City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software | Hacker News Reader

City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software

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142 pointsanw67 comments

I'm Catalan. Catalonia has always been big on open source, and if anything I'm surprised this took so long to happen. The mindshare in universities and such is particularly high, and this isn't limited to computer science (my background). Even my high school did at the very least run a Linux server (running at least samba and squid) and had a few Linux workstations. This was 20 years ago. Back when I lived there, I worked in many companies, all of which had near 100% of workstations running Linux, something I now realize is not the case elsewhere.

A strong argument nobody's mentioned in the thread yet is that free software support for our language (Catalan) is very good, whereas Windows/OSX support for it is terrible when it exists at all. There's the fact that we do still remember a previous effort where Microsoft released some version of windows in Catalan, I'm not sure if it was 98 or XP era, which was very broken; Microsoft never handled the issues back then, or released any more versions in Catalan, and it left a very bad taste in our mouths.

We do care massively about our language, so it'll be very hard to sway anybody in here unless this fact radically changes.

People in universities (both staff and students) are always left-leaning; the mindshare of Linux in universities has always been big everywhere, it's not really a Catalan thing. Because of that, I'm not surprised they are enthusiastic about the Catalan language either, but that's not the case anywhere else, where people usually run their software and enjoy their entertainment in Spanish without making a big deal about the language.

I also believe Windows 10 has a good Catalan translation although I have never used it.

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

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

Well, at least I, and presumably Eric Raymond, beg to differ.

It does however not match mine (and I'm Catalan). We've got university professors of all walks of life with all sorts of views. However, it is true that I've yet to meet one that wasn't favorable to open source.

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

Well, I'm Estonian living in Barcelona. A lot of things never bother to add Estonian support because we're such a tiny nation (like iOS, for example) which means our English is rather good. Good English is not something I've encountered much in Catalonia, so while yes I agree that having your country's technology work in your language is a must, it's also in my opinion a double-edged sword making more and more local people not speak English.

I understand what you're saying but keep in mind that when Catalan is not available, the language that tends to be used isn't English, but Spanish.

Knowledge of Spanish in Catalonia is not by any metric bad.

And spanish is one of the top used languages in the world.

A quick Google suggest it has a) more native speakers than English, b) more total speakers than English, with only Chinese ahead of it.

That must dampen enthusiasm for learning other languages.

Yes, fallback is Spanish indeed. But I'm a young guy, I got to clubs a lot and most people I meet there are between 20 and 30 and having very hard time speaking in English. Which makes me amazed, especially in Barcelona, which is a very international city. The same problem is in France. It might be due the fact that most of the media never displays any English. Movies are over-voiced in Spanish and so forth. I have no sources to back this claim, it's just my theory.

yes, almost all the movies and TV shows are dubbed in Spanish, it makes English proficiency in Spain very bad

Yeah, it's interesting how just having subtitled media can help. When traveling, I came across an older guy in Viljandi who had learned his basic English from watching Melrose Place reruns.

For political and historical reasons that don't need to be discussed all over again, many people are bilingual but make a point of writing, speaking and demanding Catalan. They might be resigned to Spanish-speaking tourists, but much less tolerant in more official contexts (like software localization choices).

Why is that a problem though? Should people in an arbitrary country need to learn English?

Also, could you provide a source for the fact that English literacy rates are actually decreasing? I find that difficult to believe.

I don't see where he said it's decreasing.

And as I understand it, it's improving. Catalonia's fortunate in that most people are bilingual to begin with, which is known to ease the introduction of other languages considerably.

That's not a problem if you never want to communicate with people from countries where they don't speak Spanish nor learn Spanish in schools. It is a problem however if it's an international city like Barcelona and most people I've met between 20 and 30 have very hard time understanding or speaking English.

I didn't say the English literacy rates are decreasing, I'm simply stating that they speak a whole more English in the north than in the south as far as young people go and it generally surprises me how bad English among young people here is. Is it because while they do learn English in schools, they don't practice it enough? Certainly can't be the case in Barcelona, right?

