German state moving 30k PCs to LibreOffice
blog.documentfoundation.org
blog.documentfoundation.org
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.
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.
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).
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?
Companies are better off investing in short-term gains and leave the governments taking care of the environment and digital accountability of its citizens.
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.
Otherwise we can simply go back to paper.
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.
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.
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.
We actually agree on this point.
Using OpenStack is actually not a silver bullet and won't solve this problem. This is an organisational problem.
So my point still stands that OpenStack is lacking in services and is not fit for complex applications if you do not want to reinvent the wheel every day.
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.
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.)
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).
One thing that's more "magical" in AWS is S3. Their architecture is impressive, see e.g. https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2021/04/s3-strong-consi...
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.
I mostly thought about the software infrastructure side. With thousands and even mere hundreds of servers over several locations you already want some uniformity. Would you run k8s? Nomad + Consul? MinIO or Ceph? MySQL + Galera? Would OwnCloud scale to many hundreds of users? How would you unify or integrate access control to all that?
Nothing unsurmountable here, just interesting how it's done in real big on-prem installations.
What I would run depends on the particular customer I would have. I probably wouldn't try to unify or integrate access control much. You are not trying to build another public cloud, you want to develop and deploy applications with reasonable robustness in comparison to the cost and benefit of the solution.
Real on-premise installations usually are a mix of open and proprietary technologies. Many companies probably have a few Windows Server file servers on top of VMware vSAN or some kind of EMC2/ NetApp/ HPE 3PAR or whatever storage with HA capability. There is no S3 compatible storage and all the data is stored on the network drive and referenced in some MSSQL database or stored directly in it. If MSSQL or Oracle is used, they probably run on local storage and have are part of a cluster that are marked such that they are never on the same physical node. You can do similar things with Proxmox, GNU/ Linux and PostgreSQL too with a little more effort. You can run MinIO or Garage for S3 if you want to be cool or buy a supported Ceph installation from e.g. SUSE. Everything will be more rudimentary and half automatic but still a few people will be able to manage that even on a rather large scale without many issues. Of course, if you have bigger needs, there are companies you can by computers from by the rack. Some will offer you a complete cloud management stack with it. It can be Oxide Computers (their own stack), or Cloud&Heat in Germany for instance (that is built on OpenStack). There are so many options.
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.
Better to just switch where you can and invest resources into improving FOSS offerings to handle the use cases it currently can’t.
If you want to give the users a nice programming environment you can't also prevent them from doing arbitrary computations.
You can run Excel in a VM if you want.
That, but also lack of feature parity. Unfortunately Libre Office is just not very good
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.
Source? Is that phrase really a Microsoft invention?
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...).
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.
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.
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.
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?
None of the shit you mentioned is a counterexample to that.
HTH!
But PDF is not really optimized for editing or collaboration, and the tools available on Linux especially are limited.
I’d like a format that is like PDF, but markup only.
What kind of internet/IT department do you have where you have any sort of regular office outage?
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.
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?
I think that depends on which part of "Office 365" you mean: The name itself is, as I understand it, a moniker for pretty much all Office products nowadays, both the "MS Office in the browser" and the "traditional MS Office applications". More of an all-encompassing marketing label than any specific product. So the free-standing MS Word / Excel / Outlook etc I use at work are "Office 365" just as the webpage equivalents I could use in stead (but don't, because they're still pretty massively inferior to the standalone apps).
N.B: "As I understand it"; I could be wrong as Hell.
At least, that's how it used to function way back when I used it and had a not-always-online connection.
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.
Offline use cases don’t use O365.
Yeah, so? Why shouldn't one be?
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.
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.
Sharing multiple copies of the "same" file is where the problems come in.
[2] If you look in Teams, some people have automatic permissions because they are in the Team or already have access to the Teams folder. If they are not in the Team, then you have to give "direct access".
[3] For the paranoid, you first go into OneDrive and "manage access". Then you are faced with two choices whose UX is confusing to say the least. One option is to "Copy Link" which has almost the same identical choices as "Share with Specific People". Note that "Share with Specific People" gives you options like "Anyone/doesn't require sign in" and the dialog has a button called "Copy Link". Huh? I thought I was sharing with specific people. I am still unsure who exactly can see the document. Or if the document was shared externally outside of my company.
SHAREPOINT https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-sharepoint-...
ONEDRIVE https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-onedrive-fi...
> All files that you upload, create, or share in Teams can be found in the ONEDRIVE??? icon app on the left side of Teams for desktop.
> Files that you upload to a channel are stored in your team's SHAREPOINT???folder. These files are available in the Files tab at the top of each channel.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/file-storage-in-m...
I only discovered it by chance while roaming my onedrive directory.
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...
(MS had tried to pressure against the move from the start, but wasn't really successful in the first years)
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.
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.
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?
Firstly, the number of options argument. Choosing between lots of options, over choosing the best option, isn't some intrinsic good. I don't support say football over Formula 1 because there are more teams. I choose one over the other based on which sport I prefer to watch.
