Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

blog.documentfoundation.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 402 posts

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#41

Post by Rinzler89 »

unkoman wrote: post #35
jorvi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s kind of a bummer that there’s a bunch of these separate OSS initiatives in Spain, France, Germany and a few other countries.. Instead of everyone rolling their own subvariant of Nextcloud, Matrix, LibreOffice etc, imagine if there was an EU mandate set up and some serious money was budgeted to it. You’d get a triple multiplier of more budget, less duplication of effort, and a self-reinforcing cycle where more us…

I think I want less bureaucracy in my development so happy to see multiple versions and letting them battling them out

While your small projects with next to zero market share fight it out between themselves, Microsoft keeps swallowing more market share making more billions.

Who do you think is the real winner of your sandpit fight?

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#42

Post by dikei »

icemelt8 wrote: post #23

Genuine question, is there any other professional field in the world where people work for free like how Software Engineers work in open source?

To be fair, there are not many professions that a single individual can make so much impact as Software Engineering.

People say 10x Software Engineer, rarely 10x Electrical Engineer.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#44

Post by nokeya »

China started the process of switching from x86 to own architecture (loong-something if I recall correctly). Where Microsoft is essentially not present. I think they use Microsoft products a lot like any other governments. So we might see a big switch to libreoffice soon

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#45

Post by NeoTar »

icemelt8 wrote: post #23

Genuine question, is there any other professional field in the world where people work for free like how Software Engineers work in open source?

A few examples:

- Doctors/Nurses working at free-clincs,

- Legal professionals will sometimes offer their services for free to needy individuals (I don't mean no-win-no-fee, but more writing a letter to a landlord on a tenant's behalf)

- Many people in the accountancy profession will offer their services to local groups/societies as treasurers or to do annual accounts, (indeed the whole boards of such groups are often unpaid, but may be less of a profession),

- Often at least some members of a board-of-directors for a charity will be volunteers,

As a more out-of-left field example, I recently met a really quite famous academic volunteering as a tour-guide at a historical house.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#47

Post by josefx »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #30

> Why should local governments use taxpayers’ money to buy proprietary, closed software from a single vendor? I don't want to be a pessimist, but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives. Linux is successful on the server because it has huge corporate backing.…

>but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives.

That is already a given with Microsofts own tools, office365 is a crippled mess.

> The cost of Microsoft Office is comparable to the cost of keeping their workplace stocked with coffee throughout the year.

Which is also something many companies don't pay for.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#48

Post by Hendrikto »

Hamuko wrote: post #37
icemelt8 wrote: post #23

Genuine question, is there any other professional field in the world where people work for free like how Software Engineers work in open source?

Volunteer firefighters.

At least in Germany, they are not professionals working unpaid. They are just volunteers with other jobs. Not really comparable.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#49

Post by ykonstant »

4878241143 wrote: post #6
reify wrote: post #2

Cool Hopefully they will move 30,000 wonkdows PC's to linux once Microsoft imposes the £61 annual extended security updates fee. let me open my terminal and start up python: 30000*61 1830000 £1,830,000 for the first year extended security updates and will double in consequitive years. A tad greedy! for a few old rotten wonkdows 10 machines. They first collected our data for free, then had the audacity to charge us fo…

why not just use bc?

Here is a setup I use to make `bc` more handy if you don't know how many computations you want to do in advance:

    alias bb='bc -l
Now enter calculations and assignments one per line and enter X to exit.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#50

Post by tetris11 »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #30

> Why should local governments use taxpayers’ money to buy proprietary, closed software from a single vendor? I don't want to be a pessimist, but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives. Linux is successful on the server because it has huge corporate backing.…

Linux was successful before corporate backing from just a handful of volunteers. If it was a failing product, corporations wouldn't have chosen it to develop on. It has been greatly enhanced by corporate contributions, but it would have gotten there without them too, albeit much slower.

I do agree though that MS products will likely play hard and fast with the compatibility game in order to exhaust local government workers from using FOSS

Post reply on HN