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Open Source Software Technology

Open-Source Software Becomes a Standard In Dortmund, Germany (documentfoundation.org) 42

The Council of the German city of Dortmund has announced that it's embracing free and open-source software, wherever possible. The Document Foundation reports: The Dortmund Council has declared digitalisation to be a political leadership task in its Memorandum 2020 to 2025. In the course of this, two central resolutions for free software were passed on February 11, 2021, for which the minutes were published on March 30:

- "Use of open source software where possible."
- "Software developed by the administration or commissioned for development is made available to the general public."

With this resolution, city policy takes on the shaping of municipal digital sovereignty and digital participation. The resolution means a reversal of the burden of proof in favor of open source software -- and at the expense of proprietary software. In the future, the administration will have to justify why open source software cannot be used for every proprietary software application. Based on the report of the Dortmund city administration on the investigation of the potentials of free software and open standards, open source software is understood in the sense of free software.

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Open-Source Software Becomes a Standard In Dortmund, Germany

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  • What news?

    FFS.

  • by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Friday April 02, 2021 @05:57PM (#61230370)

    Is that governments often love open source because it's "cheap," but they don't want to budget anything to provide financial support for it. Think anyone is going to tell Dortmund's government that if they adopt LibreOffice they should set aside at least ten euros per user per year to send to the Document Foundation to help pay costs? Unlikely.

    • Didn't a major German city play this game - albeit more aggressively - and after a few years, when no one was looking, went back to Microsoft windows?

      The much-touted savings rarely materialize, and the effort at the local level to integrate disparate software packages is typically much more complex that the average "open source" advocate would like to admit. As an example, Windows offers a fantastic management tool to manage thousands of desktops/users and resources called Active Directory - there is no "op

      • by gmack ( 197796 )

        Windows offers a fantastic management tool to manage thousands of desktops/users and resources called Active Directory - there is no "open source" alternative

        That's a pretty weird thing to say given that Active Directory is basically an interface and some protocol extensions on top of LDAP.

        Want Linux to authenticate against an AD server? I've done it, not hard. Apache even supports it for websites (used it), or you can do LD in the actual web site logic (used that too). You can even use Linux as an AD controller.

        • Windows offers a fantastic management tool to manage thousands of desktops/users and resources called Active Directory - there is no "open source" alternative

          That's a pretty weird thing to say given that Active Directory is basically an interface and some protocol extensions on top of LDAP.

          Want Linux to authenticate against an AD server? I've done it, not hard. Apache even supports it for websites (used it), or you can do LD in the actual web site logic (used that too). You can even use Linux as an AD controller.

          Your argument centers around authentication, and you're right - there are LDAP implementations that handle authentication pretty easily.

          That's not all Active Directory is, though. Group Policy is a big one - one place to create very granular system behavior permissions, user permissions, and unattended installation of software. Linux does this somehow, some way, I'm sure, but it's nowhere near as consistent or simple (feel free to point me to such a solution, I'm genuinely curious about one). One pretty hel

          • by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Friday April 02, 2021 @09:28PM (#61231030) Journal

            Samba does all the same stuff too. But that's a bit of a red herring. That's presuming that you're going to run with all your computers running the proprietary Microsoft operating system, Microsoft's proprietary office applications, etc and manage them with the open source management system. Which frankly doesn't make much sense. If you're going to run 3,000 Microsoft Windows computers and use Microsoft O365 for your email and Azure for your servers, it would probably make sense to use Microsoft's management tool, Active Directory. Samba isn't quite as good *at being Microsoft* as Microsoft is.

            If you're going to use all Microsoft products, then yeah Microsoft makes the best system for managing their OS
              Samba can do it all, but why?

            On the other hand, Active Directory really, really sucks at managing your Yum repos. As in it's completely incapable of even trying. AD has no ideas what a Kubernetes cluster is. AD managing your MySQL? Nope.

    • Think anyone is going to tell Dortmund's government that if they adopt LibreOffice they should set aside at least ten euros per user per year to send to the Document Foundation to help pay costs? Unlikely.

      Worse. You think anyone in Dortmund will actually fund some even basic training on how to use software that isn't the software that everyone grew up with? Sure you can figure it out, but "free" is often quite costly.

    • Think anyone is going to tell Dortmund's government that if they adopt LibreOffice they should set aside at least ten euros per user per year to send to the Document Foundation to help pay costs? Unlikely.

      But that’s how it should start, rather than ideological statements like “everything must be open source” I would much rather governments choose the right tool for the job. So absolutely they should try to replace MS Office with LibreOffice, contribute to the open document foundation and go through the process of contributing to the project when it lacks something they need.

      Once they’ve proven they can do that they can then do the same thing with other software components in their inf

  • "Use of open source software where possible."

    This sounds great, but how much software, beyond basic office productivity applications, that a municipal government needs to manage a city is available as open source? Sure, over time some "run the municipal water supply" or "manage the police department" and maybe even a "municipal tax collection" application will be written by altruistic open-source advocates, donating their time to help cities save on software expenses, but right now this is almost meaningless posturing.

    The resolution means a reversal of the burden of proof in favor of open source software -- and at the expense of proprietary software. In the future, the administration will have to justify why open source software cannot be used for every proprietary software application.

    Wow, that bold interpretation of

  • Microsoft announces some big new office in Dortmund and the Council cancels its FLOSS plans? Something like that happened in Munich.

    • by quikee ( 6171646 )
      Actually, the city of Munich first elected a different mayor, that just happens to be very pro-Microsoft. Then the writing was already on the wall what would eventually happen with their open source efforts - the new administration wanted to get rid of it, so they did (no matter if it was running fine for them or not).
    • My thought exactly. Tested and proven technique for getting a certain new large employer in town.

    • The problem is that Dortmund is at least 10 years too late.

      When selecting a software today (commercial, not custom made), open source to a large extent compete against cloud based offerings where there are no servers to be installed, no software to be installed, no patching. New functionality is added transparently.

      Microsoft does not have to do anything in Dortmund. They just present the complete Microsoft365 package and let the good people at Dortmund try to find or configure something even close in fu
  • A major problem for Open Source advocates is that for a lot of the commercial offerings, they are delivered as cloud based services.

    That means the customer can start using it NOW, not when servers have been purchased, network configured and software installed, admins trained and everything tested and secured.

    Yes, I know there are many things to be said about cloud and security etc.., but from a management standpoint, it offers a pretty much unbeatable package.

    One example would of course be Microsoft365,
  • Interesting how a general statement of support for open source can make nerds^H^H^H^H^H slashdotters crazy.
  • ...and over again and expecting a different result.

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