#Canadians, this is your Government of Canada on #Microsoft (and this is only one of many M$ contracts this year).
"Just say no!". Elbows up eh?
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@leftylabourtech lying to us.
When we get tired of Carney they will offer us the return of Harper. We need to pressure Liberals to start standing up, just like the Democratic Party in the US.
The lie that we have to become fascist to defeat fascism is insane.
We need to see a plan on getting that lowered, and I would love a new rule to put a freeze on any new deals with Microsoft within our government.
@leftylabourtech How do we convince them to sever this connection? We need to get away from US tech entirely.
@lmgenealogy This is an enormous problem not just in Canada, but world-wide.
I think there are already some positive initiatives elsewhere in the world, particularly in Europe that we can draw upon, of the public sector breaking with US big tech. There have been some mistakes too of poorly planned migrations along the way that we can also learn from so that we don't make the same mistakes.
This M$ outage though has created broad public awareness of the issue of US big tech dependency.
@lmgenealogy The beauty of the free/libre/open source (FLOSS) world is that it gives public sector organizations the opportunity to collaborate on breaking proprietary US big tech dependency. No single public sector organization has to figure everything out on their own.
@leftylabourtech Can you imagine how transformative a third of a billion dollars a year would be for Linux and BSD developers who beg for rent and pizza?
@datum To be fair this is a "multi-year contract", but it's only one of many M$ contracts
And yes, this one contract alone would do miracles for FLOSS development.
Last time I looked at The Document Foundation's annual financial statement, they ran on about 1.5 million euros a year. That's peanuts for a government.
@datum That's the thing about neoliberalism though - they're not looking for efficiency. Their ideology sees giving $350M to a foreign monopoly as 'fostering a competitive market' somehow, but directly funding a free, open-source solution as an 'anti-competitive state subsidy.' (edit for clarity: operational vs capital expenditure)
This despite the fact that money in the hands of Canadian developers just ends up circling back to them through taxes and economic spending and money given to Microsoft gets used for yachts, trampling competitors and buying political influence.
#neoliberalism having stripped the assets elsewhere seeks to strip the assets of the state for profit.
And if Yanis Varoufakis is correct, we are shifting from neoliberalism to #technofeudalism
@leftylabourtech 👆 Not entirely sure, but I'd say we're already there. @datum
@leftylabourtech
I think you target the wrong audience.
Early-administrative people within a bureaucracy drive change. They shift their 8-12 employees to a new data set, a more-efficient work flow, a new software or cloud service, etc.
They are small enough for a more-senior administrator to take a risk on letting them run with an idea. Once they do it successfully, for less money/staff/time/whatever, they sr. takes credit for the innovation, and implements everywhere.
Not the PMO.