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German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

blog.documentfoundation.org

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Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#71

Post by rchaud »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #32
daeros wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.

What's the alternative? Would they be able to do more without cloud office solutions? Like in the days long last we used to email .doc files to each other? I doubt it. Would hosting an on-prem alternative yeld better cost and a higher uptime? I doubt it.

> Like in the days long last we used to email .doc files to each other? I doubt it

How long ago are we talking? I was sharing files with coworkers on a shared network drive 20 years ago. I could send files via IM as well back then.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#72

Post by aleph_minus_one »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #56
Stranger43 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drive here is to reduce dependencies to locations the state itself have jurisdiction over i.e. things that can be controlled. It's essentially to avoid having the states data taken hostage when the slowly brewing conflict between America's lack of respect for it's foreign partners data protection regulation and the EU's very popular trend towards less and less tolerance for corporate data abuse comes to an head a…

And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US? Companies buy Office 365 subscriptions so they can focus on their main business and don't want to think about their office solution and want something that JustWorks which is already compatible with what everyone else uses. They have a business to run and money to makes, so spending extra tim…

> You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US?

I don't think they will stop, but they will become much more hesitant.

Concerning your other points: it is of similar economic importance for the company to invest in precautions to prevent that you are taken hostage of, in this case by Microsoft. Thus such measures are actually often in the company's self-interest in opposite to fighting a virtual trade war for someone else.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#73

Post by Havoc »

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.…

Some initial growing pains seem worthwhile though

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#75

Post by yourusername »

Moldoteck wrote: post #57
andrewstuart wrote: post #24

This ship sailed 20 years ago. Who is still fighting this ancient crusade? Pay the small fee, use the Microsoft software, live life. There’s much better battles to fight than the office software one.

the fee will no longer be that small considering microsoft's intention to charge a lot for extended windows support, it's not like the price is constant

Only if you stay on a outdated version. If you're a company/government you have a M365 subscription that includes the latest windows and you're replacing your computers every 5-7 years so Win11 not supporting some computers from 2017 might cost you 1 year of support for a small part of your total fleet.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#76

Post by morsch »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #56
Stranger43 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drive here is to reduce dependencies to locations the state itself have jurisdiction over i.e. things that can be controlled. It's essentially to avoid having the states data taken hostage when the slowly brewing conflict between America's lack of respect for it's foreign partners data protection regulation and the EU's very popular trend towards less and less tolerance for corporate data abuse comes to an head a…

And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US? Companies buy Office 365 subscriptions so they can focus on their main business and don't want to think about their office solution and want something that JustWorks which is already compatible with what everyone else uses. They have a business to run and money to makes, so spending extra tim…

Governments can take a longer and more strategic outlook than private enterprises. It's not even primarily about nationalistic trade wars: I want my tax euros to fund as little closed-source software as possible. It's crazy how much money even just our schools spend for software that can't be freely redistributed or modified. That said, I'm not holding my breath regarding the success of this most recent move.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#77

Post by guappa »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #56
Stranger43 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drive here is to reduce dependencies to locations the state itself have jurisdiction over i.e. things that can be controlled. It's essentially to avoid having the states data taken hostage when the slowly brewing conflict between America's lack of respect for it's foreign partners data protection regulation and the EU's very popular trend towards less and less tolerance for corporate data abuse comes to an head a…

And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US? Companies buy Office 365 subscriptions so they can focus on their main business and don't want to think about their office solution and want something that JustWorks which is already compatible with what everyone else uses. They have a business to run and money to makes, so spending extra tim…

You just do it like USA does: if you want to do business with the public sector, you must not rely on a foreign cloud.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#78

Post by 3rd3 »

f_allwein wrote: post #15

Did not work well in Munich, my hometown, in 2004. Hope the lessons have been learned. https://itsfoss.com/munich-linux-failure/

The "lesson" does not seem so clear according to the article you have linked:

> Schneider claimed that the decision had been political, “not made on the basis of facts”

> “We do not see any compelling technical reasons for a change to Windows and Microsoft Office… We solve compatibility and interoperability problems by providing MS Office, mostly virtualised, at workplaces that need to work together with external offices on office documents.”

One point of critique was the difficulty involved with 3rd party programs on the Linux laptops. But with MS Teams, Zoom etc. running in the browser and/or having actual Linux clients these days, this may be much more feasible today.

The opposition claimed the decision to abandon Linux was a purely political one. The mayor who pushed the return to Microsoft, Dieter Reiter (SPD), was a known Microsoft fanboy, but he (of course) denied personal investment in the reversal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#79

Post by Arathorn »

jorvi wrote: post #31
monospaced wrote: post #3

The will likely be using Phoenix: https://www.dataport.de/about-phoenix/ The German government developed a fully free and open source solution that is quite similar (consisting of Nextcloud, jitsi, Collabora etc.) and can be deployed using Kubernetes: https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk

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…

Speaking from the Matrix side: it would definitely be preferable to have a large reliable source of funding for public sector Matrix deployments rather than juggling between loads of small overlapping ones (especially when they end up failing to route any $ to the upstreams). That said, Schleswig Holstein is looking to route $ upstream in this instance.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#80

Post by EduardoBautista »

tetris11 wrote: post #50
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 w…

Linux started receiving corporate backing within a few years of it being released. Red Hat played a huge role in providing support and someone to turn to when something went wrong.

> but it would have gotten there without them too, albeit much slower

No, it wouldn't have. There is no way that a bunch of volunteers in their spare time could achieve the same results, what took many full-time employees and contributions from the largest and most powerful corporations in the world.

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