> ah, the ad hominem, never a good sign for the proceeding argument.

An ad hominem means using an insult as the basis for rejecting an argument, e.g. 'that is wrong because you are [attack]'. Saying an argument is naive and then explaining why is not an ad hominem.

arguments can have multiple lines of reasoning, one of which can be an ad hominem all by itself.

None of the lines of reasoning were an ad hominem. From your other comment[1], it seems like you think "ad hominem" just means "being rude to someone". I recommend reading the GP comment's description of ad hominem again: it means making a logical argument that depends on the speaker's personal characteristics.

"You're European, so your argument is biased and wrong" is an ad hominem. "Your argument is naive, here's why I think that" is not. The latter is logically downstream of the argument, while the former is upstream.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31854644

no, an ad hominem need not be literal. do you really not understand nuance in language? we're not computers operating only on singular data and deterministic instructions.

see how those three sentences go together? that's a line of reasoning. the subject comment doesn't have that throughline. it's disjointed; the parts are only tangentially connected.

> no, an ad hominem need not be literal

What on earth do you mean by "literal" here? Ad hominem refers to a specific fallacious style of argumentation. Being ignorant of the definition and then too stubborn to admit it is not pushing back against "overliteralism".

Especially because the rest of your comment (dismissing the rest of the argument due to "ad hominem") only makes sense if one assumes the correct definition!

A car has multiple parts, but it’s still difficult to use if you only use/look at each one separately

if you look carefully, the 3 sentences are disconnected. they don’t form a line of reasoning.

if it had been starter, engine, and transmission, maybe you’d have a point, but instead it’s corroded battery, door handle, and tailpipe.

I looked at it carefully, and I’m not seeing what you’re seeing unfortunately. I interpreted the naive comment as a separate summary of their opinion, and then the rest of the paragraph was the supporting explanation. He didn’t dismiss the idea because it was naive, it’s the reason it is naive is why he was saying it wouldn’t work

Ah, the ad hominem, never a good sign for the proceeding argument.

> ah, the ad hominem, never a good sign for the proceeding argument.

GP never says that you’re naive, but the comment was.

either way (intent can also be multi-modal), it signals a triggered response and is entirely superfluous and distracting. it's worth setting that aside, even after writing it, and examining the emotional underpinnings that led to the response in the first place. we learn a lot about our own subconsciousness that way.

>, ... it signals a triggered response

This is, at best, a stretch.

I have no idea what it is you're trying to say but I did laugh that your username is clarity! :)

excellent, my diabolical plan to rule the world via dry humor is working as designed.

The average large organization uses over 100 SaaS products

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233538/average-number-s...

I would love to see you replace all 100 of those with open source software.

Have you ever dealt with large technology migrations?

And if no one does anything, in 5 years it will be a 1000, in 10 years 5000. As it is right now, the only voice governments hear is that of corpos, and corpos want to preserve the influence of corpos. That's why we need to force the ban on corpo influence. I'd rather pay 1% gdp for a one-time migration to open and free software than pay .01% gdp per corp per year.

Are you going to also train staff to use the new open source software? Where is the open source SalesForce equivalent? Workday? Concur? Device management? Email service? ServiceNow? Time tracking? Photoshop? Are you going to also force every employee to use Linux instead of Mac and Windows? Are you going to tell them to rewrite all of their software and business processes written on top of Oracle and SQL Server? Should they also rewrite all of their bespoke mobile apps to support open source mobile operating systems? Are you going to migrate all of their Office documents and SharePoint? Are they going to move all of their project management processes from Microsoft Azure DevOps (aka Visual Studio Online)? Are they going to move all of their call center software to open source? For school systems are they going to move their fuel procurement software? Many education systems are partially funded by the lottery. Are they going to move their backend systems from GTech? Their lunch programs payment systems for students use a third party, are they going to move that too? Their ATS? LMS? Grade tracking software?

How long have they been using each one of those products on average? How about migrating off at the same speed?

So let’s take the lottery systems. Most states including mine has been using the same back end for the lottery since 1991. Who is going to write the replacement? Who is going to audit it? How much is it going to cost to replace literally thousand of lottery terminals? And what benefit would it be?

I can’t think of the name of the company now. But there is one company that manage the school lunch programs. Who is going to write the software and you have to replace all of the hardware throughout the state.

So put systems like that at the end of the list?

And they'll require renegotiation or hardware upgrades at some point, so use that as leverage to say no government entities will buy any more unless they meet certain rules about open sourcing and data storage.

But really, if a handful of things like that were the only examples that would be wonderful.

So what goes at the beginning of their list and who is going to develop and maintain the equivalent open source software?

> So what goes at the beginning of their list and who is going to develop and maintain the equivalent open source software?

The beginning is any SaaS that started being used in the last 2-3 years. The immediate solution might just be going back to what they had before, if the top priority is privacy.

