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Joined 14 days ago
Cake day: October 3rd, 2026
  • five_bucks@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.ca•Canada could save millions by developing its own operating system instead of relying on Microsoft Windows
    31·
    6 hours ago

    Fair critique!

    A less all-or-nothing approach could be to migrate Members of Parliament and departmental executive down to management… maybe even support staff. That group makes decisions based on the products from operational folks. So they can deal with a basic office suite. There’s a big savings there.

    At the operational level, things would get expensive because of the specialized and in-house software for which there are no alternatives except Windows.

    I don’t know enough about IT to comment on the feasibility of supporting that scenario.

    I didn’t catch this in the content posted by OP, but I thought it would be interesting to mention: GCTools. It’s a suite of collaboration and document management tools. I think they’re all open source. ^But ^I ^don’t ^know ^anyone ^who ^uses ^them.

    Edit: Can’t superscript. Fuck it

  • five_bucks@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.ca•Canada could save millions by developing its own operating system instead of relying on Microsoft Windows
    102·
    7 hours ago

    I’ll probably take shit for my comment, so preface: I use FOSS and self-host a lot of stuff at home, my Elbows are Up, and Fuck M$. Now then…

    Yeah, the federal government could give up MS licenses for the public service and switch to OpenBSD or Linux and use LibreOffice. Excellent! Big savings.

    Now then, how about all the ancient databases and applications used by the CRA and regulatory agencies. Will they keep working or will they need attention? Downtime is not an option.

    Then there’s weird things like lab equipment and remote devices that provide earth sensing data for weather forecasts and probably tsunami warning for all I know.

    Every one of those things needs, at least, thorough consideration and many will need specific attention from developers who are familiar with some pretty old tech. The public service does not have that capacity on hand. Contracting (expensive) private sector companies is a given.

    I haven’t even mentioned the requirements for handling protected data or liability. Who does the government sue for damages if there’s an unpatched exploit in OpenBSD?

    Anyway, all the above can be addressed. Nothing’s impossible. But the estimated cost-savings are not realistic. Like, at all.

    You may now tear me to shreds.