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German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice

Stranger43
90 replies
7h38m

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 enterprise management features) itself is targeted, and the entire federation of germany changing from ms office formats to odf in practice could set some interesting balls in motions.

But as we have seen this before where a product is started and then sabotaged or delayed by lobbying and inertia from people who dont want to change how theyve always done things, it could be another one-off that dont set a trend.

daeros
63 replies
7h14m

sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.

Rinzler89
43 replies
7h10m

What's the alternative? Would they be able to do more without cloud office solutions?

Like in the days long last we used to email .doc files to each other? I doubt it.

Would hosting an on-prem alternative yeld better cost and a higher uptime? I doubt it.

Stranger43
33 replies
7h5m

The drive here is to reduce dependencies to locations the state itself have jurisdiction over i.e. things that can be controlled.

It's essentially to avoid having the states data taken hostage when the slowly brewing conflict between America's lack of respect for it's foreign partners data protection regulation and the EU's very popular trend towards less and less tolerance for corporate data abuse comes to an head and we see actual blocks being mandated on high-security networks against US data harvesting companies(of which MS is but one).

Rinzler89
32 replies
6h59m

And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US?

Companies buy Office 365 subscriptions so they can focus on their main business and don't want to think about their office solution and want something that JustWorks which is already compatible with what everyone else uses.

They have a business to run and money to makes, so spending extra time and effort on alternative office solutions with various degrees of compatibility, just to fight a virtual trade war, will slow then down significantly from their main business goal.

Why do you think Google uses SAP instead of rolling out their own solution? You think they don't have the technical know-how, or is it because it's not worth the effort and better use what everyone else is already using and focus your resoruces on what really matters?

guappa
17 replies
6h49m

You just do it like USA does: if you want to do business with the public sector, you must not rely on a foreign cloud.

rad_gruchalski
16 replies
6h13m

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

guappa
7 replies
6h5m

openstack

LunaSea
5 replies
5h38m

No. OpenStack sucks to deploy and maintain with the result being an inferior cloud with a lack in services.

guappa
4 replies
5h22m

The goal is not "superior", the goal is "USA can't kill our infrastructure pressing one button"

LunaSea
3 replies
5h19m

The goal is also to have a usable cloud on which you can efficiently develop software.

Otherwise we can simply go back to paper.

prmoustache
2 replies
4h35m

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 processes, privileges separations and nomenclatures, it becomes so bureaucratic all flexibility of a cloud mostly disappear.

LunaSea
1 replies
3h47m

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.

prmoustache
0 replies
2h53m

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

And I have been asked by my manager to help a different team and I am still waiting 10 days later to get access to the necessary AWS account.

These kinds of problems are organizational, not technical. Thinking cloud solutions solve organizational issues magically is naive and delusional.

rad_gruchalski
0 replies
5h42m

okay

Stranger43
4 replies
5h35m

As someone who split his time 50/50 between AWS and vmware based instances, i cant really think of anything we run in AWS that is not eventually supposed to go back on prem when we have stabilized the specification and lifecycle expectations. And who could not have gone in on prem if we had been willing to spend capex upfront(which would likely had led to lower lifecycle costs).

The last time this debate came along ms was able to sweep in with an solution that did not require cloud integration with an price/support package that was by all estimate at bellow cost, and i would be surprised if the state in question have anything in the cloud that MS did not use to offer as on-prem solutions, and im pretty sure the current wintel/mso solution is based around those on-prem implementation of AD and SharePoint that no longer exists and viable alternatives to opensource based document storage repositories.

nine_k
3 replies
5h2m

i cant really think of anything we run in AWS that is not eventually supposed to go back on prem

Hod do you handle multi-DC, multi-AZ resilience? What are you using instead of IAM policies that cover every resource?

(Asking unironically, would just like to know. I worked at cloud-centric companies for last 15 years or so.)

kaliszad
0 replies
4h19m

I guess the same as people have always done. You have more server rooms on ideally different networks and grids. That can be a rented room/ rack in a bigger DC, your own if you have a big factory with subsidiaries etc.

The IAM etc. will probably done by a combination of technical on organizational measures. You will have certain people doing certain things at least before the solution is ready for IaC. People will create roles, accounts, accesses and such. With networking gear that can be still tricky to implement, with virtualization solutions that is easier today. For databases etc. you can create accounts in them too. Of course, K8s and similar make these things more formalized/ transferable. However there is a lot of stuff before you can deploy that.

People forget however that even if you have hundreds of servers you are tiny compared to the cloud providers. You don't have to have the same breadth and depth of offering. So while you need more baby sitting of hardware, probably will not get nearly as good deals on hardware as the big providers do, you will save their considerable margins. Also, they actually have some of the same expenses too - if a harddrive goes bad they will still swap them basically the same as you do. Big cloud providers will not get substantially different energy pricing than what e.g. a steel foundry would get.

By hosting things on premise or in a nearby datacenter(s) you can shave off a lot of latency too. Some machinery likes to store a lot of data and shaving off latency will decrease your need for thick router buffers because you will not have such a big Bandwidth Delay Product and will achieve the same speeds with much smaller buffers. Building stuff on premise just for you makes some things easier too. Even if you loose some credentials usually you can just hard-reset the equipment as the last resort. There will be no credit card blocking that would affect the operations. If you are less strict with security it will usually matter much less - you are not sharing the hardware with unknown parties and all people that touch it have a contract with the company. So usually everybody want the company to succeed to get the paycheck. You build a deeper know how and can do some optimizations the cloud providers cannot do because you don't have to be general.

Stranger43
0 replies
4h28m

For AWS we rely almost entirely on backup/restore and database level log shipping on prem this is is in some cases argumented by storage level(netapp and previously hpe 3par) replication but this is going away for cost reasons.

Given that my experience with AWS is to use the same application level cross region resilience techniques im used to on prem(i have worked with high end unix boxen most of my carear) im genuinely baffled when people start talking about cloud resilience as something magical, and nearly all our traffic happens inside of an private network(MPLS/VPN) that stretches across the different sites.

I really haven't seen any magic multi-az resiliiance in aws that dont have an onprem counter part.

None of this is in house whitebox hardware but relatively standard solutions from established vendors(VMware recently started abusing their near monopoly so everyone is looking for/at alternatives like proxmox, xen and nutanix but arent ready to move just yet).

SoftTalker
0 replies
3h34m

Many users don't need multi-DC, multi-AZ resilience. Having a good (and tested) DR plan might be enough.

ffgjgf1
1 replies
4h52m

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.

dividedbyzero
0 replies
3h44m

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

wkat4242
0 replies
5h12m

Scaleway is a great alternative to AWS. A lot cheaper too! And API compatible.

etiennebausson
5 replies
6h18m

If the entities you depends on for funding migrate from Words to LibreOffice, then yes, you will consider moving as well.

The network effect may be mostly considered in regard to social media, but it is just as powerful when it come to tools and file format.

Administrations moving en-mass to open-sourced software would ensure a significant chunk of companies would follow.

pydry
4 replies
5h38m

This is precisely why Microsoft freaked out when Germany last tried this. It led to them inventing this nebulous "TCO" concept wherein they massively overestimated the costs surrounding moving to FOSS in order to try and convince clueless managerial stakeholders to stick with them.

ffgjgf1
3 replies
5h1m

To be fair in certain cases the cost might be very high and considerably higher than whatever the license/subscription fees paid to MS are. e.g. Libre Office doesn’t really have a drop-in replacement for Excel (for non trivial use cases. To be fair it still might be sufficient for the majority of users, but that would mean that some proportion of your workforce has to stay on Excel/Office which kind of beats the whole purpose).

rightbyte
1 replies
4h28m

Vendor lockin is no excuse leaking PI to MS though. You could buy some Office 2003 CD and use Excel locally.

alemanek
0 replies
3h50m

Uh using an out of date and unsupported Excel version is a really bad idea. Lots of security vulnerabilities around VB scripting/macros which gives you the very real risk of being compromised by a malicious spreadsheet.

Better to just switch where you can and invest resources into improving FOSS offerings to handle the use cases it currently can’t.

pydry
0 replies
3h18m

To be equally fair, in certain cases the non-licensing costs of Microsoft software are higher than the FOSS equivalent.