As far as open source, the existing companies could often be contracted, but if they don't want to open up then the government can put out bids or build a team. If entire countries want to buy something, they can make a market. And that's assuming there isn't already open source software that can do the job, because there often will be.

So now you want the government to “build a team” of competent software engineers and the government is going to have to compete with the private sector for talent. The average enterprise framework developer in the US costs at least 3 times as much as the average teacher.

Now on the other hand, return offers for interns at my BigTech company is around $150K. The average salary for the superintendent of schools for larger cities is $167K. Where is the government going to get the money to compete with the private sector?

I'm pretty sure the context here was entire countries switching, not single school districts. The money is there.

In the US, congressmen make $170K a year, the president makes around $400K a year. Junior developers at large tech companies can make $170K easily in year one or two. Senior developers at tech companies make $400K+. Is the government going to pay tech workers enough to compete?

It could.

Or it can offer tens of millions of dollars for some software and see who bids.

Especially when the previous provider would probably like to get more money selling something to the government, even if they have to make changes.

The above poster was willing to pay "1% GDP" for the initial migration and for the US 200 billion dollars would pay for a lot of development work.

The companies bidding for the work would also be private industry. Wasn’t the entire idea to remove private industry from government?

Do you really think the government has the competence to create software? How many decades has the US government been trying to modernize the IRS? Do you remember the original ACA website rollout?

Not only do you have to hire developers, you have to hire project managers, retrain employers, etc.

Are you going to also create data centers to create what’s available in the public cloud? You need to make those redundant across regions, are you going to force open sourcing of control plane software?

> Wasn’t the entire idea to remove private industry from government?

I think the main idea was to remove third party data storage? With some open source? You can contract both of those out, and when it's open source the company doesn't have the same kind of leverage.

> Do you really think the government has the competence to create software?

It's not like companies are usually good at it either, so shrug.

> Are you going to also create data centers to create what’s available in the public cloud? You need to make those redundant across regions, are you going to force open sourcing of control plane software?

At that scale, datacenters are cheaper than cloud hardware. As for making the cloud software, well, billions of dollars can buy a lot. Force shouldn't be necessary.

It’s not just the hardware, it’s building out the competencies in house. Companies like Netflix, Disney , Intuit (TurboTax) explicitly decided that it wasn’t “cheaper”.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, SalesForce, Oracle, are not good at creating software?

Let’s say the government wanted to “leverage” open source, do you think they could make a better version of ChromeOS than Google?

You also just think throwing money at a problem can automatically create software that is better than private corporations?

The original poster said:

i’d support any legislation that booted google, fb, ms, adobe, salesforce, and a whole host of other surveillance tech companies from any and all levels of government. it’s literally as important as the separation of church and state. in fact, i’d love to see a constitutional amendment explicitly separating corporate interests from governmental ones, in all facets of civic life (e.g., campaign finance).

They don’t want any private company involved in government IT. That means the government has to build everything out themselves without using contractors.

> Companies like Netflix, Disney , Intuit (TurboTax) explicitly decided that it wasn’t “cheaper”.

Doesn't Netflix only run their metadata servers in the cloud? I'm not sure what those other two do.

> Google, Apple, Microsoft, SalesForce, Oracle, are not good at creating software?

Did I imply that?

Though we could debate Oracle...

> You also just think throwing money at a problem can automatically create software that is better than private corporations?

I never said better. But "good enough", in avoidance of horrible privacy violations, is a choice I'd approve of.

And open source software usually does quite well when given moderate funding.

> They don’t want any private company involved in government IT.

My interpretation is that if you get rid of the surveillance you solve the main problem, as far as outsourcing goes. If that's wrong then some of what I suggested isn't compatible.

Netflix is AWS’s largest customer. They run everything on AWS except the CDNs that cache their video that is usually collocated at ISPs.

I’m not trying to “appeal to authority”. But since we are taking specifically about AWS, I should disclaim that I work at AWS in the consulting department. That’s where my perspective about large scale migrations come from. I’m not necessarily saying everyone “should move to the cloud”. I’m more referring to how deeply ingrained the commercial sector has always been involved with government.

Simply training government workers to use open source tools would shut down governments for weeks.

Then this is a good argument to help convince Republicans to get on board.

not sure that it's relevant and 'large' is subjective, but yes, i stewarded the technology migration of a core product suite for a prior employer, which incidentally had government agencies as a prominent customer segment.

i'm not suggesting that governments can only use internally developed or open-source software, i'm saying corporate interests should be firewalled away from goverment. so a locally-installed office suite incorporating no surveillance tech doesn't have the ancillary corporate interests attached to qualify it for being firewalled.

You migrated a product. Were you involved in migrating the entire infrastructure of an entire state?

Yes, I speak from experience, migrations and modernizations are kind of my job.

100 SaaS products in one org sounds like a security and logistics nightmare.

so just assuming you have an overpriced stinking pile of sh*t, is this an argument to stay with it forever?

So do you think open source or the government producing their own software will be better?