I have an idea in which federal state Microsoft Germany headquarters will move next…
MS HQ in Kiel? That would be so desperate.
… told them 20 years ago already. Well then, finally …
I wonder if this is related to https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/. This as it shouldn’t be about saving cost. It should be about being sovereign.
I’m not sure it’ll even save them money, at least initially. They’re likely paying consultants to work out the best approach, they need to retrain staff, and they’d probably go with a distro like RedHat that has vendor support (plus have paid support for LibreOffice too)
Not being held hostage by one US company should be a priority by much more countries
I hope they do not try to save that money but rather take the opportunity to invest some of it into the open source ecosystem that are now relying on.
That’s not how governments work
And having a government as a significant backer for an open source project is a great recipe for conflicts of interest and general trust erosion.
who else should be a significant backer for an open source project? google? microsoft?
Things get weird as corporations increasingly have power comparable to nation states.
But, generally, I would rather a megacorporation than a government. Because megacorps are at least “smart enough” to pretend they aren’t trying to take over the world. Whereas governments have a tendency to justify a lot of horrible shit for righteous reasons.
But, in a perfect world? I would rather a wide range of different donors and backers but mostly clustering around maybe fortune 500 companies instead of fortune 10?
Because megacorps are at least “smart enough” to pretend they aren’t trying to take over the world.
there are enough examples for corps doing evil things. You hear about them less often, because they cover their tracks and the outcry is generally smaller than when governments do similar things.
Whereas governments have a tendency to justify a lot of horrible shit for righteous reasons.
corps justify a lot of horribble shit for financial reasons. Is that better?
Corporations can also act on behalf, or on the orders of nation states. So you don’t solve anything, if a state wants to get involved, it will. You have the additional cons that corporations tend to cater to their financial interests anyway, while a public institution might not always have ulterior motives.
Well think again, Germany invests in open source.
The fund will rise with the savings for sure
Why not both?
Let’s say MS charges $5M a year.
Their support contract, assuming they get one, for libre office might be $1M.
They could still invest another $1M in OSS and still save $3M
A $1M net gain for OSS and a $3M savings for the govt.
That’s called a pareto optimum
That’s still not how governments work
It would be nice if it worked like that, but we both know it doesn’t
In reality it’s gonna be something like:
M$ charges 5M €. Libreoffice might be 1M € so they will give 1M € to OSS and waste the remaining 3M € on some overly expensive one-time crap like car infrastructure. Later they will realize that they had understaffed their IT department and will need extra 5M € paid by more state debt.
I recall randomly check open source project and some of them has German public funding.
Hahaha no way. Im Germany we say “Sparen!”
And some lobby bitches say “Schuldenbremse”
To become chancellor you have to swear an oath on the “schwarze Null”.
To become chancellor you have to swear
an oath on the “schwarze Null”.that you forgot what you did during the largest tax-scam in history
the government has given the go-ahead for the first step towards complete digital sovereignty in the state, with further steps to follow.
The term digital sovereignty is very important here. If a public administration uses proprietary, closed software that can’t be studied or modified, it is very difficult to know what happens to users’ data:
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. As a state, we have a great responsibility towards our citizens and companies to ensure that their data is kept safe with us and we must ensure that we are always in control of the IT solutions we use and that we can act independently as a state.
Digital sovereignty seems to be the primary impetus, so this might go far. Saving money is secondary.
digital sovereignty is among the best reasons to switch, good on them!
There were also previous notes about public tax dollars should not feed private corporations, but stay within a public system
Lol. Geez in America this would be radical ideas haha.
Seems nice not to have tax dollars going to private companies at a glance. However, I do not trust the government to get the job done right by themselves either in many cases.
- Wouldn’t be government anyway.
- I’ve worked on both public and private sectors, and they’re both run by people with the same potential for good and bad decisions and performance. I’ve seen great things coming from public organizations and terrible things coming from successful private organizations. Don’t buy into the narrative that government = bad.
Saving money is secondary.
Weird how that’s always the case in a capitalist society.
