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City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

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Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#61

Post by deknos »

dogma1138 wrote: post #11
EspadaV9 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Munich was pretty good. It's been deployed for 4+ years and won't be replaced until the end of 2020 (assuming everything goes to plan) so that will be at least 7 years of use. It seems that the reasons to move back to Windows weren't completely technical either.

Munich effectively had a parallel program for anyone that had to work with any external entities, and many used it also internally. Munich never switched off Windows and MSFT Office at best it just abstracted or added additional layers of complexity. The moment you need to digitally sign some stupid PDF with some “proprietary” signature scheme or open some excel spread sheet it’s pretty much back to Windows.

Bullshit. The people using MSOffice were an absolute minority. The City had 18k Clients and on Windows on standard libreoffice, too. only for interaction with a few other institutions microsoft was needed. most of the time, this was provided via virtualmachine or terminalserver

and for signature schemes there is for example masterpdfeditor.

Are you uninformed, shill or windows-fanboi? I'm amazed the last days who comes out on reddit and ycombinator and spreads uninformed opinions...

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#62

Post by deknos »

dogma1138 wrote: post #17
cies wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much for a sovereign govt. I'd say that a gov't should be able to dictate what format is used, especially when replacing a patent-encumbered private format with an open one. But heay, who still believes that gov'ts are on top of corps is living a fantasy I guess.

Ironically many of the tools that the German government and public sector created didn’t work. So when you have some docusign like scheme that doesn’t run on Linux or on non Adobe PDF clients well....

you mean like masterpdfeditor? :)

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#63

Post by deknos »

a254613e wrote: post #37
cies wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Munnich's decision was also in part because MSFT would consider Munnich as a location for an office based on their decision on using their product to do their work. The old "we have to serve the corps (and their owners) or they leave" argument.

Microsoft decided to move their HQ to Munich years before this. In fact the year the construction of MS HQ started Munich voted to start planning the move to LiMux.

ah, so.. why then did the new mayor the last year have the need to meet with microsoft and prepare the move?

Do you have data for your claim?

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#64

Post by deknos »

luma wrote: post #31
icc97 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually gives strength to what Munich did. They proved that it was possible to swap. So Barcelona doesn't have such a political tricky situation as there is a pre-existing example. Let's hope that more follow Barcelona. Barcelona is possibly taking an easier approach. That is, replace the easier things like Office and IE. I've done similar things. So where as my software has to use IIS and Windows servers, I use…

I'm not sure how Munich "proved it was possible". The user community disliked it so much they are now switching back. They proved that it cost the city a lot of money in the transition (both times), and those costs have nothing to do with licensing. "Free" is only "free" so long as you and your user's time carries no value.

not the users. the mayor and city council.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#65

Post by jeanrene »

unmango wrote: post #43
interfixus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you equating support for open source with left-leaningness?

Yes, I am. That's what matches my personal experience.

Open-source boosts competition in capitalism. Open-source makes it easier for startups to offer services and create products, for instance. Open-source breaks monopolies. In other words, Open-source is capitalism in its finest.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#66

Post by Piskvorrr »

adwhit wrote: post #19

I kind of amazed that Microsoft are still successfully charging SO MUCH for their absolutely run-of-the-mill OS and Office products. Office, in particular, brings in something like $25bn/year revenue with presumably very healthy margins. For a product that has hardly changed in 20 years. It's a good product, sure. But a clean-room reimplementation of the bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more…

You underestimate the power of the MS Office. Or rather, the flexibility of MS Access, to be specific - it's not "just" a DB, it's a prototyping environment (with a rather unfortunate tendency to protoduction, but that's hardly MS's fault).

As for Excel and Word - those are 80/20 replaceable for LibreOffice or what-have-you (definitely for SOHO purposes: it will work, mostly), but it took over a decade of concerted effort to get there. Making a powerful word processor or a spreadsheet processor is orders of magnitude harder than it seems at the first glance.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#67

Post by Piskvorrr »

adwhit wrote: post #30
blowski wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn’t believe the number of workflows hardcoded to Excel and Outlook. Those two products alone guarantee that Office is here to stay for years.

For sure. I've seen complete trading systems written in Excel macros. MS have played their hand very astutely and have managed to capture a large fraction of the enormous gap between cost-to-producer and value-to-user. Keeping things that way is worth $100bn market cap to them, and challenging them is worth relative peanuts to anyone else. Of course they're going to win every time. Our best hope is that someone like…

Not even MS products from the Office are fully compatible with each other - I've seen issues with documents produced by older Offices being mangled in newer ones (compounded by locale differences).

DOC/DOCX compatibility across different products is a tire fire, there is no solution on the horizon.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#68

Post by Piskvorrr »

tzahola wrote: post #38
adwhit wrote: post #19

I kind of amazed that Microsoft are still successfully charging SO MUCH for their absolutely run-of-the-mill OS and Office products. Office, in particular, brings in something like $25bn/year revenue with presumably very healthy margins. For a product that has hardly changed in 20 years. It's a good product, sure. But a clean-room reimplementation of the bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more…

The real value is not in MS Office itself, but the ~30 years worth of mission-critical infrastructure built on top of it which MS customers can't afford to replace.

And training. Infrastructure can be replaced at cost, training is harder.

Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

#69

Post by a254613e »

deknos wrote: post #63
a254613e wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft decided to move their HQ to Munich years before this. In fact the year the construction of MS HQ started Munich voted to start planning the move to LiMux.

ah, so.. why then did the new mayor the last year have the need to meet with microsoft and prepare the move? Do you have data for your claim?

Sure - one of many articles from 2013 announcing the move:

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/neue-deutschland-zentral...

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