<story><title>Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector</title><url>https://news.itsfoss.com/switzerland-open-source/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kenjackson</author><text>The biggest con is IMO the most obvious one.  What if a third party non-open source product does something that FOSS can’t do or is dramatically behind on?&lt;p&gt;And are companies going really source local maintainers for FOSS versus the standard maintainer?  Eg, is Switzerland really not going to use Canonical for supporting Ubuntu because it is British?</text></item><item><author>Rinzler89</author><text>Should be an EU wide mandate at this point, as it&amp;#x27;s mostly pros with little cons.&lt;p&gt;Since the options are 1), keep spending EU taxpayer money to boost Microsoft&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;The only cons are the short term costs, teething issues and pains of the transition, but that&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s control, and the taxpayer money going to local companies and jobs instead of US.&lt;p&gt;Ironically, Russia was unaffected by the Crowdstrike incident since they&amp;#x27;re under sanctions and can&amp;#x27;t use it, and IIRC they also started switching to Linux for their infrastructure after the war, so maybe it&amp;#x27;s an interesting case study.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jraph</author><text>&amp;gt; What if a third party non-open source product does something that FOSS can’t do or is dramatically behind on?&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s almost the best side effect: in a place where open source is mandatory, they will have to fund the missing features and it will be available to everyone, once and for all. If everyone does that, we rapidly get great software, sharing the costs, very efficiently, and it&amp;#x27;s all open source.&lt;p&gt;The alternative being everyone paying their own little license on their side ad vitam eternam.</text></comment>
<story><title>Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector</title><url>https://news.itsfoss.com/switzerland-open-source/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kenjackson</author><text>The biggest con is IMO the most obvious one.  What if a third party non-open source product does something that FOSS can’t do or is dramatically behind on?&lt;p&gt;And are companies going really source local maintainers for FOSS versus the standard maintainer?  Eg, is Switzerland really not going to use Canonical for supporting Ubuntu because it is British?</text></item><item><author>Rinzler89</author><text>Should be an EU wide mandate at this point, as it&amp;#x27;s mostly pros with little cons.&lt;p&gt;Since the options are 1), keep spending EU taxpayer money to boost Microsoft&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;The only cons are the short term costs, teething issues and pains of the transition, but that&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s control, and the taxpayer money going to local companies and jobs instead of US.&lt;p&gt;Ironically, Russia was unaffected by the Crowdstrike incident since they&amp;#x27;re under sanctions and can&amp;#x27;t use it, and IIRC they also started switching to Linux for their infrastructure after the war, so maybe it&amp;#x27;s an interesting case study.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>InitialLastName</author><text>Reading the blog linked in TFA, in this case the requirement applies just to software developed by the Swiss government (or on their behalf by a contractor), not to all software in general.</text></comment>