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Comment by LoganDark | Hacker News Reader

Could be that Microsoft can navigate all the regulatory bullshit that surrounds anything government. I don't know of anyone doing that for anything Linux.

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There's tons of Red Hat in federal IT, that's not the issue. It's just that Microsoft dominates the client-facing software business, and Red Hat has minimal presence there so while you might see RHEL desktops at e.g. NASA you're unlikely to see them anywhere else, and there's no real open source equivalent of SharePoint or Office out there.

Maybe [0] will be one, eventually, but it would take a long long time to replicate the functionality if it were to ever happen. Best case scenario is that the EU were to fund an open source solution.

[0] https://www.techradar.com/pro/mozilla-launching-thundermail-...

> Schleswig-Holstein, one of Germany’s 16 states, on Wednesday confirmed plans to move tens of thousands of systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The announcement follows previously established plans to migrate the state government off Microsoft Office in favor of open source LibreOffice.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/germa...

People don't take it seriously because European governments have a history of making announcements like this and then rolling it back in favour of a return to Microsoft.

Lets see what happens when they try to move finance of Excel. If they are successful there, then there might be hope, if not, then they will eventually go back or have 45% of the company on some kind of exception.

Huh, I didn't know Red Hat did any government stuff.

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