In fact, I'd argue that in some cases these are higher. A good example of this is that piece of shit that is Microsoft Teams - both the horrid security flaws and the ways it keeps breaking. I've used FOSS equivalents and they have a smaller attack surface and are more reliable.

They also play all sorts of user-hostile tricks that make vendor lock in possible, and this often has an underappreciated impact on delivery.

Stranger43
1 replies
6h11m

If the alternative is not getting the security certifications required to operate legally in the sectors they depend on for revenue what alternative does an organization really have to seeking/implementation solutions in sync with the mandated regulations.

And this is not an private company whose demise is insignificant to the society at large(as all companies must be in an functional capitalist economy) but the government itself instituting policies to protect itself from dependence on a single foreign company.

And being told by an court to get off the o365 cloud is not an theoretical prospect for an European governmental organization as the EU commission found out about a month ago(https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/pre...).

ryukoposting
0 replies
5h37m

And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US?

Well... yes, I think that's exactly the argument being made here. Reliance on foreign cloud infrastructure is a liability, and the US does not hold any of its companies accountable for blatantly unethical and reckless data practices.

I'll admit LibreOffice is relatively underpowered and unintuitive, but I've been using it for years and I find the compatibility issues to be overblown. I'd hazard a bet that most employees of companies using MS Office could make the switch and be used to it within a couple weeks. Certainly a much, MUCH easier transition than one between ERPs, for example.

Why do you think Google uses SAP instead of rolling out their own solution?

SAP can be hosted entirely onsite, and at Google's scale that's almost certainly what they're doing. The problem is the infrastructure, not the origin of the software itself. Note how the EU never had anything against MS Exchange Servers.

morsch
0 replies
6h49m

Governments can take a longer and more strategic outlook than private enterprises. It's not even primarily about nationalistic trade wars: I want my tax euros to fund as little closed-source software as possible. It's crazy how much money even just our schools spend for software that can't be freely redistributed or modified. That said, I'm not holding my breath regarding the success of this most recent move.

kaliszad
0 replies
5h1m

And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US?

Most workers in most companies probably don't really need an entire Office suite. It is just they use Outlook and from time to time open a Word document that could've been a PDF or HTML form if they had better processes. For the same reason, most people don't really need to use Windows. However people use Windows, because a lot of "professional" software only ships for it and nobody is going to rewrite an app that the enterprise uses for the last 20 years to prevent the use of Windows or some of its particular version. If it was that easy, why would Windows XP or Windows 7 be still so wide-spread?

Companies buy Office 365 subscriptions so they can focus on their main business and don't want to think about their office solution and want something that JustWorks which is already compatible with what everyone else uses.

The problem is, many programs in the Office suite don't just work. Being an admin in a larger organization you will face a broken .pst file basically every week. 10+ GB of emails seems to be a problem also considering the search speed etc. The level of engineering incompetence behind Outlook is high. It even has special conditional HTML just so Outlook renders some things correctly, because Microsoft is long term incapable of implementing a web engine to a degree that they had to adopt and adapt a competitors product (Chromium). Similarly for Excel. Most things that are in Excel shouldn't be and instead should be a table + some app in a database or a form + database backend. We have seen that during COVID-19, when essential health data was messed up because of wrong use of Excel but also because Excel just wasn't the right tool for the job frankly. We have been renaming genes or whatever, because Excel has insufficient auto-formatting algorithms and people have to learn how to prevent this - which is proof it doesn't "Just Work" for people.

They have a business to run and money to makes, so spending extra time and effort on alternative office solutions with various degrees of compatibility, just to fight a virtual trade war, will slow then down significantly from their main business goal.

Most things in most companies should be formalized in digital forms backed by some processing backend. Most companies just are not very good at management therefore they fill these gaps by using more flexible tools where everybody can unfold their creativity generally making a mess making any kind of formalization much harder later on.

No question there are also jobs where you need that flexibility, e.g. where you get data from people precisely in these formats and are expected to produce output in these formats for them too. Because people are generally opposed to change and don't want to learn, if they can avoid it. Much better tools are available for so many activities yet people usually opt for a product out of the Office suite.

Why do you think Google uses SAP instead of rolling out their own solution? You think they don't have the technical know-how, or is it because it's not worth the effort and better use what everyone else is already using and focus your resoruces on what really matters?

Because promotions are easier to get if you work on a product that makes money for the company (such as search + ads) or is a big cost center and a needed pre-condition for the business (such as the cloud infrastructure) and you can implement changes that safe the company a lot of money. However, don't underestimate how much SAP was customized for Google. It could be that SAP is just the core of a much bigger system.

fifteen1506
0 replies
6h51m

Of course. Same thing will all those environmental laws shenanigans.

Companies are better off investing in short-term gains and leave the governments taking care of the environment and digital accountability of its citizens.

aleph_minus_one
0 replies
6h50m

You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US?

I don't think they will stop, but they will become much more hesitant.

Concerning your other points: it is of similar economic importance for the company to invest in precautions to prevent that you are taken hostage of, in this case by Microsoft. Thus such measures are actually often in the company's self-interest in opposite to fighting a virtual trade war for someone else.

Qwertious
0 replies
5h24m

You don't need everyone switching over. Let's say that by next year, a total of 10% of orgs in the EU are using LibreOffice, and then Redmond is hit by a comet. It'd be painful for the other 90% to switch but there would be some familiarity with the process, whereas if there's an MS monoculture then it would take a whole lot longer and be a lot messier.

shrubble
3 replies
6h31m

You mean emailing .doc files around to co-workers, like what happened yesterday?

panzi
2 replies
6h23m

Nowadays they mail .docx around, haven't seen a .doc in a long time. I'm a software dev on Linux and haven't even LibreOffice installed. I tell the sender to please send it to me as .pdf. I write docs in markdown on GitHub (the company I work for uses GitHub, make of it what you will).

quesera
0 replies
5h31m

PDF is easy to read. It's a ridiculous document format for the purpose of internal sharing and reading, but it still works well for that purpose.

But PDF is not really optimized for editing or collaboration, and the tools available on Linux especially are limited.

bee_rider
0 replies
3h13m

I like PDFs when I trust them, but I’m always a bit wary receiving them from random people. Don’t they support embedded scripting?

I’d like a format that is like PDF, but markup only.

rchaud
3 replies
6h51m

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.

ctrw
2 replies
6h41m

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.

rchaud
0 replies
3h40m

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

digging
0 replies
3h24m

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?

prmoustache
0 replies
6h44m

When did people stop doing that? Last time I checked (which was our soc2 audit last year) most people didn't understand the sharing/collaborative features of sharepoint/office365 and were still doing it.

datenhorst
5 replies
5h13m

Is Office365 really down that often? I'm fortunate enough to not have to use it but I don't hear any complaints from my colleagues that do.

boringg
4 replies
5h9m

The fact that it would even go down and it requires online connection to vacuum up my data is such a bananas level oversight from MS. That company, man, that company.

deaddodo
3 replies
5h2m

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.

Spooky23
1 replies
4h36m

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.

boringg
0 replies
3h4m

Really? Or did that not make its way up the chain of command? None of your 250k+ accounts had issues because they didn't connect to the internet? What about license renewals - did anyone get shut out of their account immediately because they missed a license renewal date and happy to be off the internet?

evilduck
0 replies
4h45m

They better never have Monday outages then.

freetanga
4 replies
5h45m

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

wg0
1 replies
51m

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?

freetanga
0 replies
36m

No clue. But the most painful point is not so much loosing web-based apps (we still have local versions) but Teams, OneDrive and some management tools which are moot if services are down

markbranly
1 replies
5h33m

Does he laugh it off or get offended? I find a good rep walks the line between customer advocate and company "man".

freetanga
0 replies
38m

Laughs it off. Except the time I said that to his boss and the Western Europe MS Head Sales. That time he skirted it…

zo1
3 replies
5h49m

I live in a badly-maintained, "3rd world" country, and since we got office 365 maybe a half decade ago (probably more) it's been down once, for one afternoon. And that was due to what looks like an undersea cable sabotage.

What kind of internet/IT department do you have where you have any sort of regular office outage?

