German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

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Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#401

Post by otherme123 » Thu, Apr 11, 2024, 3:55 PM UTC

CRConrad wrote: post #382

otherme123 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a mistake at this phase. Right now, we europeans still didn't figure out what is the best way, so each country tries something different. With time, failures will be replaced with winners.

Yeah, that must be why it's been such an overwhelming success story ever since Munich started it in 2003. /s, in case anyone wondered.

You are /s'ing, but the fact that it didn't spread out of Munich until 2020 is a success in itself: the failure got confined to a very small part of Europe, instead of getting deployed in the whole Bavaria, Germany or even Europe. Damages were limited, they had nearby neighbors to compare, they did the partial rollback (losing "only" 90 million instead of 900), analyzed the failures and fixed a lot of them just by going LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice.

The second attempt they had better outcome, and the German government agrees. Now they have the know-how from Munich, and can have a degree of confidence that things will be fine. You don't need an overwhelming success, just be on par with the Microsoft Office solution using free software, and you are already ahead. It's Microsoft who needs to be clearly ahead to justify the cost.

Still, it's better to have it limited to Germany while others watch for a year or two if it works as intended.

Re: German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

#402

Post by openrisk » Fri, Apr 19, 2024, 11:05 AM UTC

CRConrad wrote: post #399

openrisk wrote: post #172

A question mark before open source productivity tools find mass adoption is their ability to integrate ML/AI tools. The current hype notwithstanding, it is likely that the next generation productivity suite (from spreadsheets to document editors etc) will support important algorithmically augmented workflows and non-technical users will expect them to be available. Libreoffice and friends must have a forward looking…

> A question mark before open source productivity tools find mass adoption is their ability to integrate ML/AI tools. No, the question is how long it will take before the world admits that this "AI" emperor is naked. > The current hype notwithstanding, Whaddayamean "notwithstanding"? The hype can't be notwithstanding, since hype is all it is.

This is insular attitude that will not serve well the open source desktop (and libreoffice in particular). Reasons to be annoyed by the "AI" emperor certainly abound, but one might get too distracted by distasteful mass hysteria phenomena and miss important developments and trends that are here to stay.

The point is that there is an entire universe of popular and very useful data science tools and models (built around Python, R etc.) of which the current AI/ML/LLM's algorithms are just a tiny and rather extreme use case. At some point libreoffice must move beyond VBA if it wants to remain relevant.

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