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German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

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151–160 of 402 posts

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#151

My wife just started a new job in the Netherlands and I was super excited to hear that her office uses Ubuntu and LibreOffice for all their PC's. She wasn't interviewing for a tech job but apparently her being reasonably familiar with both was helpful at her interview (all those years of Raspberry Pis around the house paid off!) Is this normal? It certainly would be an outlier back in the US.

If a similar announcement came from my government i'd just assume one of their mates had set up an open source consultancy business and it'd all be abandoned once enough money had been siphoned off.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#152
post #14
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".

No, they didn't. That happened for example in Munich. But that is on the other side of Germany. And there is already a joke that MS can't move their german headquarters every time a state or big city want's to move away from MS products. (They did this when Munich changed back to MS producs - but of course this was pure coincidence.)

Microsoft started building their new Munich headquarters in 2013/2014. Their old headquarters were already immediately outside Munich. For example, the Munich airport is further away from Munch city than the old headquarters were.

The decision to revert to a Microsoft Platform was taken in November 2017.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#153
post #45

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 ofte…

> Legal professionals

Pro bono legal work, which is unpaid, is actually a requirement for practising lawyers in some jurisdictions. New York is one such example.

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

Depending on how you define the terms, all of the directors will be volunteers.

The most common structure for charities is a board of trustees/directors between around 5 and 10 members, who are all unpaid and part-time. The board is led by the Chair(man, woman) of the Board, who is otherwise just an ordinary board member. The meetings are facilitated by the Chief Executive, who is not a board member but a full-time, paid employee of the charity.

Underneath the Chief Executive are other full-time paid staff who are supposed to follow the leadership of the Chief Executive, and who often don't get to attend the board meetings. This group may be any size between zero and thousands of individuals! Confusingly, some organisations call certain people in the middle-management of this team 'directors'.

To conclude:

Board: unpaid - '(Non-executive) Directors', 'Trustees' or 'Councillors'.

Staff: paid, usually full-time - includes 'Executives', '(Executive) Directors' and possibly many other non-management roles.

Some charities' boards get so large they become more like the parliaments of liberal democracies - Speakers, votes, elections.

That's only the most conventional structure - I'd be happy to elaborate on the edge cases too! :)

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#154
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…

You need python to do 3*61 and append four zeros to the result?

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#155
post #59
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft spent so much money to make it fail.

How do they do that? I mean, practically? If the open source solution works, where do Microsoft spend money to make it fail?

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#156
post #14
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".

No, they didn't. That happened for example in Munich. But that is on the other side of Germany. And there is already a joke that MS can't move their german headquarters every time a state or big city want's to move away from MS products. (They did this when Munich changed back to MS producs - but of course this was pure coincidence.)

Yes, Bavaria is practically an entirely different state, with its' own language, religion, politics, and culture.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#157

My wife just started a new job in the Netherlands and I was super excited to hear that her office uses Ubuntu and LibreOffice for all their PC's. She wasn't interviewing for a tech job but apparently her being reasonably familiar with both was helpful at her interview (all those years of Raspberry Pis around the house paid off!) Is this normal? It certainly would be an outlier back in the US.

Normal no but it's in the 2-3% range so not completely unthinkable and usually supported well enough by the core organisations that an company must interact with to be entirely feasible.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany can afford to fund libreoffice development which will benefit the taxpayer by providing good free alternatives to microsoft products. I also dont think any tax payer is concerned about the cost of a document being formatted differently.

And I don't buy the argument that a document not being formated correctly is costly. People mostly don't care and when real administrative stuff needs to be shared it is done via pdf forms where the output is controlled.

It matters when there One Dominant Vendor. In that case, when format errors and other small errors arise, the reaction depends. If it's the dominant vendor's software, then the user considers the other either normal or in their end. If the errors arise while using another software package, though, it's the fault of the "cut-rate, knock-off" software.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#160
post #81
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?

I didn’t think that centralization itself was the problem… just where the centralization was occurring (outside the EU).
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