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

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#271

Post by LunaSea » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:38 PM UTC

prmoustache wrote: post #237

LunaSea wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal is also to have a usable cloud on which you can efficiently develop software. Otherwise we can simply go back to paper.

The initial premise is wrong for a start. You don't need a cloud to efficiently develop software. I've worked in companies that were running kubernetes on prem. It was a PITA for kubernetes ops but from a developer perspective it wasn't much different than using the cloud in a large company. Cloud is very flexible for very small orgs that have little processes but once you get into a certain size with lots of process…

> You don't need a cloud to efficiently develop software. I've worked in companies that were running kubernetes on prem. It was a PITA for kubernetes ops but from a developer perspective it wasn't much different than using the cloud in a large company.

EC2 servers and Kubernetes are a very small part of what is necessary to run complex applications.

> Cloud is very flexible for very small orgs that have little processes but once you get into a certain size with lots of processes, privileges separations and nomenclatures, it becomes so bureaucratic all flexibility of a cloud mostly disappear.

That will be the same in any large company.

Friends working at banks have to make formal requests for new versions of Python that months to be accepted.

If anything, clouds can be much more flexible thanks to tools like CDK which bare-metal or OpenStack don't offer.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#272

Post by groestl » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:41 PM UTC

mminer237 wrote: post #214

groestl wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yepp. The only money that might "cost" something, to a nation state, is money that leaves it.

A country spending money employing people to do unproductive work reduces the amount of useful work its populace can do. On paper you keep all the money, but no value is created.

There's opportunity cost, that's true, and I'm sure one can show that the most optimal situation in this case would be everyone on the world using the same office suite (i.e. free trade is optimal), _provided_ non-US countries would spend the money on actual production cost. However, the money paid is not only for production, but also for rent seeking, squeezing value out of a quasi-monopoly. That is actual money lost for unproductive work, _and_ it is going outside of Germany.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#273

Post by dividedbyzero » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:42 PM UTC

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #228

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the alternatives. Like, really. I get it: Hetzner and OVH exist. But what are the alternatives to AWS, GCP, Azure?

I guess MS could just find a way to guarantee that any data is only stored in data centers in Europe. It shouldn’t be too complicated and I don’t see how could they be considered to be a foreign cloud then.

Can the US government still force them to violate that guarantee? If yes, then they're a foreign cloud.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#274

Post by majoe » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:42 PM UTC

zelphirkalt wrote: post #185

Less of my tax money into the hands of companies that do comply with EU law, ergo criminals, great! I hope they have some solution in mind for cooperatively working on documents. That seems to be a big hurdle. Maybe some Nextcloud thing, that outputs ODT and only for locally working using LO? Or does LO offer collaborative features now?

There is Collabora Office [0], which is built on LibreOffice. It also has a Nextcloud integration.

[0]: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#275

Post by rchaud » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:45 PM UTC

ctrw wrote: post #91

rchaud wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Listening to people talk about the 00s like we barely invented fire is something else. There's been very little new in computing since the arpanet was invented. The cloud is someone's mainframe and we moved away from those for the same reason why government wants to leave the cloud.

Agreed. A lot of "new tech" are just cloud versions of what used to be on-premise services.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#276

Post by jraph » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:45 PM UTC

1970-01-01 wrote: post #204

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/

I predict it will yet fail again. Desktop Linux maintains it's bad reputation very well, and 20 years is just enough time for everyone to forget the details. Unless they have an insane user to IT ratio (perhaps 6:1), the adoption pain points will soon be rediscovered and overwhelm the project.

Do you have actual elements? Actual pain points? The details you are mentioning?

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#277

Post by morkalork » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:46 PM UTC

NeoTar wrote: post #45

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 ofte…

I had a language teacher that before working professionally spent many months as a volunteer teaching free classes for immigrants and refugees. The way he made it sound was that nobody got hired without doing that free work.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#278

Post by aeyes » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:48 PM UTC

vasco wrote: post #163

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…

State mandated projects give you things like the Lidl AWS "alternative" who's pricing page is a downloadable PDF.

The PDF makes looking at the prices much easier.

But if you prefer, you can also see it on the website, for example: https://www.stackit.de/en/pricing/cloud-services/iaas/stacki...

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#279

Post by isodev » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:48 PM UTC

f1refly wrote: post #257

a2800276 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an outlier in Germany as well. The municipal government in Munich tried to migrate to OSS around ~2004, but had to roll back after a couple of years. Most municipalities and government agencies would _like_ to utilize more OSS, but don't really have any concrete idea of how to proceed.

This was probably completely, utterly unrelated to the migration of the german Microsoft HQ to Munich at that time and there was no corruption involved at all.

Indeed. Microsoft is extremely aggressive in such situations. I used to contract for this big corp here in Belgium that was on track to replace office and windows with Linux and LibreOffice. A few months later, they got a new VP of something, previously working for MS… fast forward to the next all hands meeting announcing the return to Teams and O365.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#280

Post by tiahura » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 2:51 PM UTC

josefx wrote: post #47

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…

office365 is a crippled mess.

Strong “I have no idea what I’m talking about” vibe here.