This makes me want to try LibreOffice again. Is it really close-enough to on-par? I tried OpenOffice and LibreOffice a few times through the years and always found weird hiccups, like filetype issues, files looking different between programs, weird UI choices, etc…
I’ve been using libreoffice for several years, and when I have to cowork with someone, compatibility issues always happen. However, since last year, I’ve been experimenting transitioning to onlyoffice for a few academic works, and it has been so smooth. So far, I opened all documents people sent me without issues, and published some works, and no one involved in the process complained about anything. If you need compatibility with ms office, I suggest using onlyoffice. It’s also foss and can be used at most OSes, even on android.
Edit: I see that other people already suggested onlyoffice. I didn’t mean to sound like those pushy comments that appear on our inbox from people saying the same thing again and again.
No issues as long as you switch the toolbar to use tabs or contextual groups instead of the insane button overload which is still the default for some reason.
Libreoffice is strongest when you’re using ODT format because it’s an open standard. It’s not at all their fault for docx incompatibilities because they change the format CONSTANTLY and of course their only documentation is internal.
Personally I haven’t had those issues though, only slight formatting differences when opening docx files, and half the time it’s because I didn’t have the font installed. You can change to the ribbon style if you really want but personally I prefer the older style, I find it’s easier to find what I want.
No issues here. Have to use (mainly) excel at work, but use libre office calc at home, for years. Hate excel with all my heart. Mainly autocomplete and UI issues, but also issues when using more than one instance with excel. No problems with file exchange, p.e. with my tax person. Imho excel was THE leader but they enshittyfied it to the max.
I use Word at work and OnlyOffice and it works perfectly fine for my needs.
I don’t see any reason to go back to any proprietary software at home 😇
If you need MS office compatibility, don’t use Libreoffice. If you just want to use the software for your own documents, Libreoffice is (imo) better* once you get used to it. If you need Basic Excel macros, Libreoffice won’t work unfortunately.
(*) the thing I hate about excel is that everything works “like magic” which is fine as long as it works. When something doesn’t work, you are screwed because you cannot explicitly tell Excel what to do. It wants to do its own magic instead of obeying your will.
OnlyOffice is good. Better compatibility with MS office and nicer UI than libreoffice.
I don’t like that it feels more like a webpage in a browser than real software.
Let’s hope they put the money they save into the projects
Awesome. Now stick with it!
And remember, different isn’t wrong, it’s different.
MS will erect another campus and things will go back to “normal”. Hopefully this will last at this time…
Good documentary about MS hold over German government: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duaYLW7LQvg
it’d be funny if municipalities all over the eu started switching to Linux because they want a Microsoft campus
That’s only half the story if you look into it. I think they also had issues with the transition.
I think they also had issues with the transition.
They were blown out of proportion. Every single problem was magnified as if Windows had none at all. IIRC the sysadmins actually said they had less support tickets to deal with than before.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
i could swear they did this before… like 10+ years ago when ODF was being pushed hardcore, but then i read they switched back to microsoft for some reason.
This is another state, last one was Munich
Haaa! It feels good to hear. I hope that theyll support free software financially.
If they put as much money into these foss projects as they where giving microsoft before, maybe Libreoffice will become halfway decent.
I use Libreoffice and it’s fine for a non-power user, but it sure has some rough edges
It has some rough edges to be sure. I’ve found myself fighting with it quite a bit. But it’s usable.
I’m just glad there is more incentive for [organization] to help patch the issues.
While I’m all for OSS, I’m also objective enough to know where it’s not a good idea. And I think this is one of them. They have commercial one available in their own country called softmaker, which comes with support which is really important for a business or organization. I’ve been using it for many years because the OSS where just not right for me. Also liked WPS more but Linux dev was slow, but now I found my match
LibreOffice does “develop and maintain a certification system for professionals of various kinds who deliver and sell services around LibreOffice.”
A good number of European cities and countries have tried Linux and open source software in the past. They use it for a few years and then they have almost always have quietly gone back to MS Windows and Office products.