ToucanLoucan
1 replies
5h41m

Recently we had a Teams outage at work that wasn't AWFULLY disruptive, but the only reason that is is that we don't depend on 365 cloud services to get anything done. We use Slack for chat features and more casual calling services (non-meeting) though of course Teams managed to be down on a meeting-heavy day, and we ended up organizing Slack huddles to get around it.

The only real cloud service we use is OneDrive and the CEO is pushing us to get away from it because it has all kinds of strange problems with file permissions and we constantly have to call IT to unlock files.

rawgabbit
0 replies
5h5m

What alternative tool does your CEO prefer?

dubcanada
0 replies
5h44m

https://twitter.com/MSFT365Status just scrolling through there is several outages, Teams, performance issues, etc. However it does tend to be only a specific area/country or a set of products rather then all of Office 365.

andsoitis
2 replies
4h14m

sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.

While there might be issues with Office 365's reliability (I don't know, I use Google Docs), the online collaborative capabilities is a fantastic tradeoff. Mailing individual files amongst a group of collaborators impede productivity (even though it has other benefits).

You could make the argument that cloud solutions are not a prerequisite for collaborative tools like Office 365 or Google Docs, but desktop peer-to-peer systems like those that Groove Networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks) tried to create did not take off.

rawgabbit
0 replies
2h58m

Hmmm. Compared to Google Docs and Google Drive, Microsoft's collaboration is just bizarre.

Yes, under ideal conditions, teams of people technically could use Microsoft to edit and review documents online at the same time. I have yet to see it in a real world setting. Often times, where I work, we just get confused by OneDrive's links vs direct sharing vs personal onedrive vs sharepoint onedrive. And we end up sharing multiple copies of the same file on Teams which is another source of confusion.

Forbo
0 replies
22m

Collaborative editing in OneNote is hot garbage, leaving you with a mile long list of conflicts. It desperately needs some work.

cjk2
0 replies
3h58m

I use O365 all day across two orgs and have done for about 5 years. Never had a problem. Not once!

pixelpoet
12 replies
6h37m

Do the americans exclusively use MS Office in government computers?

lrvick
7 replies
6h30m

Yes. Most schools too. Microsoft has incredible political power here.

trelane
3 replies
6h7m

The phrase is, "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft." It's descended from the same phrase, applied to IBM, when they were the power.

croes
2 replies
5h41m

But the impact is deeper nowadays.

What was the worst that could happen when you bought IBM back then?

Liquix
1 replies
4h40m

I think the sentiment is less that something catastophic can't happen by depending on M$ - it's more that you personally will never be blamed for their servers going down. Whereas if you advocate for a smaller/more open solution and that blows up in the company's face, it's your ass on the line.

croes
0 replies
4h17m

But that could change after the last couple of mistakes by MS.

Do maybe it's still in the head of the people but it could backfire.

dewey
0 replies
6h9m

There's stories like this for every big vendor. This rarely has any impact.

jofaz
0 replies
3h7m

Not as much as it used to be, now that they can do most of what they need with Google's free apps

spogbiper
0 replies
4h0m

America is a very big place with federal, state, city standards. I'm not sure it is possible to say "exclusively" about anything.

That said, I've been in the IT world for 3 decades and I haven't worked for/with a government agency that used anything other than MS Office since the WordPerfect and Lotus 123 days.

severino
0 replies
4h22m

It's reasonable. What would be strange is that they relied on Chinese or Russian software to run their government. That's sort of what we, the Europeans, do when we use Microsoft tech in our governments.

ghnws
0 replies
4h19m

Not just Americans. MS Office is the standard (at least) in the western world.

deaddodo
0 replies
4h53m

What do you mean by "exclusively" and "government"? Outside of the DoD/US Military (where hardened Linux has quite a few uses), I'm pretty sure the US Federal govt is fairly Microsoft-centric as they offer them the guarantees and concessions needed to sign contracts. 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 and they have full control of all of their software to do so without hindrance.

Local and state govts usually follow suit, as it makes sense that what works for the Fed will work for them. But I've seen plenty of open source softwares being used in various municipal and state offices. LibreOffice and CentOS would probably be the most common alternatives.

So, to answer your question, no it's not exclusively Windows. It's almost exclusively Windows in the Federal govt as there are mandates there, but otherwise it's a hodgepodge of what works/can be afforded throughout all other levels of govt.

Havoc
8 replies
6h51m

Yeah last time with Munich they moved back to MS after MS just so happened to move their HQ to that state.

Microsoft is clearly keen to avoid this becoming a thing. If governments can shift successfully then so can businesses

https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-h...

sgift
5 replies
6h37m

The link is just about a move from one part of Munich to another (MS German HQ has always been in Munich). From what I remember it was more that we had a coalition with the CSU for four years and unsurprisingly, the moment conservatives were part of the cities government all went back to "help the companies".

(MS had tried to pressure against the move from the start, but wasn't really successful in the first years)

mattalex
2 replies
6h14m

The problem was mostly that the only guy that was really backing the project (Christian Ude, SPD), was replaced with his successor (Dieter Reiter, SPD) who just didn't have the drive necessary to maintain the project.

The entire design of "LiMux" was doomed from the start: it was a highly customized version of Ubuntu that was only used in Munich (not even throughout the entire state). That made everything ridiculously expensive since the actual advantages of building on an open source solution was never realized. That is combined with the fact that "open source" and "cost savings" were used interchangeably when in reality the budget for Windows should have been pre-allocated into development, rather than cut.

The entire project was half-assed to begin with, which basically meant that Windows and Linux had to coexist since many crucial tools were never ported to Linux.

The "Microsoft killed it" story sounds realistic, but the truth is the much more boring incompetence in execution.

bruce511
1 replies
5h48m

I've no doubt that there was incompetence involved. Which is to be somewhat expected since Linux requires a set of skills to install and administer at scale, and few people have that particular skillset.

Equally I'm sure it was never going to be a cost saving exercise since firstly the cost of Windows is negligible, and second the conversion costs, in-house skill requirements, re-training of users, and porting existing software are all significant.

So you go from cheap software to free software, but from cheap IT staff to expensive, perhaps-incompetant, hard-to-replace IT staff.

If the savings aren't real then the fallback argument is privacy etc. But Libre Office runs fine on Windows. So by all means start there.

sgift
0 replies
5h15m

They always stated that it won't be cheaper. That was not the intention.

The main point was that Munich saw an opportunity to leave a monopoly for an option with competition. When the LiMux decision was made Munich had to change their whole IT landscape anyway (They ran on NT4 and even extended support was running out / getting extremely costly), so they thought: If we have to change anyway, why not change for something where we have more options?

erAck
1 replies
5h8m

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.

sgift
0 replies
4h23m

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

TacticalCoder
1 replies
5h18m

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 Office but the world really doesn't need that turd.

I ve both ported an Excel spreadsheet to dedicated app and helped SMEs move everything to Google workspace.

Fuck MS Office.

Havoc
0 replies
4h26m

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 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.

Not wildly attached to excel but now actively steer clear from custom app projects due to career risk of being in proximity of these.

It’s the same as big SAP projects once the “customizations” start. The implementing teams incentives are the precise opposite of the business. Bill as much as possible, extend project timeline, add more features and widgets, make things seem more complicated than they need to be, pull users away from their work to test, cater to the execs with dashboard instead of the team in trenches, endless CYA processes camouflaged as “end user acceptance”, office politics shenanigans to promote the solution etc. I’d much rather debug & streamline a spreadsheet than deal with all that.

I do agree that spreadsheets tend towards chaos as complexity increases though…

7thaccount
1 replies
4h4m

I figured the stated move to open source was a bluff to get a lower license cost.

bee_rider
0 replies
3h10m

I could swear this has happened before…

jrochkind1
0 replies
5h32m

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 specifically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#History

And here's an article that may be what I was thinking of -- but turns out it was about Munich specifically. That has a history of saying it was going to switch to OpenOffice as far back as 2003, that not working out for them, then trying again...

2020: Linux not Windows: Why Munich is shifting back from Microsoft to open source – again: Munich's flip-flop back to open source is the latest sign of Germany's political sea change over proprietary software.

However, the decision by the new coalition administration in Germany's third largest and one of its wealthiest cities is just the latest twist in a saga that began over 15 years ago in 2003, spurred by Microsoft's plans to end support for Windows NT 4.0.

