Linux

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.

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.

If even Germany can, so can Canada.

And stop paying for Windows while we're busy getting rid of it!

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.

you can install linux today and drive adoption instead of waiting for rich people to save you from microsoft.

There's basically zero chance of this happening.

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.

Hell, Americans should do that too. Great idea for almost any country, frankly