As much as I enjoy using Linux, (and no, I don’t use Arch), and open source for my own needs, I would be willing to bet after a few years, this German state will quietly move back to Micosoft products again.
The intense pressure from Microsoft doesn’t have anything to do with it I’m sure.
It’s cheaper to find support
*at first
Its only cheap because its normalized in that domain. As more work is done to iron out bugs and get people in the office space the feature they need on Linux the more experience IT folks will get support.
Its an investment as always. There is no such thing as a free lunch
Society favours the short term and it will be a long time before Linux sys admins are cheaper than Windows sys admins
Or even asking random kid put of high school how to do x
Who else to start the trend than the government that was created for the public good in the first place.
Microsoft certainly tries it’s best to keep you locked into their ecosystem by making it inconvenient but not impossible to leave though that’s not the real reason, it’s security. Businesses and especially governments are scared of nation state hackers contributing malicious code to open source products and falsely assume it’s safer to use closed source software because those incidents aren’t public. There’s so much great software out there I’d love to use and the first question I’m asked when I bring it up is can you prove China hasn’t contributed code?
As the result of a change in the city’s government, to leave LiMux and at the time, critics of the decision blamed the mayor and deputy mayor and cast a suspicious eye on the US software giant’s decision to move its headquarters to Munich.
Just a coincidence.
The last time I tried it, which is now a few years ago, LibreOffice Calc was substantially slower than Excell for larger spreadsheets. Like a difference between night and day, it was no acceptable substitute if productivity was a concern, which it usually is.
Imo a big swoop change like this, which is done for ideological reasons, but without practical considerations, is doomed to fail and leave a lasting bad impression in peoples’ minds. Imo it would have been far better to only drop windows 10/11 for a familiar looking Linux distro, while continuing to use Microsoft Office.
If an Excel sheet is that big, it should be replaced with a proper database, which most likely would run on Linux. I think you’re right, though, about the lack of planning around the practicalities.
Using the right tool in an office setting isn’t something that’s typically done. Unless that tool is a spreadsheet of course. A spreadsheet is always the right tool.
In structural engineering (bridge design etc), we use quite complicated spreadsheets for calculations; a database wouldn’t be the right tool for that job. We use excel because everyone knows how to use it and it’s easy to print to PDF and see the inputs and outputs and any graphical summaries you have added. Using a spreadsheet makes it easy to check and easy to adapt/change when you want to do a slightly different calculation next time.
I’ve tried building spreadsheets of similar complexity in libreoffice and it’s true they are very slow in comparison and more prone to crashing.
Libreoffice works well for some tasks and I enjoy using it at home but honestly if I tried to use it at work it would cut my productivity significantly. I’m probably using it more intensively than most people though.
I agree that spreadsheet use in engineering is one of the most complicated use cases, but I submit for your consideration another very complicated use case: laboratory software ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_information_management_system ) LIMS do what Excel can but with the added benefits of being more controlled, secure, user friendly and faster because they’re built upon the back of a modern database. In my experience with engineer built worksheets, the engineer that built them is typically the only one who knows how to use them. This is job security for that engineer, but isn’t scaleable for others’ use. In the lab software, a scientist builds the methods, and lab technicians use those methods over and over again daily. Each step of each use of the method is recorded with the inputs, the results, who performed it and exactly when. The workflows are built-in and the calculations are comparable to those used in engineering.
Interesting, I think it’s different for structural engineering because you’re doing calculations in accordance with a code of practice and the spreadsheet needs to be adapted to tweak the inputs and outputs of a standard formula and apply it slightly differently for different bridges / structural arrangements. I’ve written loads of spreadsheets that have been used and adapted by other people in my company, I honestly don’t think they are that difficult to understand (or people wouldn’t have been able to build on them and adapt them).
I can see that lab software is quite different, especially if you have very well defined procedures and you are repeating exactly the same test again and again with the same inputs and outputs.
What is the best sheet to Db Tool out there? Surely this is a normalized path by now, right?
you can probably just use python (pandas or something) or an equivalent in other languages
There often aren’t spare funds to develop something proper.