Because the city needed to find a replacement for aging Microsoft Windows workstations, Munich eventually began the move away from proprietary software at the end of 2006.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

And here's a history of Berlin announcing/trying but not getting approval....

It is the second time the opposition Greens had proposed switching Berlin's 68,000 workstations to open source software, and the second time they failed, said Thomas Birk, the party's spokesman for government modernization, on Wednesday. The earlier effort was in 2007.

Oh boy, which also mentions:

Not every migration works though. The city of Freiburg announced in November it would dump OpenOffice and go back to Microsoft because of functionality problems due to a failed migration.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2611066/berlin-won-t-migra...

So yeah, German localities kind of have a history of trying this out without it actually leading to a sea change, although this one may be larger/at the state level instead of just city/etc. (Although I guess it's wrong to say this hasn't led to a trend -- its' an existing German trend of local governments trying to switch, without it necessarily working out!)

FloatArtifact
0 replies
2h44m

I hope they set aside some budget/resources to contribute back to the open source ecosystem

jorvi
24 replies
7h11m

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 use means the product becomes better through contribs which makes use even more attractive.

vasco
5 replies
5h54m

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

mariusor
2 replies
5h44m

Do you have a specific critique of the StackIt cloud that makes you put "alternative" in quotes? Do share if that's the case.

vasco
1 replies
5h32m

"The pricing page is a PDF" is right there in my post. I can get deeper but as we say in my language, "for those who want to understand, half a word is enough".

mariusor
0 replies
59m

I can get deeper

Please do.

I can't say I'd trust the opinion of someone that gives "price page is a PDF" as the only reason for invalidating a cloud offer. :)

txdv
0 replies
4h22m

Can they fax me the pricing page?

unkoman
5 replies
7h8m

I think I want less bureaucracy in my development so happy to see multiple versions and letting them battling them out

Rinzler89
4 replies
7h5m

While your small projects with next to zero market share fight it out between themselves, Microsoft keeps swallowing more market share making more billions.

Who do you think is the real winner of your sandpit fight?

ctrw
1 replies
6h39m

Until you can bribe officials to the tune of billions the quality of your software won't matter. The only reason why ms keeps winning is that it keeps bribing.

Qwertious
0 replies
4h50m

MS also keeps winning because they have billions of dollars to pour into the UX of their Office suite. The FOSS community doesn't spend a lot of money on hiring professional UI designers, and it's "do-ocracy" doesn't handle UI design well because UI design isn't seen as "doing" so much as nitpicking the choices of the programmers who are "doing all the work".

MS bribery is a factor, but if we use it as an excuse to ignore our own faults as a community then we're just screwing ourselves over.

nolist_policy
0 replies
6h41m

You are right, we need to make a bloated project and need to pour in millions into it like we did with Gaia-X. Then it will be a big trash-fire with smoke visible from afar and not just some small sandpit.

estebank
0 replies
6h38m

Keeping the separate projects at the national level also precludes the furious lobbying efforts against it that could target members of the union with... "friendlier ears". It also allows for smaller scale testing to work out kinks, in the same way that some US federal law started as laws in specific states.

isodev
5 replies
6h47m

But isn’t this the very centralisation we’re trying to avoid?

4gotunameagain
1 replies
6h28m

When it's open source, forking / moving is always an option and you're not vendor locked or being charged exuberant fees with no other option.

zelphirkalt
0 replies
5h9m

And of course it would have to be OSS to be in any way justifiable, that public money is put into it.

panzi
0 replies
6h20m

Not if everyone runs their own servers.

mbreese
0 replies
5h56m

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

Qwertious
0 replies
4h55m

Centralization is about infrastructure, so no. This would be a monoculture, assuming nobody forks. But if it's a FOSS monoculture and nobody forks, that implies that everyone is fairly satisfied with it.

otherme123
1 replies
5h2m

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.

fleischhauf
0 replies
4h24m

but ours is better! also we need our own national standards no body else uses!

tpm
0 replies
6h33m

You are underestimating German federalism - there are several competing providers for each specialized software used by German municipalities, often with huge customisations. There is no way you could mandate a specific product. What can be done from above, in some cases, is specifying requirements (for eg data storage, privacy laws, code auditability...) and APIs (like APIs to federal agencies) and let the customers and providers create solutions. It might be messier, but in the end you are not dependent on a single product.

lyu07282
0 replies
6h21m

Very typical for Germany, they rather roll their own solutions than cooperating with other countries and pooling resources. But it's even worse than that, each state within Germany does their own bureaucracy differently as well, to varying degrees.

lyu07282
0 replies
6h15m

imagine if there was an EU mandate set up and some serious money was budgeted to it.

We saw what that looks like already. "Gaia-X" it was a huge clusterfuck and burned to the ground before it even began.

Arathorn
0 replies
6h48m

Speaking from the Matrix side: it would definitely be preferable to have a large reliable source of funding for public sector Matrix deployments rather than juggling between loads of small overlapping ones (especially when they end up failing to route any $ to the upstreams). That said, Schleswig Holstein is looking to route $ upstream in this instance.

icemelt8
22 replies
7h22m

Genuine question, is there any other professional field in the world where people work for free like how Software Engineers work in open source?

dikei
6 replies
7h4m

To be fair, there are not many professions that a single individual can make so much impact as Software Engineering.

People say 10x Software Engineer, rarely 10x Electrical Engineer.

moooo99
4 replies
6h58m

I would argue most volunteer firefighters and other social volunteers have more net-positive impact than the vast majority software engineers.

MichaelZuo
2 replies
5h28m

Are you sure?

A huge chunk of cost increases in modern high rise building (outside of land and taxes) is due to ever more stringent fire safety requirements.

moooo99
1 replies
4h21m

Would you like to see your house burn completely to the ground? Would you know how to deal with a car wreckage?

I don’t, I’m grateful for those people existing. Regarding safety regulations, those were most often driven by tragedies that occurred prior to those regulations being in place. I prefer being alive over saving money

MichaelZuo
0 replies
1h43m

You’ll almost certainly get outvoted by the lower housing cost crowd, considering the usual comments on HN.

Cyphase
0 replies
5h53m

They didn't say positive. I think they were thinking in terms of leverage.

Avicebron
0 replies
4h15m

That's not how people use 10x (which I think is a silly article of marketing at best or a pretend metric people like to claim as some sort of totem of achievement), usually it means someone 10x more productive(???) than a supposed 1x software engineer.

In that case if we applied the same make believe as we do with software, then sure a 10x electrical could exist, just think of what you think an avg electrical engineer does and 10x it, boom.

Hamuko
4 replies
7h6m

Volunteer firefighters.

Hendrikto
2 replies
7h2m

At least in Germany, they are not professionals working unpaid. They are just volunteers with other jobs. Not really comparable.

mminer237
0 replies
5h0m

In many smaller communities, at least in the US, they are just volunteers with other jobs, but they still have to do hundreds of hours of training each year to keep all the certifications.

Hamuko
0 replies
7h1m

Not everyone in open source is a professional software engineer.

willyt
0 replies
6h6m

In Britain they are paid as well. They get a yearly retainer of ~£6k for being on 5 min standby and are also paid per call out.

NeoTar
2 replies
7h2m

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 often unpaid, but may be less of a profession),

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

As a more out-of-left field example, I recently met a really quite famous academic volunteering as a tour-guide at a historical house.

seabass-labrax
0 replies
6h2m

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! :)

morkalork
0 replies
3h40m

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.

sureMan
0 replies
6h58m

Off course, vets volunteering at animal shelters, same for MD's, medics and nurses at shelters, lawyers doing pro bono work, etc

phkahler
0 replies
7h1m

> Genuine question, is there any other professional field in the world where people work for free like how Software Engineers work in open source?

Woodworking, restoring old cars, building airplanes. These are all things that people do for themselves at their own cost. The difference is that software has a marginal cost of zero, so they hand it out to everyone and collaborate to make it better.

non-chalad
0 replies
6h6m

Collaborative writing (1), movie making (2), terrorist hunting (3), and volunteer forum moderation (4), are all things. Fanfiction (5) is also written for free.

All of these have been, in the past, variyng degrees of professional.

1. https://www.makeuseof.com/collaborative-fiction-sites-improv...

