Meh, I’ve written to MPs/MLAs a few times on this sort of subject. They aren’t going to ditch Microsoft without a HUGE demand from the public. They ignored Canada’s antiquated privacy laws for so long – letting it focus on “Data Residency” rather than “Data Sovereignty”. So even while the US put in things like the CLOUD act to allow them to take anything in a US cloud, Canada sat there like idiots thinking “if the servers are in Canada, we’re safe and secure!”. Pretty well all our government agencies and regulators are using Microsoft products / are integrated with Microsoft’s cloud. Hell, my Niece/Nephew in elementary school literally got signed up with Microsoft accounts for their school work – indoctrinated in like grade 2. All our financial services are entrenched in Microsoft’s ecosystem too – like, quite literally, most ATMs run on Windows by decree from Payments Canada, and our financial regulator sites / document transfers are all via Microsoft cloud.

Our government can’t function without a subscription to a USA company. It’s difficult to argue we’re a sovereign nation once you realise that. It also helps to explain why the government is so incapable of doing anything about the current situation – they already screwed us all over, based on a foolish assumption that the USA would always be a reliable partner.

And as for them changing, there’s a reason every time you hear them talk about elbows up / pro-canada procurement pushes, they include caveats like “if it’s too hard” or “if it’s too expensive”. They use those as easy outs for anything related to technology. “If we use linux, we’d have to hire people who can maintain linux! We’ve already outsourced all our technical know how to the USA, so it’d cost us a ton to reclaim that capability!”.

Absolutely agree with this. Politicians and those that are in the management position to make real changes have been having it too good for too long and they just want to take the easy way out by saying “it’s too hard/too expensive” and spending OUR taxpayer dollars. It’s BULLSHIT.

Look around you and see what software these government managers entities actually use? Email/chat clients, MS Word, Excel. What? Why are we still on Microsoft’s ecosystem if at all if that’s what they use most of the time? The cloud infrastructure isn’t even handled by 99% of these politicians and managers. Let the IT people handle it. Any serious IT team should know their in-and-outs of open source software and operating systems.

A lot of other legacy IT mainframes aren’t even compatible with Windows and they’ve only created an UI to ‘talk’ to the underlying system. There’s no reason why it cannot be recreated, if not improved, during the switch. Hell, don’t even switch right way, run the systems in parallel. At the end of the day, the real underlying information are just stored in tables - absolutely no reason why it cannot be ported.

The only expense that would be on-going maintenance, improvements and updates as legislation changes over time. We need data sovereignty otherwise we’re just cucks to US big tech.

I mean, yes we should, in the long term, but there will be short term retraining costs, inevitable required exceptions for edge cases, and we’re not going to be able to get out of our contracts until they’re actually over.

Also, given that the austerity budget is being driven by our NATO funding requirements to the tune of 150B per year, I don’t think this is really the same order of magnitude discussion.

Doing my part! I take credit for preventing a taxpayer funded contract with IBM to provide software solution, where there was an open source alternative (that’s actually better than the product IBM was selling).

No we should continue to be dependent on a foreign corporation who’s president attacks our sovereignty and Microsoft admits that US law supersedes Canadian sovereignty. /s

not sure Ubuntu is a great solution. but I do agree that there need to be changes made.

Yes and try out a BSD, folks! Choices (in no particular order):

• OpenBSD
• DragonFlyBSD
• FreeBSD
• NetBSD

So why choose BSD over Linux as an open source operating system to run on your computer? Because BSDs feel much more cohesive as operating systems! Every Linux distribution I’ve ever used had the feeling that it was still sort of a cobbled-together patchwork of software with a package manager and repository to maintain it.

BSDs, on the other hand, feel like they’ve been designed as a unified whole by a group of people whose goal is to build an operating system. With this comes better organization and documentation. BSDs also include software projects that are written specifically for the operating system.

If you try a BSD and start to like it, you may want to check out BSDCan, North America’s Largest BSD Conference. This year’s conference already took place in mid-June but all of the talks have been posted to the BSDCan YouTube Channel.

Lastly I want to say that if you’re very comfortable with Linux as your daily driver OS but still potentially interested in BSD, you can always give it a try on a spare computer. All of the above BSDs (except DragonFly) will run on a Raspberry Pi, for example.

Arguably anything critical shoulf have the appropraite level of SLA on it, but every dollar spent on opensource is an investment vs money going towards renting it.

Suse is the only fully FOSS and first party commercially supported distro i know. They are international but HQed in Germany.

Debian and arch are fully FOSS and community ran.

Ubuntu is commercially supported but requires unsupported retooling to move away from non-foss snap packages. They are UK head quarted.

RHEL is probaly the market leader but mosy obvious against this goal since they are US HQed AND they EULA is antiFOSS.

PopOS is FOSS, commerically supported but HQed in the US and a bit smaller of a company.

SUSE, Debian, and Arch are my recommendations for third party supported distros because of their natures though of being very popular AND FOSS.

Again though the framing that it will free as in free beer is not a good one to me, support, devolopment and maintaince are real total coat of ownership factors to consider BUT FOSS does make those costs investments in truely publically owned and controlled systems and allow for greater choice in who supports it and flexibility in cost (if a government program cant afford a year of support they program can continue legally without paying anything, though with more assumed risk).

Even American FOSS!