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City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

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Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#51

Post by ZeroGravitas »

snvzz wrote: post #44
nofilter wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm Estonian living in Barcelona. A lot of things never bother to add Estonian support because we're such a tiny nation (like iOS, for example) which means our English is rather good. Good English is not something I've encountered much in Catalonia, so while yes I agree that having your country's technology work in your language is a must, it's also in my opinion a double-edged sword making more and more local…

I understand what you're saying but keep in mind that when Catalan is not available, the language that tends to be used isn't English, but Spanish. Knowledge of Spanish in Catalonia is not by any metric bad.

And spanish is one of the top used languages in the world.

A quick Google suggest it has a) more native speakers than English, b) more total speakers than English, with only Chinese ahead of it.

That must dampen enthusiasm for learning other languages.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#52

Post by roel_v »

adwhit wrote: post #19

I kind of amazed that Microsoft are still successfully charging SO MUCH for their absolutely run-of-the-mill OS and Office products. Office, in particular, brings in something like $25bn/year revenue with presumably very healthy margins. For a product that has hardly changed in 20 years. It's a good product, sure. But a clean-room reimplementation of the bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more…

"But a clean-room reimplementation of the bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more than $1bn."

Well, let's do some back of the envelope calculations. Let's say you can tap an incredibly cheap source of programmers, so that you can employ large numbers of them for 100k / year - this includes buildings, equipment, but also support staff and managers and what not. That would give you 10k man years of work. Star Office/Open Office/LibreOffice has existed for what, 20 years? So that's say 500 programmers. I'm not sure what the head counts on the various teams working on that have been, probably less than 500, but not an order of magnitude less. So considering that OO hasn't been able to replicate anywhere near the functionality of Office (I'm talking not just basic document processor here, but things like the VBA environment, and Outlook, and Access, and all the programmable components, etc.), I don't think you can say that 1bn is all that much.

Of course you could say oh but we don't need all the legacy stuff Star Office once did, and we'd just be a 100 coders with no managers working from our bedrooms eating pizzas, and we'd only build the 20% of things people would actually use, and we have much better tooling now so it'll be faster, etc. You'd still have to convince people to switch, in order to save what - $100 / year? 150? That's what, 1/2 day of work, if that, per user for a company? Sure a saving is a saving, but I don't see how you can claim that Office or Windows are 'expensive', in the overall scheme of things.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#53

Post by nofilter »

snvzz wrote: post #44
nofilter wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm Estonian living in Barcelona. A lot of things never bother to add Estonian support because we're such a tiny nation (like iOS, for example) which means our English is rather good. Good English is not something I've encountered much in Catalonia, so while yes I agree that having your country's technology work in your language is a must, it's also in my opinion a double-edged sword making more and more local…

I understand what you're saying but keep in mind that when Catalan is not available, the language that tends to be used isn't English, but Spanish. Knowledge of Spanish in Catalonia is not by any metric bad.

Yes, fallback is Spanish indeed. But I'm a young guy, I got to clubs a lot and most people I meet there are between 20 and 30 and having very hard time speaking in English. Which makes me amazed, especially in Barcelona, which is a very international city. The same problem is in France. It might be due the fact that most of the media never displays any English. Movies are over-voiced in Spanish and so forth. I have no sources to back this claim, it's just my theory.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#54

Post by nofilter »

hyperpower wrote: post #46
nofilter wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm Estonian living in Barcelona. A lot of things never bother to add Estonian support because we're such a tiny nation (like iOS, for example) which means our English is rather good. Good English is not something I've encountered much in Catalonia, so while yes I agree that having your country's technology work in your language is a must, it's also in my opinion a double-edged sword making more and more local…

Why is that a problem though? Should people in an arbitrary country need to learn English? Also, could you provide a source for the fact that English literacy rates are actually decreasing? I find that difficult to believe.

That's not a problem if you never want to communicate with people from countries where they don't speak Spanish nor learn Spanish in schools. It is a problem however if it's an international city like Barcelona and most people I've met between 20 and 30 have very hard time understanding or speaking English.

I didn't say the English literacy rates are decreasing, I'm simply stating that they speak a whole more English in the north than in the south as far as young people go and it generally surprises me how bad English among young people here is. Is it because while they do learn English in schools, they don't practice it enough? Certainly can't be the case in Barcelona, right?

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#55

Post by Oletros »

nofilter wrote: post #53
snvzz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you're saying but keep in mind that when Catalan is not available, the language that tends to be used isn't English, but Spanish. Knowledge of Spanish in Catalonia is not by any metric bad.