2. Iron Sky (2012), Moon (2009), Norwegian Ninja (2010) all involved free collaboration, to varying degrees.

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR6epSP_Xlw

4. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3491102.3517628

5. http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...

izacus
0 replies
6h57m

Huge huge majority of open source (especially famous one) is developed by people that are paid to do so by corporations. So it's a misleading premise.

fhd2
0 replies
7h15m

People working on open source don't necessarily do it for free, I know tons who are sponsored by their company.

That aside, at least in Germany, there is a considerable amount of volunteers, e.g. in social work.

d0gsg0w00f
0 replies
7h7m

Politics. People want to influence their world and volunteer for local seats. Then they have to figure out how to not be corrupted by the power.

Hendrikto
0 replies
7h3m

Lawyers often do pro bono work.

EduardoBautista
20 replies
7h11m

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. Linux has not been successful on the desktop because it has low corporate backing.

The cost of Microsoft Office is comparable to the cost of keeping their workplace stocked with coffee throughout the year.

helloimhonk
3 replies
7h1m

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.

prmoustache
2 replies
6h41m

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.

trelane
0 replies
5h59m

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.

mminer237
0 replies
5h6m

Trying to collaborate and send revisions to each other is a nightmare when you are using different programs. You spend way more time fixing the nth mangling or redoing the other's changes in your copy than you do actually getting work done.

hackerlight
3 replies
6h40m

going to cost the taxpayers more money

It's an investment in a public good, which is one of the roles of governments. Sort of like how the German taxpayer helped kick start the solar industry decades ago.

groestl
2 replies
5h29m

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

mminer237
1 replies
5h4m

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.

groestl
0 replies
3h45m

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.

tetris11
2 replies
7h1m

Linux was successful before corporate backing from just a handful of volunteers. If it was a failing product, corporations wouldn't have chosen it to develop on. It has been greatly enhanced by corporate contributions, but it would have gotten there without them too, albeit much slower.

I do agree though that MS products will likely play hard and fast with the compatibility game in order to exhaust local government workers from using FOSS

EduardoBautista
1 replies
6h47m

Linux started receiving corporate backing within a few years of it being released. Red Hat played a huge role in providing support and someone to turn to when something went wrong.

but it would have gotten there without them too, albeit much slower

No, it wouldn't have. There is no way that a bunch of volunteers in their spare time could achieve the same results, what took many full-time employees and contributions from the largest and most powerful corporations in the world.

Brian_K_White
0 replies
6h9m

I counter these assertions by simply saying the opposite with exactly the same authority supported by exactly as many citations.

Even the bsds, which allow companies to steal without giving back, have kept essentially apace in any important ways with a microscopic fraction on Linux's individual or corporate investment, and without Linux's copyleft to ensure all developments go back upstream.

Both of these comments were nothing more than religious faith opinion.

josefx
1 replies
7h2m

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 also something many companies don't pay for.

tiahura
0 replies
3h34m

office365 is a crippled mess.

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

Moldoteck
1 replies
7h1m

if all DE will switch to libreoffice, they'll use a single format, so shouldn't be such a big problem. The problem may arise when communicating with other countries (maybe?)

guappa
0 replies
6h47m

If germany switches the other countries will follow, at the very least the offices that have to interact with them.

rchaud
0 replies
6h40m

Why bail out the US auto companies in 2008? Japanese cars had better gas mileage, it would be a win-win for the taxpayer, right?

The need for sovereignty in these areas of national strategic significance is going to override concerns about UX or a learning curve. Most LibreOffice apps are similar to Office anyway, and the Open Document Format it uses is standardized in ISO 2600.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

estebank
0 replies
6h17m

National governments have more considerations that purely saving tax payers' money, because such savings can be short sighted. Saving money on munitions during a war effort, for example. Would you be as eager to have your courtry's military equipment built and purchased from an adversarial super-power? This is exactly the same thing.

dubcanada
0 replies
5h37m

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.

That is a bit short sighted, if we didn't work with non-traditional tools the whole computer/internet wouldn't exist and we'd still be writing stuff down.

croes
0 replies
6h24m

Only if you exclude the attack vector of linked MS products.

How many malware attacks are based on some kind of Office exploit?

Havoc
0 replies
6h50m

Some initial growing pains seem worthwhile though

reify
19 replies
8h47m

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 for it too.

Roll on linux

Dare I use the word Enshittification?

Hamuko
10 replies
7h43m

What's the cost of training a bunch of public servants to use Linux?

Stranger43
4 replies
7h36m

Probably lower then people think once the applications are identical across the two platform. and if Linux turns too complex there is always macos.

The big push is going to be getting rid of old excel and word macro's and replace sharepoint/onedrive with something else as data migrations are newer as simple in reality as they look in theory.

Hamuko
3 replies
6h29m

and if Linux turns too complex there is always macos

I have witnessed in person people switching from Windows to macOS have issues adapting to a different operating system and its concepts, like the fact that pressing the X button in the top-left corner doesn't close the application. Therefore I am rather skeptical that you can just throw some Linux distro at a bunch of novice computer users without large amounts of friction.

doubled112
1 replies
6h10m

Your example feels like shots fired because the programs running without windows concept still confuses me. It just doesn't compute.

I'm a sysadmin and have been using Macs on and off since System 7, Windows since 95, and probably 10000 Linux distros/DE combos. Just as a point of reference.

quesera
0 replies
5h8m

programs running without windows concept still confuses me

I'm a sysadmin and have been using ... probably 10000 Linux distros/DE combos

Most of the things I run on Unix systems do not have windows. This doesn't confuse me at all! :)

I know what you mean of course. A GUI application without windows is superficially confusing, but you can certainly imagine something daemon-like that runs all the time and only occasionally requires interaction in the form of configuration or control.

What you're really talking about is document-based applications, which can continue running when no documents (windows) are open. This may be less intuitive if you think about things in a document-centric way, vs an application-centric way. There are advantages and conveniences to both.

skydhash
0 replies
6h6m

Linux Mint is practically identical to Windows 7/10 in terms of basic interaction. Most people learn only a few workflows and software and do not tinker with the OS. When my SO moved to MacOS, the only thing she asked about was how to launch apps and do things like copy-paste. Everything else is still how I configured it when the computer came. Just like you don’t tinker with container images, people will be fine with Linux GUI if everything they need is there.

gtvwill
1 replies
7h34m

Train once and never pay fees for the lifetime of the worker. Or still have to train on windows and pay fees ontop of standard user training for the lifetime of the user. Remember just because it's windows doesn't mean it doesn't require training. All business computer use takes training.

zihotki
0 replies
7h30m

Or use classic approach - pay the lower price now and let the next goverment deal with the future problems.

zihotki
0 replies
7h33m

If they manage to do the training and onboarding within 4 hours then that may worth it (considering minimal hourly rate 12.41 euro per hour). That doesn't look realistic.

steve1977
0 replies
7h10m

Zero. Most of these people are probably not proficient in MS Office either. But since they are mostly not doing any real work, it doesn’t matter.

pakitan
0 replies
7h34m

The cost to show one person "this is the browser icon and these are the excel/word icons; click them when you need to", multiplied by number of people who need to be trained.

4878241143
3 replies
7h41m

why not just use bc?

jhgb
1 replies
7h22m

You have to be at least 41 years old to remember that bc exists in the first place.

cbm-vic-20
0 replies
7h8m

bc is the new thing. dc forever!

(Though "modern" dc and bc are typically packaged together now.)

ykonstant
0 replies
7h2m

Here is a setup I use to make `bc` more handy if you don't know how many computations you want to do in advance:

    alias bb='bc -l <<X'
Now enter calculations and assignments one per line and enter X to exit.

yourusername
0 replies
6h54m

Ok now do the cost for moving all other applications from Entra/Active Directory SSO running on Windows to LDAP or some non MS Oauth implementation on Linux. I'm sure replacing all the legacy applications and retraining the government employees on their FOSS alternatives can be done but it's going to take years and burn many many millions in fees for IT suppliers and investigating alternatives. You really need to do it because of ideological considerations because i doubt you'll save a dime the first decade.

rad_gruchalski
0 replies
6h2m

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

pjmlp
0 replies
7h25m

You know to whom belongs many of the FOSS critical infrastructure projects nowadays, including some key CPython contributors, right?

joostdecock
0 replies
7h15m

The English summary focuses on the move from MS Office to LibreOffice (it's a post on the Document Foundation blog, so it makes sense that this is their focus), but the original German press release (1) lists 6 pillars:

- Switching from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice

- Switching the operating system from Microsoft Windows to Linux

- Collaboration within the state administration and with external parties: Use of the open source products Nextcloud, Open Xchange/Thunderbird in conjunction with the Univention AD connector to replace Microsoft Sharepoint and Microsoft Exchange/Outlook

- Conception of an open source based directory service to replace Microsoft Active Directory

- Inventory of specialist procedures regarding compatibility and interoperability with LibreOffice and Linux

- Development of an open source based telephony solution to replace Telekom-Flexport

So it's a good bit more ambitious than replacing MS Office.