Why the locals not speaking English is a bad thing?

Also Catalan, and confirming my professional experience in Catalonia was mostly open source, with the exception of a few multinational corporations that preferred Windows and of graphic designers (mac).

I just wanted to point out that you can use Windows 10 in Catalan. The language pack may be installed directly from the language preferences dialog. Support for Office also exists.

In another note, more frustrating for me is how many websites don't respect my browser's language preferences. I prefer Catalan, and English otherwise --BTW if you feel like criticizing this option, which I am completely entitled to, take into account that I live abroad and my kids don't understand Spanish, or the case of people in Northern Catalonia who certainly shouldn't be expected to understand Spanish--, but I keep getting Spanish instead of English when Catalan is not available. We also keep getting ads in Spanish that completely miss the target audience.

Google also really thinks that I will be really interested in contents from the Spanish Wikipedia by preferring it over the equivalent Catalan or English articles, even when it doesn't literally match my search query.

Oh, and my "OK Google" search in Android has the funnies behavior. Let's take a simple question about the weather as an example.

- With Catalan as the search language -> ask in Catalan -> no information about the weather - With Catalan as the search language -> ask in English -> information about the weather in Spanish. Some of the search UI is in Catalan and some in Spanish, including the actual weather information. Voice response is in Spanish.

So I have to use English, which is fine, but just shows how in terms of l18n we still have a long way to go.

I kind of amazed that Microsoft are still successfully charging SO MUCH for their absolutely run-of-the-mill OS and Office products.

Office, in particular, brings in something like $25bn/year revenue with presumably very healthy margins. For a product that has hardly changed in 20 years. It's a good product, sure. But a clean-room reimplementation of the bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more than $1bn.

The power of monopoly capitalism.

Problem is that you wont complete any RFPs without that "junk" that "nobody" uses, even if its just 1 percent that uses those functions of the users, those 1 percent is spread out on all the big companies that pay a big part of those $25B.

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

For sure. I've seen complete trading systems written in Excel macros.

MS have played their hand very astutely and have managed to capture a large fraction of the enormous gap between cost-to-producer and value-to-user. Keeping things that way is worth $100bn market cap to them, and challenging them is worth relative peanuts to anyone else. Of course they're going to win every time.

Our best hope is that someone like Google pours money into a fully-compatible fully-featured desktop replacement out of sheer spite.

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

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

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

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

"But a clean-room reimplementation of the bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more than $1bn."

Well, let's do some back of the envelope calculations. Let's say you can tap an incredibly cheap source of programmers, so that you can employ large numbers of them for 100k / year - this includes buildings, equipment, but also support staff and managers and what not. That would give you 10k man years of work. Star Office/Open Office/LibreOffice has existed for what, 20 years? So that's say 500 programmers. I'm not sure what the head counts on the various teams working on that have been, probably less than 500, but not an order of magnitude less. So considering that OO hasn't been able to replicate anywhere near the functionality of Office (I'm talking not just basic document processor here, but things like the VBA environment, and Outlook, and Access, and all the programmable components, etc.), I don't think you can say that 1bn is all that much.

Of course you could say oh but we don't need all the legacy stuff Star Office once did, and we'd just be a 100 coders with no managers working from our bedrooms eating pizzas, and we'd only build the 20% of things people would actually use, and we have much better tooling now so it'll be faster, etc. You'd still have to convince people to switch, in order to save what - $100 / year? 150? That's what, 1/2 day of work, if that, per user for a company? Sure a saving is a saving, but I don't see how you can claim that Office or Windows are 'expensive', in the overall scheme of things.

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

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

It's nice to see the FSFE being active, and making an actual difference. Our donations are not in vain.

Hopefully it would work out better than in Munich.

I'm sure it's quite a lot more feasible now than it was when Munich embarked on their adventure.

And one would also hope they have used Munich as a good case study.

Context [0], for anyone interested.

[0]: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source-e...

