• AgreeableLandscape☭
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    192 years ago

    I mean, if they halted operations, presumably permanently as they seem to imply, it shouldn’t matter right? Since they intend to ditch all their assets and exit the market anyway, right?

    Unless this whole thing was a marketing ploy for Western audiences and they plan to start right back up once people stop paying attention. Hmm…

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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      102 years ago

      Yeah exactly, if they were serious about leaving then what’s all the fuss about. Looks like a bluff got called.

      • @Julianus@lemmy.ml
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        -32 years ago

        …with a weaker bluff. It’s childish, like the toothless sanctioning of Biden and Hilary Clinton. Or threatening international volunteers for the Ukrainians with legal action, while inviting Syrian mercenaries at the time. The noises coming out of the Kremlin have become farcical.

  • ghost_laptop
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    102 years ago

    How is the government going to handle the use of public computers if Microsoft is getting out of Russia? I mean, I’m sure they already have a lot of pirated copies and old versions of Windows, as any (at least third world) country does, but at some point I don’t see any option to either pirate every copy of Windows or start using Linux.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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      142 years ago

      I’m guessing Linux will end up being the long term solution, and they’ll just keep using old versions of windows before they can phase it out. Astra Linux is the main domestic distro there and I imagine it’ll be getting rolled out more aggressively now.

      • ghost_laptop
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        22 years ago

        I know you can pirate it, I doubt a government will decide to launch a national scale campaign to pirate every machine with Windows, it would probably be easier to install Linux any way since you have a lot of older machines.

        • @triplenadir
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          12 years ago

          I think you’re right that government departments would use Linux in the long term… seems to me it could take months, if not years, for workers to learn all the new ways of doing things, virtualise / wrap / port any Windows-only software they’re using, replace or write drivers for any non-Linux-supporting hardware they use, and fill any holes in accessibility tech – I’ve heard that JAWS is a long way ahead of Linux equivalents.

          Setting up a fake license server, or rolling out something like MAS using Group Policy might make a lot of sense in the meantime…

          • ghost_laptop
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            12 years ago

            I agree there are cases where you need specific software and in that cases it might be hard, but also there are a shit ton of other cases where everything you need is simply a word processor and spreadsheet.

            • @triplenadir
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              12 years ago

              To be clear, I hope places just cut straight to Linux, I’m saying it seems likely there’ll be a transition period. It still takes time to retrain on a different word processor or spreadsheet software, especially if you’ve been using Microsoft’s 20+ hours a week.

              • ghost_laptop
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                12 years ago

                Yeah, I know, I know, also people who are not tech savvy, you change the smallest thing to their GUI and they get lost, you need to do some training stuff.

  • @ree@lemmy.ml
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    72 years ago

    Apple and windows have administrative access to all device right?

    Coulnd’t they juste brick 99% of Russia PCs over night if they wanted?

    • lemmygrabber
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      2 years ago

      Not sure if they could brick. But it’s possible for them to render the OS installation unusable.

      The problem is this: what kind of message does it send to their international market? Not a good one I suppose.

      • @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.mlM
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        2 years ago

        A small part of me wants that to happen, just to really hammer in the fact that open source is the only reliable way to run your tech fleet. Especially if the US hates you.

          • @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.mlM
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            2 years ago

            I mean the other day I was checking out CMake licensing(because I was bored), and I was shocked to find that you can’t use CMake if US hates you. In what universe would such a tool threaten national security??

            Then it’s not open source. Not by the definition.

            Both the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation agree that you cannot put restrictions on what the software can be used for and still call it Open Source or Free/Libre Software, respectively. Not even conditions like no commercial use or no military use are allowed. This is why CC-BY-SA (do whatever you want as long as you cite the creator and re-license under the same or compatible license) is considered an Open Source/Libre license, but both CC-BY-NC-SA (no commercial use) and CC-BY-ND-SA (no derivative works) are not.

            • @bc3114@lemmy.ml
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              2 years ago

              Thanks for the detailed explanation!

              edit: also I’m just sad that a tool I used to trust and love is not really open source as I thought it was:(

  • @triplenadir
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    32 years ago

    there’s a joke in here somewhere about centrists crying about broken windows 🤔🤔