German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice • Hacker News Board

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#121

Post by Archelaos » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 12:04 PM UTC

Some clarification and background.

The headline might be somewhat misleading if you do not read the article. It is not the federal state of Germany that is starting to switch to LibreOffice, but one of the member states of the federation: Schleswig-Holstein.

Shifting to LibreOffice is only one component of the the state's strategy towards a digitally sovereign IT workplace. You can read more about the other elements of this strategy here: https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/... (in German).

What is very interesting is the political background: Schleswig-Holstein is governed by a coalition of the Converservative party (CDU) and the Greens. In past decades it had been the Greens who where among the most driving forces for the adaption of open-source software and open standards in the public sphere, while the Conservativs primarily sided with big business. Now the latter seems to change gradually. Interesting times ...

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#122

Post by schleck8 » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 12:04 PM UTC

cladopa wrote: post #4

They already did that before until Microsoft offered them new conditions and they went back to MS. So take all those "digital sovereignity" with a grain of salt. It usually means: "We want you to lower your fees".

Opposite end of the country.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#123

Post by lyu07282 » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 12:05 PM UTC

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…

Very typical for Germany, they rather roll their own solutions than cooperating with other countries and pooling resources. But it's even worse than that, each state within Germany does their own bureaucracy differently as well, to varying degrees.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#124

Post by panzi » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 12:05 PM UTC

isodev wrote: post #81

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…

But isn’t this the very centralisation we’re trying to avoid?

Not if everyone runs their own servers.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#125

Post by moolcool » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 12:06 PM UTC

Open source is great, but LibreOffice is a nightmare to use when you want to any actual work. I feel for the German bureaucrats.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#126

Post by mglz » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 12:08 PM UTC

moolcool wrote: post #125

Open source is great, but LibreOffice is a nightmare to use when you want to any actual work. I feel for the German bureaucrats.

What issues for example?

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#127

Post by etiennebausson » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 12:08 PM UTC

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…

If the entities you depends on for funding migrate from Words to LibreOffice, then yes, you will consider moving as well.

The network effect may be mostly considered in regard to social media, but it is just as powerful when it come to tools and file format.

Administrations moving en-mass to open-sourced software would ensure a significant chunk of companies would follow.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#128

Post by ChicagoDave » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 12:08 PM UTC

RalfWausE wrote: post #111

ChicagoDave wrote: post #86

I’d quit my job if I was forced to a Linux desktop and non office365 tools. The loss of productivity in this change is going to be massively disruptive. It’s not going to go as smoothly as they think it will. I highly doubt their pilot program sniffed out all the complexities.

If this would be the case: Thank you for creating a job opportunity for more open minded people ;-)

I have nothing against Linux or libreoffice. I just think forcing thousands of workers to drastically alter their work environment is going to be traumatic and I’ll lay odds that in 12 months they switch back or to a hybrid model.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#129

Post by estebank » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 12:08 PM UTC

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.…

National governments have more considerations that purely saving tax payers' money, because such savings can be short sighted. Saving money on munitions during a war effort, for example. Would you be as eager to have your courtry's military equipment built and purchased from an adversarial super-power? This is exactly the same thing.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#130

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 12:08 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #93

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.…

Why bail out the US auto companies in 2008? Japanese cars had better gas mileage, it would be a win-win for the taxpayer, right? The need for sovereignty in these areas of national strategic significance is going to override concerns about UX or a learning curve. Most LibreOffice apps are similar to Office anyway, and the Open Document Format it uses is standardized in ISO 2600. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDo…

[deleted]