alt Hacker NewsAt this point all tech is big business. Microsoft or Apple. Azure or AWS. Google Apps or Office. Even dealing with Red Hat feels like you’re dealing with big tech.
And the thing is 99.99% of the time everything works just fine. I think these governments often struggle with moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.
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Gov don't move because it's not worth the risk for people with decision power. If you succeed, there's no big win to tag on your resume, if you fail (the most likely to happen) you're out.
Moreover, the people working for the teams that should make the migration usually don't want a migration, so you have to perpetually convince them of the future gains.
For the last 10-15 years, very few revolution have been made in gov ICT. Most of the job is usually rewriting existing app in a recent language or creating apps for not critical features.
It's like the proposals to get rid of daylight savings time. People get ruffled when the time jump happens, so conversation of getting rid of it bubbles up.
But then a week later everyone has adjusted and the motivation to fix it is forgotten.
Governments also don't move to open standards because open standards doesn't have a hospitality suite to invite them to at football matches or Cheltenham.
One of the most remarkable things in British politics in the last 25 years went almost unremarked upon, in part because it happened in a reactionary way.
Blair/Brown's New Labour got so deeply into bed with Microsoft that it caused the coalition government that replaced them to develop a point of agreement and move government functions off Microsoft to open standard formats, and that change stuck. Hence this weird little country that has so many problems has accidentally good IT for anything that they rolled out, there's a lot of open data etc. etc.
That would never have happened if their decision was being guided only by lobbyists; it happened that it was so strengthened by the major tech giants working with the other side.
EU governments can absolutely do this; I find it difficult to believe universities cannot.
> moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.
Until you have companies trying to intervene.
If Universities are publicly funded by the government, and those companies do stuff like spying on, or silencing public officials, then why should the government finance those companies?
I think its nuts that the EU has seen spying, access from services taken away, yet continues to fund those foreign companies. Are the Open Source alternatives worse? Would change suck even if the alternatives were better? It doesn't matter really. It makes no sense to pay to keep your bad deal running.