Thanks for the link.

"Those supporting the move to Microsoft Office say staff using LibreOffice find it difficult to swap documents with external organizations, due to incompatibilities with Microsoft Office"

This happens all around the industry. Once you are locked in there is no easy way to change. This renders the capitalist concept of competition obsolete. Everything becomes a monopoly. Intel, Nvidia, Facebook, Microsoft, Google... they amount of 90% of the market on their products.

What was 20 years ago a dynamic fast changing industry, that feared anti-monopoly actions from the goverment, has become a short list of big companies with tight ties with politicians.

Such lack of diversity opens the risk that a vulnerability is going to send all our IT into chaos, as Intel issues have showed up. It also hampers innovation and contributes to a world with less opportunities for new entrepreneurs, that are more focused in created something to sell to a big company than a long term viable business.

So Munich decision is part of the problem, but just an small one. I hope that it works better for Barcelona.

I thought Munnich's decision was also in part because MSFT would consider Munnich as a location for an office based on their decision on using their product to do their work.

The old "we have to serve the corps (and their owners) or they leave" argument.

Microsoft decided to move their HQ to Munich years before this.

In fact the year the construction of MS HQ started Munich voted to start planning the move to LiMux.

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

Do you have data for your claim?

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

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

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13625508

mschuster91's first-hand experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627452

Also, I read the underlying consultancy report, which did not appear to support the specific approach that was chosen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13643182

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

It's hard to come up with technical reasons for picking one OS over another for general business use. All of the operating systems are good enough. They have been for a long time.

What drives OS choice is (and always has been) application support and cost. Despite Linux being free, it can be expensive to support or even an impossible choice if you need, for example, Microsoft Office or Final Cut.

More often than not, Linux wins on ideological grounds. There's nothing wrong with that, but you do need buy-in from your users.

You need to start in education - MS has had that locked down for decades. It'll be really interesting to see whether ChromeOS will have any impact in the future when an entire generation has been using it daily for schoolwork.

That's only true in the US. Practically nobody in the EU has heard of / uses ChromeOS. Or maybe I'm just out of touch.

nah, same here (IT person). it's that 'another' option when you actually are deciding between different 2, if deciding at all.

and google's privacy approach has soured their portfolio for me a bit (albeit some of them are exceptionally well done and useful)

I don't think that a switch from mostly MS to mostly chromeos would be a good thing. Chromeos forces everyone into google products far more than windows forces everyone into ms products.

I think education as an influencer is overrated.

At my kids' school, they really don't care what hardware you use, as long as Google Docs works on it. If you don't have your own computer, the school will rent you a ThinkPad for $70 per year (including the summer) but they are really awful machines. A lot of people buy their own hardware.

That's precisely my point though (I could have made a better job of explaining I wasn't just talking about hardware/OS) - "as long as Google Docs works on it". Those kids will go into the world of work with knowledge of GDocs innately.

That position has been Office for the best part of 20 years, it's baked into syllabuses, exams, training materials. If that changes, it potentially has huge impact going forwards.

Munich effectively had a parallel program for anyone that had to work with any external entities, and many used it also internally.

Munich never switched off Windows and MSFT Office at best it just abstracted or added additional layers of complexity.

The moment you need to digitally sign some stupid PDF with some “proprietary” signature scheme or open some excel spread sheet it’s pretty much back to Windows.

So much for a sovereign govt. I'd say that a gov't should be able to dictate what format is used, especially when replacing a patent-encumbered private format with an open one.

But heay, who still believes that gov'ts are on top of corps is living a fantasy I guess.

Ironically many of the tools that the German government and public sector created didn’t work.

So when you have some docusign like scheme that doesn’t run on Linux or on non Adobe PDF clients well....

you mean like masterpdfeditor? :)

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

and for signature schemes there is for example masterpdfeditor.

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

If they had chosen something more mainstream like say Ubuntu or Debian, I don't think there would've been as many complaints. You can't have each city develop or maintain its own custom version of a Linux distro, I think that should have been obvious from the start.

