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German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

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Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#371

Post by ckw460 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #189
Stranger43 wrote: post #7

The germans have been tinkering with policies mandating non-cloud dependent products for a while wondering if this is a start of it actually getting implemented on a large scale or if the delay attempts will remain successful elsewhere across the region. If this is a start of an actual migration away from cloud dependence, it's a matter of time before windows(which is as cloud dependent as office those days for enter…

I feel like I've seen this very headline before in Germany specifically several times over the years, like I keep hearing that Germany is using LibreOffice/OpenOffice. Googling to try to confirm this, I see that OpenOffice began when a program called StarOffice was open-sourced, and StarOffice was originally a German product most popular in Germany, so that could be part of German interest in OpenOffice descendents s…

15 years ago. It was big news then. Germany has always had a rocky relationship with USA software.... Remember when Lotus.... software could not be exported from the USA because the encryption was considered a weapon of mass destruction?

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL6E8F276E/

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#372

Post by tietjens »

etiennebausson wrote: post #268
tietjens wrote: post #138

Mixed feelings on this, but can we please appreciate the irony that this is happening just days after XZ Utils.

To be fair, xz didn't hit, xz flopped. The issue was detected before it could do much/any damage. As far as I'm concerned it's a point in favor of OSS, rather than against it. How many such attacks in closed-source programs goes undetected?

My point was regarding German appetite for risk. Not trying to make a point against OSS.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#373

Post by CRConrad »

wg0 wrote: post #306
freetanga wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time my MS rep brings up O365 I correct him: “it’s Office 363. It does not work twice a year”

Stupid but genuine question because I never used it. How does Office 365 work? Like Office 2007 and such were all MFC/ATL code bases so calling GDI+ and all that. How does it work now? Canvas and Web assembly etc?

> How does Office 365 work?

I think that depends on which part of "Office 365" you mean: The name itself is, as I understand it, a moniker for pretty much all Office products nowadays, both the "MS Office in the browser" and the "traditional MS Office applications". More of an all-encompassing marketing label than any specific product. So the free-standing MS Word / Excel / Outlook etc I use at work are "Office 365" just as the webpage equivalents I could use in stead (but don't, because they're still pretty massively inferior to the standalone apps).

N.B: "As I understand it"; I could be wrong as Hell.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#374

Post by CRConrad »

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #369
dividedbyzero wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But then that would apply to every company that has datacenters and provides services both in US and Europe?

I don't think so. The US government could kill Microsoft; no European government could. The EU / some European government could kill a European company; the US couldn't.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#375

Post by CRConrad »

digging wrote: post #287
ctrw wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There's been very little new in computing since the arpanet was invented. Now there's a hot take! I suppose for this assertion to work, you'd have to consider Arpanet orders-of-magnitude more sophisticated an advancement than modern gaming, blockchain, VR, LLMs with fully integrated real-time image processing... all just minor increments?

There's been very little actually useful new in computing since the arpanet was invented.

None of the shit you mentioned is a counterexample to that.

HTH!

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#376

Post by CRConrad »

Spooky23 wrote: post #236
deaddodo wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? I thought local installs still function offline for up to 48 hours, as long as you haven't passed the last synced expiry date? At least, that's how it used to function way back when I used it and had a not-always-online connection.

It doesn’t. These guys are probably still upset about the ribbon. Microsoft is not my favorite company. But the only reason O365 has been down for days is when customer integrations (identity, security stuff, VPN rules, etc) break. That was even true in the early days before 365 branding. Source: I’ve been accountable for 250k+ user O365 environments as a customer director or VP for over a decade.

> These guys are probably still upset about the ribbon.

Yeah, so? Why shouldn't one be?

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#377

Post by CRConrad »

sgift wrote: post #242
erAck wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The link is just about a move from one part of Munich to another (MS German HQ has always been in Munich). Nope. They moved from Unterschleißheim (administrative district of Munich in Upper Bavaria) to Schwabing (district of Munich town), which tax-paying wise makes the difference.

