Fair question.

What it boils down to is: Become part of the OSS community.

In my experience, there’s no other way, since the alternative is to be automatically part of the Microsoft (or Apple) community.

In other words, you need to make the investment into the implementation. As I’ve said elsewhere, license costs are insignificant.

The community is where you get help, where you find others with the same issues. You can pay the likes of Canonical and Redhat, but I’ve never been impressed by either.

Ultimately any solution requires support, just like any other tool. You just need to make it explicit, rather than assumed.

One thing that Microsoft does to ensure that you have support infrastructure is to continually break backwards compatibility in subtle ways that require you to open your wallet and pay for support.

OSS will likely run for years without adult supervision, but that doesn’t mean it can continue to work without requiring support from time to time. If you don’t prepare for this, you’re going to be very unhappy.

Kali ≠ Debian

I did not see an apt-get update

In my experience, unmet dependencies are unlikely to happen on a stable version where you only installed from the official repo.

The LZMA decompression errors point at a much more fundamental issue. I’m suspecting that the repository URLs point at non standard locations or downloads were interrupted, though I’m not sure exactly how, since AFAIK, apt checks the checksum.

If you must have something that’s not In your distro, do yourself a favour and install Docker and run your package inside there, much less chance of killing your system.

Source: I’ve been using Debian for over 25 years.

I’m talking about the reality of an organisation digging itself out of the hole created by projects such as described by OP.

I get the call from such organisations to help fix their issues and sometimes I can even help, more often than not it’s a time consuming effort (ie. expensive) to get to a point where the systems are in place to avoid the next catastrophe.

The reason that Microsoft keeps getting mind share and revenue is because there’s so much of that expertise around.

There’s loads of OSS professionals, myself included, but we’re a drop in the ocean by comparison.

In many cases an OSS deployment is the equivalent of “my nephew helped set this up” and it’s not helping the overall picture in the wider community.

If you’re going to deploy OSS, then you must consider the support implications before you start, anything else is unprofessional. License fees are insignificant by comparison.

Here’s three:

• A server with nobody supporting it for 13 years. It had a MySQL database with 743 columns. There was no documentation, served three organisations and hadn’t been backed up for at least 7 years.
• A server running a CMS for a dozen organisations that was running on failing hardware. No idea who built or didn’t support it.
• A server built by an employee 15 years ago, then supported by a “web company” who didn’t update it for 12 years, then “supported” by a Windows shop which was happy to charge the customer but hadn’t actually updated the server.

You’ll notice that I’m being deliberately vague.

All these share the exact scenario that the OP outlines. The organisations involved didn’t know that they were in deep trouble until well after the project instigator departed. No documentation, no updates, no training, handover, nothing beyond a set of credentials.

Er is er altijd wel eentje …

I think that you’re describing human evolution and missing the sheer scale at which people died learning what was safe to eat and what wasn’t.

I’ll add it to the list:

• AI is Assumed Intelligence.
• AI is autocorrect on steroids.
• AI is a Dunning-Kruger accelerator.
• AI is a classic case of Gell-Mann amnesia.

Last month, different country, same company:

https://apnews.com/article/australia-ai-errors-deloitte-ab54858680ffc4ae6555b31c8fb987f3

Right until your PostgreSQL server goes down and you can’t call your IT department and have to start hunting for a contractor, find a budget, get it signed off by management and HR, then on-board the new staff member, that is, after you advertised the position, did job interviews, after first filtering through the 700 … or two, applications, each plausibly generated by a ChatGPT session. Give it something like six months in a big organisation, less in a nimble one.

Does an “entrenched” anything sound “nimble” to you?

Have you told her this, just like you have here?

What you’re describing is a general experience with LLM, not limited to the C-level.

If an LLM sprouts rubbish you detect it because you have external knowledge, in other words, you’re the subject matter expert.

What makes you think that those same errors are not happening at the same rate outside your direct personal sphere of knowledge?

Now consider what this means for the people around you, including the C-level.

Repeat after me, AI is Assumed Intelligence and should not be considered anything more than autocorrect on steroids.

And that right there is why Windows is so entrenched.

If you want this for real, adoption of open source, then treat it properly. Consider the business impact of your absence, document the systems, train others, otherwise this is just another timebomb waiting to go off and with it any hope of weakening the Microsoft stranglehold on the company and its C-suite.

I’ve lost count of the number of such “projects” I’ve encountered in my professional career.

This is not doing anyone any favours, least of all yourself.

Reading the article, that sounds a lot like: “The dog ate my homework.”

Given the “deeply entrenched windows” in the company, together with a presumably similarly equipped ICT department, how are you protecting your department and the company against your absence?

In other words, what happens if you get hit by a bus?

Fairy sure that you’re seeing a bicycle only intersection. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but zero cars is not plausible, not even in Holland.

Source: I lived there for a decade and I’ve also been watching Not Just Bikes on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@NotJustBikes

My peak body, the Australian Computer Society is advocating that we should be happy with the wages earned in the late 1990’s, so clearly we’re not essential.

Source: https://ia.acs.org.au/content/ia/article/2023/it-teams--salaries--rebalancing--after-pandemic.html

You only just figured this out? It’s always been about reducing wages … or said differently, how to get richer than the other members at your country club.

I am not sure, but I think that I saw my friend dip their toothbrush in salt. This was nearly 50 years ago.

Growing up, one of my friends used salt, but I have no idea about its effectiveness.

Yup: https://github.com/bluesky-social