The Austrian military didn’t just adopt LibreOffice; they actually contributed back to it. Over five person-years of development work went into adding features they needed. Those improvements are now available to everyone using LibreOffice, which is pretty cool.
We shouldn’t be celebrating military forces, a branch of the government that is notoriously expensive for tax payers, to use FOSS without giving anything significant back in return.
Check out @[email protected] 's comment. They did contribute significantly. Also, y’know, it’s in the article and on the post itself…
They contributed code that they needed, that is not giving back. I am speaking about actual long-term maintenance and/or money, which isn’t mentioned anywhere.
See, the problem with these code contributions is that they are just that: One time effort. In most cases, this code will be handed over to the core maintainers, who will then have to deal with it for the rest of the project’s lifecycle. There are many documented instances in which FOSS projects are actually suffering because of contributions like this, as they are struggling to maintain the added features long term.
But all the people downvoting this care about is that a public money drain like the military writes some code and throws it into the faces of FOSS developers, even completely disregarding whether these improvements are actually relevant for the everyday user of the software. And again, by contributing I am referring to actually funding the project with significant amounts. We are speaking of a public entity that spends multiple millions on a single fighter jet.
So, whether this is a good or a bad thing hinges on the question of whether they are willing to maintain the code/features they have produced? As it stands, their course of action, even if they are only contributing code for features they want to have, is “better than nothing,” I think? Would it be significantly better if they didn’t contribute anything from the get-go? As it stands, I would stand on the side of “careful optimism” that they will maintain whatever they are building, but only time will tell…
As an Austrian, the fact that they are doing anything sensible at all within the digital world is astonishing to me.
I get where you’re coming from, but Military documents getting out of Microsoft’s(USA) reach is absolutely something positive
They actually did contribute back into the project, also even if they didn’t it’s still a win because proprietary software should not be used by any part of the government.