Software freedom is about being in control of your computing. We can’t verify what proprietary software from a foreign company is doing on a government computer.
Public money public code is about citizens getting back the code we paid for. When a proprietary company improves software to get paid then they keep that advantage to themselves. LibreOffice is a collaborative project, everyone gains from it being improved by our money.
These aught to be valid concerns as much as productivity: to the degree it affects people. It cannot be dissmssed as being idelogical.
Those are ideological reasons though and me calling them idealogical does not mean that I dismiss them as valid reasons. Idealogy in itself is not a bad thing and it should certainly have a part in decision making.
Where we differ in opinion is in which should take priority: I’m of the opinion that practicality should trump ideology (in this case), while you find the idealogical reasons more important.
I think we should aim for what is ideal and then take into consideration the constraints of what we can do. If it’s not plausible enough to go for what is ideal then aim to make that more likely while doing whatever is the next best thing. We risk being stuck on a peak of possible good if we refuse to go down to eventually go up higher.
I only use LibreOffice but don’t need it much. I can’t comment on how practical it is, or isn’t, for use in a government. If there’s another free software option then we aught to consider that. Else spend money to maje in good enough in the most important use cases.
Are you working on ods formats? Anyways… We need more people using LO so we’ll have more developers and rhen comes a point in which LO surpasses everything else. Meanwhile, if we stick to proprietary software,we would be stuck in a vicious loop. We need to break trough and sometimes inthat transition there are some concessions to make. If we manage to make it aa a big collective of people,the transition process will be shorter.
I’m not using it anymore, I just tested it to see if I could propose it as a substitute. In my testing I tried both open and ms formats: I started with old excel files which didn’t work well, so then I tried open format files that were build up from a clean slate state, with the data imported from CSV files. After that didn’t perform satisfactory either, I turned to the internet. After searching for the major issue that I encountered (slow in a large sheet), I came to the conclusion that calc could not be a full substitute for excell, so I never proposed it and we’re still using ms office to this day.
I’m just going to copypaste some other people’s thoughts with which I agree, saving me a bit of time:
*"If you work at a large company for a while you’ll encounter a class of user that Calc doesn’t really address. They’re like super-specialists. They often have a deep knowledge of Excel, but are otherwise completely computer illiterate. They also work with large datasets and specific models. Calc isn’t a replacement for them. Not just on a feature level, but on an accessibility level.
Look for Excel resources. Classes, books, articles, howtos, everywhere. Do the same for Calc and you’ll struggle a lot more. There is stuff there, but it just isn’t nearly as professional and rich. There is no great way to transition Excel users to Calc users and have them still be as productive.
In the Linux world, when we get those style of work-loads we generally put aside Calc / Excel as a tool and begin looking at programming languages (e.g., Python, Matlab). I feel like this somewhat handicaps our ability to reach those users.
for basic use though, it’s perfectly acceptable. I just wouldn’t consider it a poweruser tool, and those power users are what make Office a multibillion dollar product for MS."*
*"Sadly, it’s just not there in book.
The only time I try to use LOCALC is when I have a few hundreds/thousands of rows of formatted values to sort into a simple graph and performance is just abysmal.
I just tried again earlier this day and though most daily features are there for your regular user, all my “casual” uses of it ended up underlining the severe performance problems.
Maybe my uses are far more corner case than I believe…"*
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9yjwyf/is_libreoffice_calc_truly_a_worthy_replacement/
Wow. i dont know. Ive never used calc nor excel for things that big. For that Ive used python or php/mysql. I use spreadsheets a lot, even complex ones, and calc always work for me. Anyways, you are right in regarda to the lack of support/books. Of course. Same happens with a lot of things. They are not mainstream (yet) because they are projects that havent had the money or power corporations like microsoft has had for lobbies and marketing. So we can struggle a little on the transition (some very brave pioneers have already paved the way for us, so its not that hard anymore) and hope we are contributing to a libre/free future in which digital technology helps build a better and fairer society for all. And then, they’ll become mainstream and we’ll have more books, support and communities than we ever dreamed of before.
