this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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I think you're just thinking about word processing and spreadsheets neither of which covers the big things orgs want out of these suites: email, chat, video meetings, shared document storage.
They already have their own programs to do all that. They have had them since outlook was just a client and before Microsoft and Google offered email services.
The government should be using FOSS software simply to be a good stewart of our tax money.
I can't quite tell what you're recommending here. Are you saying the government should go back to using Sendmail SMTP servers, telnet or IRC chat, and NFS shares as replacements for modern enterprise communication suites?
Or maybe they just expect every state government (or worse, individual local municipalities) to roll their own personal cloud. Like have everybody set up a NextCloud server and just hope shit doesn't fall over.
Yea, I would prefer that, a state founded agency which has the order to set up FOSS workspaces.
The tech is already here, all it needs is courage to ditch mega tech coorp.
Everything government must be transparent, in my opinion
You've never worked for the federal government have you? They just don't have the expertise to setup something like that, at least not at most agencies.
They should request private sector to write offers for produce the software and state in the contract that sources have to be FOSS
https://news.itsfoss.com/switzerland-open-source/
i think they used email as a reference point in time. that they had the necessary tools before google did email
That's my point. Basic SMTP email is a far cry from today's modern email suites like Office365 or Gsuite. Suggesting a self hosted basic SMTP email as a replacement for a modern enterprise is not realistic.
But that's not how it works now, does it? There's plenty of FOSS alternatives. postfix, mailcow, dovecot, openSMTPD, just to name a few. I'm sure the US government used or still uses postfix under the hood in certain circles btw, even if most of their IT provisioning just deals with Exchange.
I don't think they specifically meant the email system, but then they didn't being examples so its hard to know.
what are the benefits of gsuite and office 365? I ask because I don't use them
The government has had their own servers and messaging applications since the internet began. There's no good reason to ditch what they had in favkr of an inferior product like Microsoft or Google's web mail.
What we used when I was there 20 years ago was vastly more secure because we rolled our own encryption (literally used mylar punch tape to load it into a device and diatribute it to the network.)
It was resistant to jamming and interception because it worked on a rolling set of keys that changed hundreds of times per second. (frequency hopping)
We owned the .gov and .mil domains and administered them ourselves.
Moving to an external corporation is less secure, and costs more money for the tax payers.
I'm pretty sure every federal executive agency has been on Active Directory and Exchange for like 20+ years now. The courts migrated off of IBM Domino/Notes about 6 or 7 years ago, onto MS Exchange/Outlook.
Uh that's now understood not to be best practice, because it tends to be quite insecure.
Either way, Microsoft's ecosystem on enterprise is pretty much the default on all large organizations, and they have (for better or for worse) convinced almost everyone that the total cost of ownership is cheaper for MS-administered cloud stuff than for any kind of non-MS system for identity/user management, email, calendar, video chat, and instant messaging. Throwing in Word/Excel/PowerPoint is just icing on the cake.