Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector

Should be an EU wide mandate at this point, as it's mostly pros with little cons.

Since the options are 1), keep spending EU taxpayer money to boost Microsoft's and other US big-tech market cap, or 2), spend EU taxpayer money on FOSS and local companies implementing and maintaining that FOSS for local infrastructure, then the correct choice seems obvious to me.

The only cons are the short term costs, teething issues and pains of the transition, but that's outweigh by the long term pros once that hill is crossed, the biggest which is tech sovereignty and independence form major tech firms under Uncle Sam's control, and the taxpayer money going to local companies and jobs instead of US.

Ironically, Russia was unaffected by the Crowdstrike incident since they're under sanctions and can't use it, and IIRC they also started switching to Linux for their infrastructure after the war, so maybe it's an interesting case study.

Sadly, this article is plain wrong. I've been working in the gov. IT sector in switzerland and reading the headline and article gives a false impression.

The aforementioned law EMBAG does not mandate the use of open source software.

What it does is mandate that software develeoped especially for the federal government needs to be open sourced, unless that is not possible due to licensing issues or national security reasons. The whole swiss administration is microsoft based.

Also, most day-to-day administrative tasks are handled by the cantons (think state) administrations, and they are, as far as I understand, not subject to this law. The federal and cantonal administration are quite separated in switzerland.

All of this happened in november 2023

There are still arguments going on to make sure the entire Swiss Digital National ID (e-ID)[1] code will be open source.

[1] https://github.com/e-id-admin/open-source-community/blob/mai...

Love the initiative but it has failed so often (Munich anyone?) because of stupid choices like:

- let’s make our own distro.

- Let’s use OpenOffice (0 knowledge of FOSS at the start)

- let’s ban anything proprietary from day one

I hope someone wise is in charge (that Sturmer seems to be a good one, let’s just hope he is not too dogmatic/RMS about FOSS) and they set themselves up for success. Which, to me means: take it slow, ask for feedback, guide; don’t force.

… basically apply standard change management techniques.

Well, yes and no. The law (which went into effect 2023 BTW) still has a lot of loopholes, e.g.:

> The federal authorities subject to this Act shall disclose the source code of software that they develop or have developed for the performance of their duties, unless the rights of third parties or security-related reasons would preclude or restrict this.

"unless the rights of third parties [...] would preclude or restrict this" pretty much says it all.

[dupe]

Some discussion earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40852084

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047172

That's the right approach, hopefully more governments will follow. Stuff built with public money should belong to the public.

Switzerland is so brilliant.

I wish they spoke english, id consider moving there.

This is great, but I doubt this will ever actually be enforced. At least not without Switzerland dramatically increasing its investment in FOSS.

Mandatory is a ridiculous rule if only for the self defeating nature of limiting yourself. I can understand the sentiment but maybe make the rule say to prefer OSS. That is when sourcing RFPs prefer OSS solutions that can fulfill requirements.