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A petition has been created by an Austrian EU rep. to replace Windows with GNU/Linux in all Europe
(www.europarl.europa.eu)
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this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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Depends what you mean. Locked down as in hidden from the public (I don't think that's legal anyways because of the GPL) would be bad. But locked down/limited from employees so that they can't bork the system is good, imo.
The latter, and it is good from an organisational perspective, but its never a nice experience, and for many, this will be their first real experience with a Linux.
Right now Linux is "That nerd OS", if this goes badly, for millions it could change to "That OS they forced on us at work, where I can't XYZ"
Edit: on the GPL front, GPL doesn't require that you publish your code to everyone, just to the recipients of your binaries. And you only have to give it upon request. So they definitely could keep it somewhat under wraps if they wanted to. If they are smart, they'll follow the Munich model and stick to upstreaming any changes they make.
When I said "hidden from the public", I was meaning refusing to disclose the source code even when asked. I do wonder how the laws would apply to government organizations violating copyright 🤔. Like what if it was the OS for some defense system? I'm not sure a government would be too keen on disclosing that — even if it was requested though some sort of freedom of information request (if the respective country has that) — and would rather classify it and refuse to disclose regardless of the license. I'm not aware of any precedent of this.
Only the end-users would have rights to the source under GPL, and its unlikely that someone is going to risk their job by releasing the code.
I'm not sure how FOI would work, but I dont think they just automatically get approved.
I still expect it to be done in the open, one of the things Munich got right was upstreaming all their changes, which meant that even when it was cancelled, nothing was lost. Maintaining out of tree changes is just way to much work
Would you be able to cite a source for this Munich program? I'd like to read more about it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
Not a lot of sources, I did find a blog post from a 3rd party contractor who did some work to get stuff upstreamed, but I cant find it right now
Fair point. So I suppose that would be the employees using the distribution rather than the entire populace.
Why's that?
Properly locking down a machine just heavily restricts what you can do with it, to the point that normal things that you or I do day-to-day on our own PCs become impossible. Every time you hit a restriction its very frustrating.
I am drawing from my experience as a developer, so it might be worse for me, but I've also heard accountants in the office complaining of similar gripes with their locked down windows systems.
Hm, but I'm not sure people would attribute that to the design of the underlying OS itself rather than just the employer. Like do those people with restrictions on Windows blame Microsoft? It'd be the same as someone blaming the Linux maintainers for employer placed restrictions on an OS running Linux. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure someone would still do that, but I'm not convinced that the majority would think that way — I think most people would be able to make the distinction.
Yeah, I could be wrong, maybe the blame will be attributed correctly, maybe not.
At least with Windows, most people know what its normally like at home, but thats less true for Linux.
Yeah, that's a fair point that they wouldn't have a comparison, so they wouldn't know if it's always like that. One could perhaps make an educated guess, depending on circumstance, but, without any first-hand experience or exposure, it would be just that: a guess.