Lol, has sheets the size where performance matters and talks about productivity. And then chalks LO up to failure because of this. Maybe converting your .xlsx to .odf would save more money then, LO is faster there.
I think reducing their reasons to ideological is not fair. They stand to save a lot of money, reduce the risk of leaking data (to MS or hackers), and will have the ability to fork/add their own features.
While I am not familiar enough with Calc or Excel to comment on the speed, I imagine having an entire government using it could get the ball rolling on optimizations.
They stand to save a lot of money
Do they? They’ll now have to start training people to use Linux.
These people aren’t going to be enthusiasts like us. They need to be shown where everything is.
The money that will be saved is peanuts compared to the cost of the workers. Loss of productivity through the implementation of bad tools can be very costly. The various Microsoft Office programs also offer the possibility to add bespoke features. Microsoft Office does not leak data unless you chose to let it do so, at least in the eu.
Optimizations that might happen once a program with unacceptable performance is in a production environment, are generally optimizations that never happen. I’ve never seen a program make such a turnaround, it’s wishful thinking without a basis in reality.
This thing really is set up for failure. I’m not against organisations moving away from products from large monopolistic companies, rather the opposite, I’m very much in favor. But if the move is done in such a way that it’s bound to fail and then cement itself into people’s mind as a bad thing, then it has accomplished the opposite of what it has set out to do. Right now Linux is ready for widespread adoption in environments where productivity matters, but in my experience libre office is not.
the possibility of bespoke features Such a shame you can’t do this with open source software.
Every time I see someone say ‘I’m actually really a fan of open source’ it reads like ‘I’m not racist but’.
Wow, Schleswig-Holstein meaning well and starting beef by doing it. I’m sure there’s no precedent for that.
It’s a question of both expenses and dependency on a monopolist.
There simply won’t ever be an opportunity to move from MS solutions to FOSS solutions which won’t have these problems.
Being dependent is possibly more expensive in the long term too.
If you throw even half the money that would go to ms license for the foss community instead you can get some pretty huge improvements for that foss program. Blender for example, got actually nice looking and seriously good program while being foss because they got decent funding
Well, people blamed old (archaic, what it had when it was an Amiga program) UI for being hard to use, but the new one is even harder, so dunno.
I touched Blender with the old UI somewhere in late 00s on Windows, managed to sculpt and render a few clumsy objects. I don’t remember how long it took, but it feels as if the new one took twice that for the same.
EDIT: On the actual subject - yes, that too. I sometimes think that (moderate) positive inflation is not always better than deflation. It encourages a narrow way of thinking where we always stop at first local optimum. Say, MSO is cheaper right now than LO - then we choose MSO, period. Nobody thinks about finding a bigger optimum, because constant inflation psychologically encourages you to think that way. That’s just clumsy philosophy.
Well, guy who actually lives there (Schleswig-Holstein) here. Be precise in what’s written in tfa. What it laments about is that one (single) work place is about to be installed and that subsequent steps are about to follow.
I don’t want to sound too pessimistic here. The fact, that this topic is on the high level agenda shows that it has strong supporters - for the moment.
But weighing in past decades’ province goverment’s spendings in large scale software projects and peoples’ fear of everything even marginally IT, I’m very reluctant to see the big move here. Opposition against changes to my windows is simply unfathomable strong.
Nevertheless - and I mean that - it’s a good development.
Do they seem like they are paying for a integrator like SUSE (they are THE German commercial FOSS/Linux company in my head) or is it more enthusiasts trying to push changes and providing support?
I guess it will be even worse. Instead of taking good money for hiring good people (I know this strategy is over simplified, as there are mandatory regulations for gv not being allowed to compete with the private sector. But if there would be the political will to find a way, there would be a way), gv will take even more money and found a consortium of ‘experts’ who will spend most of the funding to invent an exceptionally complex new wheel that none has ever seen before and take years in development… And the next gv will roll back. And that’s that. Thinking about it I notice how desillusionated I became over the years…
Hopefully I will be wrong. This time. At least once.
