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.
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.
Ottawa IT is a joke. The BMW turn signals of government.
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.
More countries should look at the efforts made by the EU and member countries to reduce dependency on big tech.
Big same. I’ve been the cloud guy for years hosting linux servers exclusively. I win awards. Our budget to host our websites is the envy of other departments. The default is still Microsoft first for everything and I fight for every little open source win I can eke out.
And we just signed a new deal with Microsoft - after all this trade war stuff started happening.
Then the deal needs to be changed. Contracts are not above the law 🤷
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).
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.
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 are not the same as lobbyists, one has monetary influence on the politicians the other provides information selectively
Bureaucracy hates change of any kind.
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.
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.
Every country
not the USAFTFY
Just look at all the stuff the EU’s been doing. It’s definitely not a USA exclusive thing, they just happen to be leading at the moment.
It’s a shame that so far only Germany, France and China seem to understand this
If even Germany can, so can Canada.
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.
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.
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 as such, we will have to go back to flying to in -person meetings to discuss any new IP.
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.
Of course it is.
Just like all universities in Canada teach AutoCAD software, and any designs are hosted on foreign servers.
I recall how a few of us who highlighted this risk (as well as the cost increase risk) back in the early 2010s when UofT was starting to migrate from on-prem (sovereign in newspeak) services to Microslop’s cloud. We were called crazy paranoid, etc.
I’m still being ignored on this by university admin. Software deals in education are rife with corruption. I lost a 6 month battle to even have our computing service post links to Open Source software.
The average office worker has a good chance of a complete meltdown if an icon on their desktop is moved. Government and business are not going to move to Linux on the desktop.
I fully recognize the absurdity of this, particularly in an era when a huge number of office jobs are basically just interacting with a web browser. I’ve just spent enough time writing software for “regular folks” to see why it’s not going to happen.
There’s basically zero chance of this happening.
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.
you can install linux today and drive adoption instead of waiting for rich people to save you from microsoft.
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.
especially, a lot of tech CEOs who supported trump are tech CEOs, and dropping the facebook / instagram / etc platforms would seriously hurt their budget.