(1) https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministe...

(edited for formatting/typos)

CalRobert
17 replies
6h23m

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.

zelphirkalt
4 replies
5h27m

Do you know, if that company offers remote jobs for developers? And what company is that?

CalRobert
3 replies
4h15m

All in-office I'm afraid.

andsoitis
2 replies
4h11m

>> her office uses Ubuntu and LibreOffice

> remote jobs for developers?

All in-office I'm afraid.

The irony of using LibreOffice.

edu115
1 replies
4h2m

Why? What's ironic about this?

zelphirkalt
0 replies
3h54m

I am guessing GP means:

Libre -> Free -> Freedom to choose -> Freedom to choose your office.

a2800276
2 replies
5h55m

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.

f1refly
1 replies
4h7m

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.

isodev
0 replies
3h37m

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.

ramon156
1 replies
6h10m

This is definitely new for me as a dutch person, would you care to say which company? Seems like a cool company

CalRobert
0 replies
4h17m

Sure, https://svi.nl. They do pretty interesting work!

dubcanada
1 replies
5h43m

If you don't mind me asking, what type of job is it?

CalRobert
0 replies
4h15m

She's not a developer but the company makes software used to process microscopy images - Huygens Deconvolution, I think is the term.

diggan
1 replies
6h13m

Don't know specifically about Europe-wide or Netherlands specific, but it's not unheard of in various European countries.

As an example, the city government of Barcelona started to migrate things away from proprietary systems back in 2017. First applications and later the OS itself. Not sure what the progress of that is though. Old article about it: https://elpais.com/ccaa/2017/12/01/catalunya/1512145439_1325...

Similar moves been done in various agencies and entities in France and Germany as well.

swarnie
0 replies
6h5m

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.

prmoustache
0 replies
5h40m

I think most of the french gendarmerie has been using openoffice then libreoffice + thunderbird for 2 decades already. Initially on windows that have progressively replaced with linux over the years.

I've read 4 years ago that out of 85k desktop computers, only 8% where running windows 10, the rest was running ubuntu LTS.

I would say that being a branch of the french army, migration was easier.

Stranger43
0 replies
6h0m

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.

zoobab
6 replies
7h26m

Microsoft spent so much money to make it fail.

boxed
3 replies
6h58m

How do they do that? I mean, practically?

If the open source solution works, where do Microsoft spend money to make it fail?

marksbrown
0 replies
6h1m

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

hans_castorp
0 replies
6h51m

I am not saying this was the reason, but it is suspicious that the Munich Linux project was dropped, after Microsoft moved their headquarters back into Munich.

And the reasons given were made up. The recommendation written by Accenture claimed that "users weren't satisfied" while a poll from a newspaper showed that most users were indeed satisfied

f_allwein
0 replies
6h54m

If I remember, there was also an issue around people working in the administration not wanting to get used to new software/ not being able to do some tasks.

Rinzler89
0 replies
7h15m

Still. They got a Microsoft office with a lot of well paying jobs. It's something.

Most countries could dream of such leverage over a company like Microsoft.

jonesjohnson
3 replies
6h36m

It's a sad story. My spouse is working for the city in some legal department and she was happily using LiMux for years with no big issues. The main problem was that the IT department was understaffed and underpaid...

One reason for their switch might be that Microsoft thought about opening up a big office here. Another reason might have been the study conducted by Accenture [1], who have some close ties to Microsoft...

I also enjoyed reading the interview of former Munich mayor Christian Ude [2]. Apparently, Steve Ballmer was interrupting his ski vacation in Switzerland to visit Ude and personally try to convince him to ditch LiMux.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170219053640/https://www.ris-m...

[2] https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/

[edit: typo]

mschuster91
2 replies
4h53m

It's a sad story. My spouse is working for the city in some legal department and she was happily using LiMux for years with no big issues. The main problem was that the IT department was understaffed and underpaid...

I worked on LiMux in the developer team at the start of my career. HN is a village, lol. And the situation is more complex, and long enough has passed for me to detail out what actually were the problems without revealing anything top secret...

1. most of the desktop hardware was OLD. Like really fucking old. We're talking of systems with 256M of RAM. Anything would send these into swapping. But instead of blaming the finance department for not upgrading the computers, everyone was more than happy to blame LiMux because many people hoped that enough blaming would bring Windows back eventually (as it did...)

2. A lot of the hundreds of sites that the city of Munich has weren't connected to fast fiber, but via 10/10 SDSL (or slower) links. That's enough for Active Directory to work, and most sites had cache servers on-site to make life bearable, but still: everything was SLOW for a lot of users. From what I hear through the grape vines, that has changed at least for everything inside the Mittlerer Ring demarcation as M-net/SWM built out FTTB across the entire area, but some sites more remote still are on crap links.

3. LibreOffice, or rather OpenOffice was shit back then - I was there right when the fork happened. (And from what I hear, it's not gotten much better... developing an office suite actually requires funding which barely anyone wants to provide)

4. Many of the special applications ("Fachverfahren") were only available for Windows. Some (e.g. SAP) were available as Java apps (with all the problems JVM has, particularly being a memory hog), a few were available as Linux applications but usually in rpm format and not deb which made every update a PITA with alien (LiMux was Ubuntu based), but the utter majority were Windows-only. Some could be made to work with WINE, but some (particularly those interfacing with proprietary hardware such as specially hardened printers) still required a few Windows workstations here and there.

5. We were fucking understaffed. Like 4 FTEs working on packaging and development, but a whole externally sourced test department (that was, to be fair, really needed to catch regressions, and there were a lot of them). But each and every single one of my colleagues were absolute experts and a joy to work with and learn from. Without them, the situation would have been much worse.

6. Political interference. Not just from the city government and its bullshit, but especially from the entrenched "micro fiefdoms" in the administration. No one wanted to cede control to us or the central IT@M organization that was being formed when I was there, instead they all wanted their own decentralized teams (dIKA). Some wanted to opt out of LiMux entirely, and had good reasons for that (chiefly, their applications not running on LiMux).

7. Dieter fucking Reiter, the successor of Christian Ude as mayor after the 2014 elections, as well as the Social Democrat-Conservative government that came into power with him. Ude, for all he turned wrong after he left office, was a staunch protector of LiMux, and we all knew what would come once he left, and so it inevitably happened. And that's just one thing in the long list of reasons to despise Reiter.

f_allwein
1 replies
2h44m

So interesting - Dankeschön for sharing!

1970-01-01
2 replies
5h12m

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.

jraph
1 replies
3h40m

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

1970-01-01
0 replies
2h51m

The simple fact that 30 years got the Linux Desktop to 3% desktop market share should be a very loud signal that this isn't going to work.

Zhyl
0 replies
5h57m

A lot can happen in 20 years.

3rd3
0 replies
6h48m

The "lesson" does not seem so clear according to the article you have linked:

> Schneider claimed that the decision had been political, “not made on the basis of facts”

> “We do not see any compelling technical reasons for a change to Windows and Microsoft Office… We solve compatibility and interoperability problems by providing MS Office, mostly virtualised, at workplaces that need to work together with external offices on office documents.”

One point of critique was the difficulty involved with 3rd party programs on the Linux laptops. But with MS Teams, Zoom etc. running in the browser and/or having actual Linux clients these days, this may be much more feasible today.

