Fabio Manganiello

German administrations love open-source, but some initiatives could benefit from a more pragmatic approach.

Big kudos to the German state of Schleswig-Holstein!

Another German administration is breaking Microsoft's glass cage, and at a first read the scope of this initiative seems more ambitious than many I've witnessed in the past.

Both the ArsTechnica article and the original announcement don't include a few details to make better estimate on the possible success of this initiative though.

The announcement follows previously established plans to migrate the state government off Microsoft Office in favor of open source LibreOffice.

I hope that there's a Web-based offering somewhere on the horizon. Fewer and fewer employees nowadays run Word/Excel directly on their machines. Most of them run Google Docs or use Microsoft's office cloud. Giving them a stand-alone app which limits the possibilities for online collaboration may be met with resistance, especially now that many of them are already getting used to online AI assistants. I read that #NextCloud is involved – I hope there's a plan to run #CollaboraOffice, which is more or less like running the LibreOffice engine as a service, #OnlyOffice or some equivalent alternative.

Due to the high hardware requirements of Windows 11, we would have a problem with older computers. With Linux we don't have that

Very sensitive decision that will probably save taxpayers a lot of money. But it'd also be interested to know which #Linux distro has been selected. Hopefully the administration won't repeat Munich's past mistakes and it won't try to build and maintain their own distro. Better get into talks with a popular distro (probably not Red Hat, but hey isn't SuSE German?) and orchestrate a deal where the State funds its development, and in exchange it gets development support. It's a win-win where a distro not managed by a giant like Red Hat or Canonical can get consistent direct funding from a public administration (that's what many of us have been advocating for years anyway), and the local administration can enjoy the support of a well-documented distro like OpenSuSE, Mint, Pop_OS or Manjaro without having to reinvent the wheel and scramble for their own developers/packagers/maintainers, and minimizing the risk of going from one vendor lock-in (Microsoft) to another (IBM or Canonical).

The government will ditch Microsoft Sharepoint and Exchange/Outlook in favor of open source offerings Nextcloud and Open-Xchange, and Mozilla Thunderbird

Same issue as with LibreOffice: folks today are used to webmail and mobile apps. Thunderbird definitely fills the gap on the stand-alone side, especially now that it's getting more love and support than before. But it still lacks an official mobile app – K-9 is almost there, but not nearly there yet. And it doesn't solve the “I'm used to the GMail/Outlook interface and set all of my filters and do my advanced search from a webview” problem. There's actually a big gap there. What's a decent open webmail UI that can compete with GMail/Outlook nowadays? RoundCube feels ancient and it has barely changed in 15 years. SnappyMail is a bit better, and it's what a use as a selected webmail client too, but it's still lightyears behind GMail/Outlook. NextCloud Mail is slowly getting there, but it only integrates with a NextCloud solution. Let's admit that there's a gap that needs to be filled fast if we don't want employees who have years of email muscle memory trained in specific environments to doom the project.

Schleswig-Holstein is also developing an open source directory service to replace Microsoft's Active Directory and an open source telephony offering.

Please, don't. Just don't. A local administration, no matter how well-intentioned and initially well-funded, just won't have the resources necessary to invent such big wheels. And, even if it somehow manages to bake something together, it'll eventually be a patchy solution that they'll have to maintain themselves for years to come, and that is unlikely to find adoption outside of its initial borders.

Invest into #OpenLDAP to fill the gaps left by ActiveDirectory on the LDAP side instead. That project needs a lot more love. And leverage WebDAV for almost everything else. If you are already planning to use NextCloud, it'll already do a lot of the heavylifting for you on that side, without having to write new software or come up with new protocols.

Same for telephony. Looking into iPXE and other open implementations of the PXE and SIP protocols. Telephony protocols are hard and well-established, reinventing the wheel should be avoided at all costs.

I think there's a lot of potential in initiatives like these, but only a clear definition of their scope and a clear plan of execution with continuous user feedback can help preventing something like the failure of the early Munich experiments.

RE: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/german-state-gov-ditching-windows-for-linux-30k-workers-migrating/

Many ambitious voice projects have gone bust in the past couple of years, but one seems to be more promising than it was a while ago.

I've picked up some development on Picovoice in these days as I'm rewriting some Platypush integrations that haven't been touched in a long time (and Picovoice is among those).

I originally worked with their APIs about 4-5 years ago, when I did some research on STT engines for Platypush.

Back then I kind of overlooked Picovoice. It wasn't very well documented, the APIs were a bit clunky, and their business model was based on a weird “send us an email with your use-case and we'll reach back to you” (definitely not the kind of thing you'd want other users to reuse with their own accounts and keys).

Eventually I did just enough work to get the basics to work, and then both my article 1 and article 2 on voice assistants focused more on other solutions – namely Google Assistant, Alexa, Snowboy, Mozilla DeepSpeech and Mycroft's models.

A couple of years down the line:

• Snowboy is dead
• Mycroft is dead
• Mozilla DeepSpeech isn't officially dead, but it hasn't seen a commit in 3 years
• Amazon's AVS APIs have become clunky and it's basically impossible to run any logic outside of Amazon's cloud
• The Google Assistant library has been deprecated without a replacement. It still works on Platypush after I hammered it a lot (especially when it comes to its dependencies from 5-6 years ago), but it only works on x86_64 and Raspberry Pi ¾ (not aarch64).

So I was like “ok, let's give Picovoice another try”. And I must say that I'm impressed by what I've seen. The documentation has improved a lot. The APIs are much more polished. They also have a Web console that you can use to train your hotword models and intents logic – no coding involved, similar to what Snowboy used to have. The business model is still a bit weird, but at least now you can sign up from a Web form (and still explain what you want to use Picovoice products for), and you immediately get an access key to start playing on any platform. And the product isn't fully open-source either (only the API bindings are). But at first glance it seems that most of the processing (if not all, with the exception of authentication) happens on-device – and that's a big selling point.

Most of all, the hotword models are really good. After a bit of plumbing with sounddevice, I've managed to implement a real-time hotword detection on Platypush that works really well.

The accuracy is comparable to that of Google Assistant's, while supporting many more hotwords and being completely offline. Latency is very low, and the CPU usage is minimal even on a Raspberry Pi 4.

I also like the modular architecture of the project. You can use single components (Porcupine for hotword detection, Cheetah for speech detection from stream, Leopard for speech transcription, Rhino for intent parsing...) in order to customize your assistant with the features that you want.

I'm now putting together a new Picovoice integration for Platypush that, rather than having separate integrations for hotword detection and STT, wires everything together, enables intent detection and provides TTS rendering too (it depends on what's the current state of the TTS products on Picovoice).

I'll write a new blog article when ready. In the meantime, you can follow the progress on the Picovoice branch.