If anything, there should be an EU-version of Linux that's stripped of all American backdoors and constantly audited, because I think this is also a national security issue, not just an issue of vendor lock-in and long-term costs for taxpayers. But certainly it wouldn't make sense to have anything less than that, even a country-specific Linux distro doesn't make sense.

I do think ultimately it was Microsoft's politics that convinced the city to move away from LiMux, but I think the problems were also real, which pushed them over to Microsoft more easily. If it had been an EU-backed Linux distro, I don't think they would've switched nearly as easily.

Be prepared to a subtle PR war from proprietary solutions vendors, not blatantly directed at software (eg. not like giving 10000 free copies of Windows + Office + this and that) but indirectly helping the city to gain public acceptance, say funding schools, hospitals, public infrastructures etc. then offering at the same time the option to local politicians to get their face associated with the events. What politician would refuse the opportunity to address a speech during the inauguration of say a new library/hospital/mall/police station/parking lot etc. built with money that did not came from taxing people? That would make a hell of an argument during election time, so you can consider him technically sold to whoever the money comes from, even though he didn't get a single dime in the process, which of course will mean that once he is in power he will use whatever software solution the founder is "suggesting" to keep his seat.

Came here to say this. It is hard to fight the lobby power of big corps.

Though Spain has the case of Extremadura. I could not find a better article, I remember reading some that outlined then massive success that was achieved in Extremadura (one of the poorer regions of Spain).

https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2265108/spains-ext...

It actually gives strength to what Munich did. They proved that it was possible to swap. So Barcelona doesn't have such a political tricky situation as there is a pre-existing example.

Let's hope that more follow Barcelona.

Barcelona is possibly taking an easier approach. That is, replace the easier things like Office and IE.

I've done similar things. So where as my software has to use IIS and Windows servers, I use Firefox, Thunderbird and Libre Office for everything with the odd exception. It means for me having a dual boot machine is fairly easy as all software usage is the same.

You occasionally do have compatibility issues with Office but it doesn't have to. The more using it the better.

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

They switched over for 7 years, they got the initial political support required to switch over, they created their own distribution.

So I regard that as having shown that it is possible to switch.

This is purely showing that getting over the first hurdle is possible. They then showed what to what lengths MS will go to lobby against it, so Barcelona can be better prepared for the next hurdle.

These are all fairly massive achievements.

not the users. the mayor and city council.

There's the Munich experience and the Extremadura experience, so there's mistakes Barcelona can avoid.

I hear they're using a popular distribution (Ubuntu) rather than trying to make and maintain a forked one. This is a very clever choice that will save a tremendous amount of pain.

I once believed in open formats and the practicality of switching between closed and open source, but years of experience has convinced me that no two complex applications will ever really be interoperable for the long tail of complex documents that use a larger than average number of the applications' features. I waste too many hours trying to fix MS Word tables and embedded grapics so that they will render correctly in LibreOffice, too many nightmare experiences jumping between video editors, and vector graphics apps, etc. Programs like MS Office are so complex that only a Singularity-level AI will ever fix them.

Or legislation. Such as, say, requiring the use of OASIS standards within the administration, and for communication with the administration.

"But we don't use libreoffice" is not a valid excuse when libreoffice is free software and available in Catalan for all the major OS platforms.

Which is great but as soon this government is replaced by a new one, this policy will be replaced by the old one.

So what will be the cost of deploying Linux, retraining on Linux, and then going back to Windows?

These people can afford to make stupid decisions because it's not their own money they are wasting.

The only reason this is happening is crony capitalism: they want to do a favour to the local open source businesses (there are a few of them) which are friendly to the local government. They will get lots of support contracts. It's blatant corruption.

Actually a sizeable percentage of the public do support it because it has much better support for their native tongue.

This is gonna end in a disaster. Linux usability is bad to begin with, managing Linux desktops at scale is even worse and interoperability is meh.

FUD

Indeed !

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