market share that they have. Iran is semi-sanctioned right now, that is, select banks are cut off. It’s illegal under EU law to comply with US sanctions against US or Cuba so you can be sure that the commission came up with the precise list of what to block and what not so they’d hit the revolutionary guard but not random carpet or saffron traders.
The problem is that the US put sanctions on this person. Not that M$ is obeying those sanctions; it’s not optional.
Best practice is to criticize them for genocide profiteering. They chose that.
from the perspective of what’s to be done about it, it’s distinction without difference. if MS is tethered to act in accordance to our fascist dictatorship, and the point of the ICC is to do something about all these fascist dictatorships doing fascism all over the place, then the ICC must divest itself of Microsoft. it won’t be an instantaneous process, but the ICC must immediately begin the process of evaluating and selecting products from outside the united states.
I would consider it a privilege to live long enough to see the EU invest in and adopt FOSS software as a matter of national security.
Like all things FOSS & Libre, when a place as large as Europe benefits from the investment, so too do all of us benefit in kind.
It is the natural order of things; programmers love to program so much that they will do it for free, independent of any profit motive. We only see programmers charging money for their work because you basically need to sell something to survive in our Bootstrappist hellscape. Improving material conditions wouldn’t just make life better for everyone, it would also result in better, newer software, delivered faster.
It doesn’t even need to be for free. Public institutions could still buy software under the condition that it is open sourced immediately, so they don’t become dependent on the vendor.
That would be so beautiful.
It’s already happening, slowly
This is utterly despicable.
Legitimate question here: What jurisdiction does the ICC have? Seems like it just popped up over night and just issuing arrest warrants to make people feel better I guess. I don’t recall the US entering into an agreement to abide by the ICC or even recognize it. Wasn’t the the UN established to prosecute war crimes?
https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/Publications/understanding-the-icc.pdf
They wrote a document on it!
America doesn’t join international justice organizations because that way when we commit war crimes, we can’t be punished.
By the way this is written, this sounds like a mini UN with a focus on judicial functions. Again, not trying to be a jerk here, there’s the UN that prosecutes war crimes through the national courts which all countries have agreed to participate through treaties. The document written in the link above even states the ICC is not meant to replace the national courts. It sounds like it doesn’t have the teeth like the national courts do anyway. I have the perception of theatrics here.
All courts are theaters, some are backed up with an army.
The president of the United States just proved that the supreme Court has no power by refusing to bring Kilmar Abrego home. The people saw this happen and didn’t immediately take to the streets demanding that Trump be punished, so we now know that he can do whatever he wants and the supreme Court can’t stop him. There’s no difference between this and the ICC, which is one of the ways that the United Nations prosecutes criminals. Both are theaters of Justice that only work if people participate.
The fact that America isn’t involved in the ICC really shouldn’t be seen as the ICC not being legitimate, but instead that the United States isn’t.
I think a lot of the non-reaction has to do with the lower court giving 15 “last” chances for the government to explain the order. She needed/needs to just call them in violation and start holding people in contempt. It probably won’t work, but without the final declaration from the courts of “they are ignoring us” people just keep trusting the system.
