So much this. It's absurd that in a world where every government interaction isoving online, we still ask every individual state institution to contract out the development and maintenance work to outside companies, instead of having a government IT provider.

The savings on bureaucracy and time spent analyzing puvlic offers alone would be immense over a decade.

> So then why not have the same for IT infrastructure instead of outsourcing it to all these parasites?

That exists already (and has for a long while): the Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ, https://www.brz.gv.at/en/). They do a lot of public facing government websites and portals. If you lived in Austria, there’s a good chance that you’ve used at least one of them. The question is, why haven’t they been tasked with this migration?

>So then why not have the same for IT infrastructure instead of outsourcing it to all these parasites?

Not a comment on Atos directly, but I am betting that its an opex/capex thing.

Government departments see ongoing maintenance as internal, opex driven activity and right size their infrastructure teams to handle the ongoing workload.

Government departments see a large implementation project as an opportunity to save money through capex. Rather than increasing their resourcing internally to complete the project, they send it to tender. The tender document will require that the vendor hand over to their internal team for ongoing maintenance and support at the completion of the project. No ongoing impact to department opex budgets or headcounts.

Even if it blows out by like 50%, they probably still save money by not managing the labor costs internally. And they can force the vendor to take a hit on some overruns.

I prefer Atos + a solid open source solution to "an own IT department that will ditch the battle tested open source solution because XYZ" and then 6 months later bugs rain from the sky with users' data searchable in google.

Opening up a whole department requires skills. If you don't have such skills, please hire the "parasite". I prefer that. At least they provide a service, overpaid, ok, but they have at least some knowledge in the business.

> Like for example Austria has a national highway company(ASFINAG) and national railway company(OEBB)

Since only the government is doing these, there is no real gain from outsourcing - either way you pay the full costs (it need not be that way, but that is how it typically is). For IT lots of others also need that work and so you can share the overhead costs if you outsource.

That's the thing with these service companies, they only hire when they get the contracts, so you can rarely expect engineers skilled and experienced with a product so many of them got introduced a few days/weeks before.

They usually merely serve as gatekeepers to the vendor support.

why not both?

Yes of course. From the outside, I can’t tell to what extent and whether it’s being done sensibly, but there are projects where they are likely better off contracting them out, and others where there are benefits of keeping things in-house (e.g., involving subject matter experts with long involvement in some niche government area). My point was that such an organization already exists.

It's not if you're running it system that also runs other software. On a dedicated VM, I wouldn't care, though.

As for :latest, that depends on the push policy of the container owners. NextCloud only pushes stable releases to :latest so it's probably fine. There's no reason a :v123 tag would be any more or less secure than :latest.

It's only if you use the AIO package (=all in one). You can run it differently though.

I was running it on an Odroid N2 for 2-3 years, and upgraded to a RK3588 Orange Pi something a couple of years ago. It's not fast but it's useable. At one point I succeded in making the collaborative editing working, but it stopped after updates. Maybe it needs more love than what I'm able to spare, but the feeling after years is that you have to accept some level of unreliability.

It has crypt in the name

I started using this and overall quite good but with very minor caveats...

* My part of the world is not adjacent to Germany (where this paid offering is hosted)...so there is a little latency. But not nearly as bad as I expected.

* While file sharing and syncing and other basic stuff is included, the equivalent of online collabora (or whatever the online office suite is called) is not included and you would have to self host it...but hetzner state this in their relevant knowledge base webpages.

$7 per user. So if you have three people using the server, it becomes cheaper.

As we digitize everything at work, people has done that less and less. That looks like an immediate collateral effect of paper or people that think like they are using paper.

There is still your random "let's make a list of X on the meeting", that would actually improve if you just had something that collects the items. But out of that, there has been a long time since I last saw people doing it.

Yes Microsoft Office was already dominant. Why didn't libre office affect this dominance being 'so good'? It's also free, so it should be interesting to companies, right? Wrong. I recently set up an SME who when saw it ran away and immediately bought a Microsoft license, which means they would rather pay and be spied on than use libre office.

Believe it or not, people like nice things. Microsoft Office looks nice. Libre office looks like a car accident. It's shallow, I know, but this is the response I get every time.

Everyone I know hates it. It is a small sample, true, but it says something. So I think, the fact Microsoft is so strong is to be blamed on the alternatives, or in this case only one alternative.

We need to look at this as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Turn it around. If it would be good, people would jump on it. Especially small companies.

Google workspace is a web app, no? So it being better than desktop is comparing different things. I use it and I like it, especially since I don't need advanced Features Microsoft offers

We have no good alternative. We have an alternative.

> You only feel this way because you're used to MS Office.

You are kind of proving the point. You point to a Google product as a good alternative, not to the OSS product. I really want to like LibreOffice and it is a good product for what it is, but it is far from being a great product.

I disagree completely. If libre office would be fine, it would be popular. And, as said, most of the people I know avoid it like a plague.

Also, im not trying to ridicule FOSS as a whole. if anything I'm a financial supporter for several projects and organizations. It's not a lot of money, but it's every month. So, no, it's not this.

The proposal would be to fund something like collabora, build on top of libre office or do something greenfield, but all this money that was supposed to go to Microsoft should be redirected.

Decision that governments did are not based on the fact that libre office is good. It's based on 1) political reasons called digital sovereignty and 2) price. Maybe 3) being pissed at trump. They didn't do it because LO was good.

Some american products have no good alternatives, yet. Some do, like windows can be replaced with gnome, but mobile phones cannot. Probably you are not typing or reading this from a European os on your phone, yet alternatives exist. Just not good ones.

Microsoft Office clone is not what I want, but what I would accept. Let's say UI should be very similar to Microsoft Office or even better Google office. That's it. Make it in a desktop suite and we are all good.

But do not ignore the UI part of the app.