Yes, fallback is Spanish indeed. But I'm a young guy, I got to clubs a lot and most people I meet there are between 20 and 30 and having very hard time speaking in English. Which makes me amazed, especially in Barcelona, which is a very international city. The same problem is in France. It might be due the fact that most of the media never displays any English. Movies are over-voiced in Spanish and so forth. I have n…

yes, almost all the movies and TV shows are dubbed in Spanish, it makes English proficiency in Spain very bad

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#56

Post by khaled »

nofilter wrote: post #36
snvzz wrote: post #28

I'm Catalan. Catalonia has always been big on open source, and if anything I'm surprised this took so long to happen. The mindshare in universities and such is particularly high, and this isn't limited to computer science (my background). Even my high school did at the very least run a Linux server (running at least samba and squid) and had a few Linux workstations. This was 20 years ago. Back when I lived there, I w…

Well, I'm Estonian living in Barcelona. A lot of things never bother to add Estonian support because we're such a tiny nation (like iOS, for example) which means our English is rather good. Good English is not something I've encountered much in Catalonia, so while yes I agree that having your country's technology work in your language is a must, it's also in my opinion a double-edged sword making more and more local…

Why the locals not speaking English is a bad thing?

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#57

Post by HelloNurse »

snvzz wrote: post #44
nofilter wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm Estonian living in Barcelona. A lot of things never bother to add Estonian support because we're such a tiny nation (like iOS, for example) which means our English is rather good. Good English is not something I've encountered much in Catalonia, so while yes I agree that having your country's technology work in your language is a must, it's also in my opinion a double-edged sword making more and more local…

I understand what you're saying but keep in mind that when Catalan is not available, the language that tends to be used isn't English, but Spanish. Knowledge of Spanish in Catalonia is not by any metric bad.

For political and historical reasons that don't need to be discussed all over again, many people are bilingual but make a point of writing, speaking and demanding Catalan. They might be resigned to Spanish-speaking tourists, but much less tolerant in more official contexts (like software localization choices).

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#58

Post by icc97 »

luma wrote: post #31
icc97 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually gives strength to what Munich did. They proved that it was possible to swap. So Barcelona doesn't have such a political tricky situation as there is a pre-existing example. Let's hope that more follow Barcelona. Barcelona is possibly taking an easier approach. That is, replace the easier things like Office and IE. I've done similar things. So where as my software has to use IIS and Windows servers, I use…

I'm not sure how Munich "proved it was possible". The user community disliked it so much they are now switching back. They proved that it cost the city a lot of money in the transition (both times), and those costs have nothing to do with licensing. "Free" is only "free" so long as you and your user's time carries no value.

They switched over for 7 years, they got the initial political support required to switch over, they created their own distribution.

So I regard that as having shown that it is possible to switch.

This is purely showing that getting over the first hurdle is possible. They then showed what to what lengths MS will go to lobby against it, so Barcelona can be better prepared for the next hurdle.

These are all fairly massive achievements.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#59

Post by kiliancs »

snvzz wrote: post #28

I'm Catalan. Catalonia has always been big on open source, and if anything I'm surprised this took so long to happen. The mindshare in universities and such is particularly high, and this isn't limited to computer science (my background). Even my high school did at the very least run a Linux server (running at least samba and squid) and had a few Linux workstations. This was 20 years ago. Back when I lived there, I w…

Also Catalan, and confirming my professional experience in Catalonia was mostly open source, with the exception of a few multinational corporations that preferred Windows and of graphic designers (mac).

I just wanted to point out that you can use Windows 10 in Catalan. The language pack may be installed directly from the language preferences dialog. Support for Office also exists.

In another note, more frustrating for me is how many websites don't respect my browser's language preferences. I prefer Catalan, and English otherwise --BTW if you feel like criticizing this option, which I am completely entitled to, take into account that I live abroad and my kids don't understand Spanish, or the case of people in Northern Catalonia who certainly shouldn't be expected to understand Spanish--, but I keep getting Spanish instead of English when Catalan is not available. We also keep getting ads in Spanish that completely miss the target audience.

Google also really thinks that I will be really interested in contents from the Spanish Wikipedia by preferring it over the equivalent Catalan or English articles, even when it doesn't literally match my search query.

Oh, and my "OK Google" search in Android has the funnies behavior. Let's take a simple question about the weather as an example.

- With Catalan as the search language -> ask in Catalan -> no information about the weather - With Catalan as the search language -> ask in English -> information about the weather in Spanish. Some of the search UI is in Catalan and some in Spanish, including the actual weather information. Voice response is in Spanish.

So I have to use English, which is fine, but just shows how in terms of l18n we still have a long way to go.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#60

Post by JBlue42 »

nofilter wrote: post #53
snvzz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you're saying but keep in mind that when Catalan is not available, the language that tends to be used isn't English, but Spanish. Knowledge of Spanish in Catalonia is not by any metric bad.

Yes, fallback is Spanish indeed. But I'm a young guy, I got to clubs a lot and most people I meet there are between 20 and 30 and having very hard time speaking in English. Which makes me amazed, especially in Barcelona, which is a very international city. The same problem is in France. It might be due the fact that most of the media never displays any English. Movies are over-voiced in Spanish and so forth. I have n…

Yeah, it's interesting how just having subtitled media can help. When traveling, I came across an older guy in Viljandi who had learned his basic English from watching Melrose Place reruns.
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