The opposition claimed the decision to abandon Linux was a purely political one. The mayor who pushed the return to Microsoft, Dieter Reiter (SPD), was a known Microsoft fanboy, but he (of course) denied personal investment in the reversal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

ChicagoDave
12 replies
6h46m

I’d quit my job if I was forced to a Linux desktop and non office365 tools. The loss of productivity in this change is going to be massively disruptive.

It’s not going to go as smoothly as they think it will. I highly doubt their pilot program sniffed out all the complexities.

prmoustache
8 replies
6h35m

I haven't seen a particular productivity boost anywhere from regular office + sharepoint and office365.

I also haven't noted a productivity difference between sharepoint (which office 365 really is) and other content management platforms.

Ironically the only place where office 365 offered a boost is in the linux world really. You don't even need a local suite office to open msoffice documents.

ChicagoDave
7 replies
6h30m

Most non-technical people have a pattern of work. They know how to do their job because it’s been repeated over years. This change will alter many of those patterns.

Even the simplest things like text editor or using a command line will be disruptive.

The support staff is going to be overwhelmed.

prmoustache
3 replies
5h54m

Why are you talking about using a command line or a text editor? How does it relate to the subject?

ChicagoDave
2 replies
5h43m

Switching from Windows to Linux Desktop?

prmoustache
1 replies
5h33m

No need to tell me you haven't touched a linux distribution in the last 2 decades.

ChicagoDave
0 replies
8m

I’ve run a Debian server for decades.

Stranger43
1 replies
3h59m

and yet thats only ever brought up when defending windows despite the fact that MS is cauing this kind o issues every 3-5 years.

So how is it that people can go from XP->vista->10->11 and not break the bank on retraining or from windows to MacOS but somehow anything else is impossible.

This is not an logically coherent argument against linux it's basically admins being scared of having their decades of investment into wintel ecosystem devalued.

The problem is that because your applications is windows specific your not comparing windows to linux your comparing whatever legacy mess of custom applications that people use to get their job done to whatever your replacing you win32/winforms legacy stuff with(which is something you have to do anyway as that platform is dying).

ChicagoDave
0 replies
4m

Do you know how many Excel apps run in windows shops.

Windows isn’t dying anytime soon.

dezgeg
0 replies
5h0m

Haven't those people who have years of experience also gone through years of forced MS Office GUI changes?

RalfWausE
2 replies
6h28m

If this would be the case: Thank you for creating a job opportunity for more open minded people ;-)

ChicagoDave
1 replies
6h18m

I have nothing against Linux or libreoffice. I just think forcing thousands of workers to drastically alter their work environment is going to be traumatic and I’ll lay odds that in 12 months they switch back or to a hybrid model.

ChicagoDave
0 replies
6h16m

Or what’s just as likely, workers will use personal Windows computers to do their work and shuffle things onto their work computers as needed. People don’t like change.

moolcool
9 replies
6h20m

Open source is great, but LibreOffice is a nightmare to use when you want to any actual work. I feel for the German bureaucrats.

mglz
7 replies
6h18m

What issues for example?

lucumo
2 replies
5h51m

I'm not sure if this still current, but a few years ago I switched from LibreOffice to MS Office because Calc was unbearably slow. I wasn't doing anything crazy, but also not trivial: 6 or 7 sheets, with a bunch of formulas with never more than about 500 cells filled (10 columns, 50 lines), and on most sheets a lot less.

Excel blazes through it. I feel it was a very good decision, even though I'm a miser.

_aavaa_
0 replies
5h31m

Yup. The word and powerpoint replacements are workable, but Calc is excruciatingly slow. I pity the accounting departments.

bzzzt
1 replies
6h10m

Did they fix the unusable slow rendering on retina Macs yet? Couldn't even normally scroll through a blank document last time I tried...

planede
0 replies
5h46m

I suppose they won't use macs anyway.

underlipton
0 replies
3h33m

I once had a bug that wiped a handful of documents. Spent hours writing them, opened them a few months later and they were blank. In some cases, it replaces all of the characters with #s. It's something to do with the autosave feature, I believe.

Avamander
0 replies
4h0m

No fractional scrolling. No tolerable (color) templates for graphs.

pigpang
0 replies
5h9m

I have the opposite issue - if I want to work on a document or sheet, I open it in LibreOffice, because it is intuitive to use for me. I use office rarely, so I have no time to memorize how to use MS Office properly, while LibreOffice can be used out of box.

cladopa
8 replies
7h45m

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".

Isolus
2 replies
7h29m

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.)

non-chalad
0 replies
6h1m

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

elygre
0 replies
6h3m

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.

schleck8
0 replies
6h21m

Opposite end of the country.

rchaud
0 replies
6h38m

So you're saying digital sovereignty provides leverage. That itself is valuable.

lukan
0 replies
7h25m

It was mainly in Munich and more about Linux in general and Bill Gates personally intervened. The next government rolled back to MS.

And no, data sovereignity means more than money, but it might cost more money in the end. There were quite some problems, but those could have been resolved. But not for free.

jraph
0 replies
3h27m

So take all those "digital sovereignty" with a grain of salt

Actually, there's actual money flowing from Germany to open source companies as we speak to build digital sovereign solutions (like openDesk [1]), so it's more than "We want you to lower your fees".

Real concerns have more and more motivated this kind of things in recent years.

[1] https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk/info/-/blob/main/REA...

PeterStuer
0 replies
6h57m

Sovereignty might have gotten a bit of a priority boost post Nordstream.

weinzierl
5 replies
6h38m

As much as I congratulate them for moving away from Microsoft Office as much I feel this is a step in the wrong direction. We need to move our administration away from the paper centric workflows of a world that is long gone for most people.

jillesvangurp
4 replies
6h23m

Exactly. Rubber Stamps belong in a museum. Along with Fax machines. And the people still insisting on using those for "security reasons". Common practice in Germany is to receive an email with a pdf, print it, sign it (or stamp) it, and then put it in the post. This both stupid and slow.

German bureaucracy is still paper driven. Having lived in other countries with more or less full digital access to all the stuff Germans still do with paper forms or in person, I know the difference. It's slow, tedious, expensive, error prone, etc.

Any paper forms should move online. The whole ritual of printing them, filling them in with a pen, and then having people manually copy information back into some ancient database is just completely backwards. People should sign stuff digitally. This is not only possible but common practice in most of the countries bordering Germany.

weinzierl
3 replies
5h14m

Past week I travelled to London by train. I tried to book this trip a couple of months in advance from Deutsche Bahn website, but only got obscure error messages when finalizing the booking(*).

So I tried the french SNCF app and the booking was done in a couple of minutes, all tickets conveniently in the app - expect for the German leg of the travel. SNCF sent me a Deutsche Bahn paper ticket via snail mail.

(*) Tried for about a week, on different computers, my mobile, from another account. Sent a complaint, received an email answer that said they could not help me, but I could send my email to another address - except the other address was the very address I sent my complaint in the first place. Went to Deutsche Bahn office eventually, train I wanted was supposedly booked out, which I know wasn't true because booked it later via SNCF. They reluctantly tried to find me an alternative, but apparently they had to go through all the combinations manually. It took forever and wasn't successful either.

dewey
2 replies
3h55m

Try trainline.com next time, there’s many official DB resellers if you run into issues with their site.

weinzierl
1 replies
1h20m

Thanks, I did not know that. My point was more that German authorities and their privatized successors are so stuck in their paper based processes, that even when you book via a reseller app (line SNCF) they'll have to send paper per mail.

dewey
0 replies
1h16m

That’s indeed a bit weird, I book quite often and haven’t had a paper tickets in 10 years even with frequent cross border (Austria / Germany) travel. Have encountered many other issues with DB of course!

andrewstuart
5 replies
7h20m

This ship sailed 20 years ago.

Who is still fighting this ancient crusade?

Pay the small fee, use the Microsoft software, live life. There’s much better battles to fight than the office software one.