Embarrassing. I really thought we had incorporated Unterschleißheim into Munich ages ago. And I live here .. oh well. Thanks for the correction!

That wasn't a correction; you were right to begin with. If it's so much a part of the city that you don't even know if it's formally part of the city or not... Then it's part of the city.

Fuck, it seems (from Google Maps) to be about half as far from the center of Munich as the Munich Airport. If schitt that far out is called "Munich", then so is Unterschleissheim.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#378

Post by CRConrad »

Havoc wrote: post #240
TacticalCoder wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember that one... In the end the harsh truth for MS is that a guesstimate of 99% of all offices and administration users are using and, most of all, only need 1% of the features Office (including Excel) do offer. The other harsh truth is that those using more advanced features are typically creating spreadsheets full of errors and bugs, which should be better rewritten in dedicated apps. The world is using MS Of…

> The other harsh truth is that those using more advanced features are typically creating spreadsheets full of errors and bugs, which should be better rewritten in dedicated apps. My experience has been the mirror opposite. I’m doing finance/accounting day to day but can also code. The attempts to replace excel with custom apps were consistently absolute horror shows full of consultants, endless meetings, coders not…

> The attempts to replace excel with custom apps were consistently absolute horror shows full of consultants, endless meetings, coders not understanding finance nuances, endless parallel running, budget overruns. And then months and a couple of 100k spent later all to duplicate a spreadsheet someone had originally slapped together in a day or two.

"Modern Web Apps", based on "The Modern Data Stack", and so on...?

Give the spreadsheets (and access to two or three of the people who made and use them!) to one or two guy[s] with Delphi, and you'll have an old-fashioned client-server app -- which isn't a bad thing; it's what you want in contexts like this -- in a week or less. For the first one; the following ones are faster.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#379

Post by CRConrad »

deaddodo wrote: post #349
graemep wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not that the Fed thinks Windows or Office is better than the open source alternatives, as much as it is that if/when they do fail they have a direct point of contact with strict SLA guarantees to get things fixed Does MS provide SLAs? Are there no suppliers who will provide similar SLAs for FOSS software? > and they have full control of all of their software to do so without hindrance. That puzzles me. How can…

> Does MS provide SLAs? Are there no suppliers who will provide similar SLAs for FOSS software? Gotta love how internet commentators feel like picking a statement apart in isolation somehow validates their point. Yes, they offer SLAs and have full control of their software and its release cycle. So can offer guarantees and stand by them. > That puzzles me. How can you have more control over proprietary software than…

> It means that they aren't at the whims of a community who decides to abandon projects willy-nilly or replace them with brand new implementations at the drop of a hat.

Yeah, because only the Open Source community ever does that. Corporations never do... /s

(The "Google Graveyard" site is famous, but wasn't there one for Microsoft too? I want my Microsoft Bob to be maintained, dammit!)

ETA:

> The fact that people continue to sign with Azure, Microsoft, Office, etc makes it self-evident.

...that they're idiots. That's what you meant, right?

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#380

Post by CRConrad »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #189
Stranger43 wrote: post #7

The germans have been tinkering with policies mandating non-cloud dependent products for a while wondering if this is a start of it actually getting implemented on a large scale or if the delay attempts will remain successful elsewhere across the region. If this is a start of an actual migration away from cloud dependence, it's a matter of time before windows(which is as cloud dependent as office those days for enter…

I feel like I've seen this very headline before in Germany specifically several times over the years, like I keep hearing that Germany is using LibreOffice/OpenOffice. Googling to try to confirm this, I see that OpenOffice began when a program called StarOffice was open-sourced, and StarOffice was originally a German product most popular in Germany, so that could be part of German interest in OpenOffice descendents s…

> although this one may be larger/at the state level instead of just city/etc.

I think that, like in the USA, some German states (Bundesländer) are smaller than some German cities.

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