#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
@zazzoo @datum If there is a "positive" to come out of all of this shit, it's that now more than ever before folks are open to the idea of building alternatives to the (mainly US-based) tech lords.
As someone who's been talking about this stuff for over two decades, finally folks are starting to listen and I no longer get blank stares. :)
@leftylabourtech Seriously I thought maybe we'd get some traction when the pandemic happened, with the collapse of global supply chains, shortages and spiraling inflation resulting in rampant profiteering. The utter frailty and unsustainability of the system laid bare for all to see.
The powers that be shut that down fast, though, forced everybody back to work, declared the emergency 'over' somehow.
We saw it again with Trump's tariff wars.
We saw it again with the pointless assault on Iran.
May it all stick, at some point.
@zazzoo @datum Having kicked around the left for half a century, I look at the seemingly "small" wins and changes.
When I was a primary school kid, the Vietnam War was raging. It took years for a mass opposition to develop. With the Iraq War, the Palestine genocide, the Iran war,, the development of opposition to these wars has been instant.
Sadly it hasn't stopped them, but the opposition is huge.
@leftylabourtech Coincidentally, immediately after my last post here, I had to run an errand and turned on the radio just in time to catch Cross Country Checkup. The first half of which was on this very topic - focusing on the Microsoft and FAA outages. They really burned Sean Duffy. They had solid guests who really understood the issues and the whole thing seemed like a replay of this very thread.
As you say, word is getting out. People are getting fed up. About time. The question is if public awareness and opposition can run faster than their wealth and power consolidation. We're already at the point where government is being strong-armed by corporate lock-in.
@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.