Moldoteck
1 replies
6h58m

the fee will no longer be that small considering microsoft's intention to charge a lot for extended windows support, it's not like the price is constant

yourusername
0 replies
6h49m

Only if you stay on a outdated version. If you're a company/government you have a M365 subscription that includes the latest windows and you're replacing your computers every 5-7 years so Win11 not supporting some computers from 2017 might cost you 1 year of support for a small part of your total fleet.

wasmitnetzen
0 replies
7h5m

The entire IT landscape has changed tremendously in the last 20 years with that cloud-first approach. This is a different fight.

self_awareness
0 replies
6h46m

Much better battles according to who?

dguest
0 replies
6h42m

Remember to thank the OSS developers for the bargaining chip.

nokeya
4 replies
7h3m

China started the process of switching from x86 to own architecture (loong-something if I recall correctly). Where Microsoft is essentially not present. I think they use Microsoft products a lot like any other governments. So we might see a big switch to libreoffice soon

larodi
0 replies
4h11m

Chinese started WPS Office (called Kingsoft before) in 1989. Since end of 90s it is state favored and in 2011 received major grand. My wild guess is that they have much more incentive to use this rather than some broken open source Java thingie which is generally much slower than WPS.

This package is 36 years old and very often overlooked by analysts dunno why. At time of writing there isn’t a single mention of this in the comments… very weird?!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPS_Office

pquki4
0 replies
6h53m

LoongArch, I believe

xyst
2 replies
4h49m

The licensing costs associated with MS products is stupid high. In analyzing the budget for a county, across all departments the line item for MS was ~$322K for just a 3 month span (o365??).

It was the top line item for the quarter, beating out health insurance line related line items.

jhickok
1 replies
4h47m

Seems unlikely that an M365 license that tops our around 50 dollars per month would be more expensive than health insurance.

tiahura
0 replies
3h30m

Tops out at with Teams and AI. I believe office 365 + exchange is $20.

tombert
2 replies
3h58m

I haven't really used a WYSIWYG word processor in almost a decade (I like Pandoc), so these are old memories, but I remember feeling like the interface to OpenOffice (before it was split into LibreOffice) was more intuitive than MS Word 2007 and beyond. I feel like they doubled down on 90's-era MS Word-style interface, which I personally have just found to be extremely intuitive and easy to work with.

That said, the equation editor for LibreOffice and OpenOffice utterly sucks. This bizarre, quasi-TeX, quais-WYSIWYG interface is extremely unintuitive and hard to work with. The equations themselves generally render fine, but back when I used OpenOffice on Windows I purchased a copy of MathType and would OLE equations in. This didn't work on Linux, which is why I stopped using LibreOffice.

kevingadd
1 replies
3h56m

The good news is that most state workers probably don't need advanced features like an equation editor, so hopefully this transition won't be super painful. Seems like it would be rough on academics though.

tombert
0 replies
3h20m

It's the main reason my dad (who isn't an academic but does work on R&D in the aerospace industry) won't touch LibreOffice. He's constantly bothering people to see if he can use one of their Office licenses because he hates the LibreOffice equation editor.

My handwriting is completely illegible, even to myself most of the time, so ever since I was a teenager I would type out all my homework, including math homework, so I've developed pretty strong opinions on math formatting. I've gotten good enough with TeX that I don't really have anything I can't easily do, but my dad has, for reasons kind of unknown to me, has had a strong aversion to learning LaTeX, despite the fact that I have offered dozens of times to teach him, so he just sticks with MS Office.

zelphirkalt
1 replies
5h33m

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?

majoe
0 replies
3h43m

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

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

tietjens
1 replies
6h12m

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

etiennebausson
0 replies
3h53m

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?

kome
0 replies
3h49m

A bit dated graphically, but I wouldn't say low quality... a graphic designer worked on the first three - the last two are the creation of a "webmaster".

selfselfgot
0 replies
7h31m

Honestly I think the decades long tech bubble is winding down, once people move away from Teams, what is the need to pay OS maintainers? It will take a few years but we are heading towards an economy more balanced amongst sectors.

rchaud
0 replies
6h54m

We have no influence on the operating processes of such [proprietary] solutions and the handling of data, including a possible outflow of data to third countries.

All countries should have a strategy to fork open source software and implement it for this reason. They should also share their contributions with the wider Linux community as well, although with the recent xz scandal, pull requests from nation states may be looked at with suspicion.

pshirshov
0 replies
6h31m

What, again?

poulpy123
0 replies
7h2m

I feel like I'm reading this headline every 5 or 10 years

pjmlp
0 replies
7h23m

The irony of this change, is this isn't Munich any longer, many of those services might run on Azure, depend of FOSS projects that are directly or indirectly paid by Microsoft, thus they won't care as much as in the past, see sore state of Windows versus Azure.

outcoldman
0 replies
2h7m

Russia had the same story when about 15 years ago they tried to move their postal service away from Microsoft. They spent a lot of money to teach personal, and I believe it was a disaster at the end. Microsoft just gave them a discount later and they stayed on Microsoft products.

B2B is expensive, but so many companies just don’t understand how much money they will have to spend on education and support. Not sure what is the story with LibreOffice, if they are getting it with support or not.

openrisk
0 replies
5h43m

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 narrative to remain relevant.

Proprietary cloud based solutions are already rolling in this direction but will always face the extra hurdles that sensitive data are accessible by third parties and essential functionality for business continuity relies on external actors.

But, so far at least, neither libreoffice (nor the linux desktop for that matter) seem to be particularly keen on moving to that next phase. Even while cutting edge open source machine learning and even competend LLM models are getting available in record time, the integration story is still non-existent.

The pendulum of client/server balance and thin versus thick clients is always swinging. With mobile and cloud it seems to have reached an extremum. Who knows where it lands next, maybe the "AI PC" that some hardware vendors already pitch will become a thing.

oaiey
0 replies
6h7m

30k multiplied by an M365 license... If they would use these funds to pay some developers for Libre office... That would be awesome.

nottorp
0 replies
7h6m

Again?

nogajun
0 replies
50m

LibreOffice may be useful for German, but not for Asian languages. This is because it was designed without regard to the typographical rules of the Asian-speaking world.

You could say that TDF is "committed to Asian languages". But text is meaningless unless it can be used according to typographic rules, not just to display characters. They do not understand that.

And the problem is that the user interface is stuck in the 2000s. They don't understand that the Ribbon UI has been around for 17 years and generations have changed.

They say, "There's the Tabbed UI," but the Tabbed UI is nothing like the Ribbon UI. They're in denial and they don't want to get out of the 2000s.

maxclark
0 replies
5h40m

And in 2 years they'll move back

ktzar
0 replies
7h25m

Interestingly, it might not be a cost saving decision, but the money needed for the initial setup and ongoing support ending in local companies' and worker's pockets.

isodev
0 replies
6h50m

Nice! I think in general, public services should not have to depend on for-profit organisations for their operations. Especially when such are tax-funded.

instagib
0 replies
3h32m

Libre office excel replacement doesn’t handle vba well and many programs break.

Idk how many macros they are utilizing with vba but would find out quickly switching to libre.

Then there is Microsoft project which has no libre office clone. Those are just two examples and I’m sure there are more nuanced ones.

I get it, Microsoft is slowly getting away from local copies but this is the same news every contract cycle of going to Linux or whatever bullshit they say they will do but IT knows it will turn into a tire fire.

ensocode
0 replies
6h13m

Sure there was this sad Munich thing with Microsoft but still I think this is very positive news!

_ink_
0 replies
6h56m

Great. Now employ a team of 10 or so full time engineers and assign them to contribute to it.

Ygg2
0 replies
6h24m

Why is this constantly happening and nothing comes out of it? I've been reading same headline for past 20 years, I thought even if it was a single town, most of Germany would be running Libre/Open Office by now.

Also OnlyOffice is a much better candidate, it's very usable and OSS as well.

Archelaos
0 replies
6h22m

Some clarification and background.

The headline might be somewhat misleading if you do not read the article. It is not the federal state of Germany that is starting to switch to LibreOffice, but one of the member states of the federation: Schleswig-Holstein.

Shifting to LibreOffice is only one component of the the state's strategy towards a digitally sovereign IT workplace. You can read more about the other elements of this strategy here: https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/... (in German).

What is very interesting is the political background: Schleswig-Holstein is governed by a coalition of the Converservative party (CDU) and the Greens. In past decades it had been the Greens who where among the most driving forces for the adaption of open-source software and open standards in the public sphere, while the Conservativs primarily sided with big business. Now the latter seems to change gradually. Interesting times ...

2d8a875f-39a2-4
0 replies
4h37m

Cue supply chain attack planning starting at APTs around the world.