Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1

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If everyone moved to open source non-profit solutions, the tech industry would lose billions (programming.dev)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm a FOSS (free and open source software) contributor and enthusiast. So I prefer to use such products (Lemmy instead of Reddit, Linux instead of Windows, Firefox instead of Chrome, Signal instead of WhatsApp, you get the idea). Was just thinking that if everyone moved to such solutions, the tech and ad industry would lose billions of dollars. That would translate to governments losing billions of dollars in tax revenue. Would such a move ever be encouraged then by the governments?

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The cost is hardly in the software. It’s for the support and setup. Even if governments switch to Linux, they’d need some sort of support contract in place with a vendor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

And I know from first hand experience that those "not the corporate one" vendors that (often local) governments try to get their stuff from are not able to offer their products or services at comparable quality. Years ago my public university, via some half-baked initiative by the state in an attempt to protect data and employ local talent and whatnot, tried to ditch Dropbox and O365 etc. in favor of some locally made stuff. It was an unmitigated disaster, especially the absolute piece of shit that was supposed to replace Dropbox. On the rare occasions that it did actually work, it simply was nowhere near as useful or convenient or performant as Dropbox. As a result people avoided that shit like the plague and started sharing their files through other, arguably shadier platforms instead. Until they finally rolled the actually usable alternative that's in service now, the documents were hosted on all sorts of shitty websites with no access control.

AFAIK the Office alternative failed completely and they're back to where they were, maybe even deeper into 365 actually.