Thomas Johnson III

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 06:35:53 -0500 last edited: Mon, 18 Aug 2025 18:00:45 -0400 from ArrCay

One of the greatest impacts that DOGE could have IMO, would be eliminating Micro$oft (and practically all other proprietary softwares) on all fed.gov computer systems.

Putting an end to the use of M$ software, which shouldn't be on any system where security and reliability are concerns to begin with, would be a fairly large long-term budget cut. Not just on the stupid proprietary software licensing fees, but all the extra maintenance/admin IT personnel (including some useless managers in the middle) required to keep the insecure, unreliable crap software running with bubblegum and proprietary duct tapes.

Steve Bannon on GETTR : Can’t Have This ‘Bait and Switch’— DOGE Committed to the President a minimum of $1 Trillion of real spending cuts this year on a $6...

The rebranding of a former White House digital office into the new Department of Government Efficiency signals its potential limits, budget experts said.

While the DOGE office is limited as far as direct impact to budget cutting measures which rest on the shoulders of Congress, computer/network/technology systems have become the backbone of the entire regulatory bureaucracy. Improving it potentially has very broad, sweeping effects on overall efficiency; from citizen impacts down to DC.
For those lacking in civics education, and how the American government system was founded, that is the proper order - the citizen(s) are at the top of the pyramid, fed.gov is at the bottom. Contrary to popular belief.

The inefficiences in government bureaucracy and red-tape practices certainly predate the implementation of computer technology. Unfortunately, many of those same practices infected the IT field. I saw it firsthand as a SysAdmin running the IT dept. for a school district back in the 90's. Despite the M$ license subscription for gov/education including all M$ products, at least someone before me was smart enough to spec Novell Netware rather than Windows for the network servers. It's absurd how computer tech, which is supposed to (and can) make things faster/easier/more efficient, gets misused and bastardized into such badly implemented solutions because of bureaucratic stupidity.

The continued use of practically all proprietary software, particularly Micro$oft products, is one of the greatest SNAFU's in the bureaucracy-infected IT field. The Windows OS outlived it's usefulness on any serious or 'critical' computer system by the dawn of the 21st century. From year 2000, if not well before, up to now, the only real legitimate reason to use M$ products is for games and TPS reports. In other words, applications where security and reliability are pretty low priorities; basically falling on the "it would be nice to have" list.

There's a reason Windows hasn't even been included on ITIC's Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Survey for over 15 years.

It's a notoriously unreliable and insecure OS.

It costs more to maintain/keep running and make acceptably (barely) secure than it's worth. Not even counting the losses when it inevitably goes down and/or is breached. Remember the Crowdstrike debacle? Which should make people, particularly in the IT field, ask silly questions that answer themselves like

if the OS is actually secure/reliable why would it have any need for something like Crowdstrike's software?

Anyone in the IT field that fails to acknowledge these facts, and/or spec's Microsoft products for a system where there is any expectation of security or reliability, does so for one or more of the following reasons:

Incompetence
Profit
Plausible Deniability

Further exposition on these reasons below.

The top LargeCorp/SME/SMB's might accept the liability risk and additional IT support/downtime costs on internal desktop systems where the so-called "ease of use" appears to outweigh costs or perceived difficulties of training and/or employing more competent personnel in order to use Linux/Unix/BSD, or even Mac systems; but at the very least, if the ITIC Survey is any indication, their server systems don't run Windows. The idiots making such decisions at various 'critical infrastructure' entities affected by the Crowdstrike debacle notwithstanding.

For many of the same reasons, no .gov entity should be running Windows on any computer system.

I'd go further and say no proprietary software should be running on any .gov system. All .gov systems should run open source (fully auditable) software. This is not as much a public transparency issue (which should be SOP for .gov in any case), so much as it is a security issue. Proprietary code can contain all sorts of unknown security holes, backdoors, etc. And a .gov or '3rd party' auditor to approve a proprietary software for use can always be bought - clearly the business of political favors, preferred contracts, and other corrupt practices in .gov are alive and well. Which is another reason "only open source software" should be a requirement on .gov systems. Not only does it free up billions or more in tax-dollars spent on proprietary licensing fees (and the additional IT support costs), downtime, etc., it cuts down on avenues for corruption.

It's not like the government can't use Linux systems and open source software.
Look at BRL-CAD, which is interestingly enough the oldest known version-controlled codebase in the world that is still under active development. The 3D solid modeling CAD software started in 1979 in the Army Ballistic Research Lab with public release in 1984, and became an open source project in 2004.
It wasn't even available for MSWindows systems until 2006.

At this point there exists an open source software which runs on Linux for practically anything that Windows would be used for. And the old excuses like "everyone knows Windows", "it's just easier", "more user-friendly", blah blah; have been utter BS for a very long time. Personally I have not found any use for MS products, and all my systems have run Linux, for over two decades.

There's little old ladies using Linux Mint and similar distros now as the OS on their computers. So there's no legitimate excuse for not using Linux/BSD and open source software solutions across all .gov systems.

That brings me back to expounding upon the reasons that Windows and related software is chosen to run on systems. [Other than the gamers, TPS report writing NPC's, and the average home pc that generally has no real option to being force-fed a machine preloaded with garbage]...

Incompetence

Let's call this a spectrum ranging from simple ignorance to utter, willful incompetence. Because there seem to be those in the industry that promote/defend Windows as being secure/reliable no matter what, despite decades of evidence to the contrary; I debated including a separate line item to the effect of 'brainwashed by the marketing department' and the related industry which mostly falls into the second category (profit), but it still just boils down to incompetence.
Also, on second thought I'm not quite sure if 'simple ignorance' would be appropriate since I'm referring to someone at a level of decision-making, or at least making a systems engineering/design recommendation. For anyone at this level, I find it hard to offer the benefit of the doubt by including simple ignorance as an excuse. To have the experience/knowledge that qualifies one to make such a recommendation or approval while not actually knowing/acknowledging that Windows is the least reliable, least secure, and most costly option/solution really is plain incompetence.

Profit

There are several profit possiblities. The proprietary license fees (sales) for starters. Of course the constant support and relatively high maintenance that is required. Any third party software products. Of which I would include these subcategories;

software to make it more secure (eg. Crowdstrike, other anti-virus/anti-malware, etc.) or more reliable. I have no examples for that one, I'm sure there are some products out there being peddled that fit this category. The last time I really dealt with Windows systems the best option for acceptable reliability was to spend alot of time in config/tuning to get a decently stable running state and creating an image of that to reload on the machine often.
software that only runs on a Windows system

But wait there's more...
Various Training, Certifications, Consulting, kickbacks... And finally preferred contracts for all the above.

Plausible Deniability

This would include any situation where knowing that the system has a reputation for being unreliable and/or insecure is actually an advantage. From the simple ability to use an excuse "oh, the system is down again", "services will be unavailable for regular maintentence", "there was a data breach", "the server got hacked"... maybe just to cover for incompetence... to the deliberate actions such as creating a system that is purposely unreliable (eg. make more profit on support, etc.) or can easily be infiltrated (dare I say, voting machines?).

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