Going the Linux route "because there are more distributions to choose from" is a dumb argument if Windows is the best OS for your organisation. [1].
Equally, you may decide that you'd prefer to foster competition. You might decide that it's worth subsidising competition just to have competition. You acknowledge you're making an inferior choice, but the are unaccounted upsides to others having that choice.
But govt adoption of Linux (especially creating your own distribution) does little to nurture competition. Munich didn't spend its budget improving Linux. They spent the budget implementing it.
There are reasons Windows and Office dominate the desktop, especially in large scale environments. You may not like MS, but that doesn't negate those reasons. If you make a choice to forge a different road because you don't like MS then you'd better be very clear on what those reasons are, and what challenges and costs you are likely to face. Because if you aren't, then earn those challenges and costs come up it's hard to wave them away.
I'm not saying all this to rag on Linux or OSS, or to say its impossible to run Linux etc. As per the GP, there are companies that have made a choice, that hire people with the right skills, that make it work.
But thinking that rolling out Linux at enterprise level is easy, or cheaper, or has better desktop options, or runs more bespoke software, or is easier to get good desktop software for , or is easier (cheaper) to buy hardware for, is wrong. And that wrongness will lead to project failure. And those failures don't help Linux, arguably they hurt it.
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.
Fuck, it seems (from Google Maps) to be about half as far from the center of Munich as the Munich Airport. If schitt that far out is called "Munich", then so is Unterschleissheim.
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.
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…
"Modern Web Apps", based on "The Modern Data Stack", and so on...?
Give the spreadsheets (and access to two or three of the people who made and use them!) to one or two guy[s] with Delphi, and you'll have an old-fashioned client-server app -- which isn't a bad thing; it's what you want in contexts like this -- in a week or less. For the first one; the following ones are faster.
What was the worst that could happen when you bought IBM back then?
Do maybe it's still in the head of the people but it could backfire.
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.
Does MS provide SLAs? Are there no suppliers who will provide similar SLAs for FOSS software?
> and they have full control of all of their software to do so without hindrance.
That puzzles me. How can you have more control over proprietary software than over open source? If you mean MS have full control, how does that benefit their customers?
Gotta love how internet commentators feel like picking a statement apart in isolation somehow validates their point.
Yes, they offer SLAs and have full control of their software and its release cycle. So can offer guarantees and stand by them.
> That puzzles me. How can you have more control over proprietary software than over open source?
"They" is Microsoft.
> If you mean MS have full control, how does that benefit their customers?
It means they don't have to wait for Linux (or a plethora of other open source softwares) for upstreaming or need to fork / manage an independent branch. It means that they aren't at the whims of a community who decides to abandon projects willy-nilly or replace them with brand new implementations at the drop of a hat. Or commercial entities built on top of those projects that can only offer surface level guarantees.
No one here is saying Windows (or proprietary software) is intrinsically better. What they're saying is that what Microsoft offers to certain large-scale/enterprise entities is clearly better.
If you disagree, have at it. I don't care. The fact that people continue to sign with Azure, Microsoft, Office, etc makes it self-evident.
Yeah, because only the Open Source community ever does that. Corporations never do... /s
(The "Google Graveyard" site is famous, but wasn't there one for Microsoft too? I want my Microsoft Bob to be maintained, dammit!)
ETA:
> The fact that people continue to sign with Azure, Microsoft, Office, etc makes it self-evident.
...that they're idiots. That's what you meant, right?
> Gotta love how internet commentators feel like picking a statement apart in isolation somehow validates their point.
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.
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!)
I think that, like in the USA, some German states (Bundesländer) are smaller than some German cities.
The German government developed a fully free and open source solution that is quite similar (consisting of Nextcloud, jitsi, Collabora etc.) and can be deployed using Kubernetes: https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk
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.
Who do you think is the real winner of your sandpit fight?
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.
We saw what that looks like already. "Gaia-X" it was a huge clusterfuck and burned to the ground before it even began.
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. :)
But if you prefer, you can also see it on the website, for example: https://www.stackit.de/en/pricing/cloud-services/iaas/stacki...
/s, in case anyone wondered.
The second attempt they had better outcome, and the German government agrees. Now they have the know-how from Munich, and can have a degree of confidence that things will be fine. You don't need an overwhelming success, just be on par with the Microsoft Office solution using free software, and you are already ahead. It's Microsoft who needs to be clearly ahead to justify the cost.
Still, it's better to have it limited to Germany while others watch for a year or two if it works as intended.
Could be familiar to you, but if not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorvi_Hospital
Is this normal? It certainly would be an outlier back in the US.
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.
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.
>> remote jobs for developers?
> All in-office I'm afraid.
The irony of using LibreOffice.
Libre -> Free -> Freedom to choose -> Freedom to choose your office.
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.
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.
Strong “I have no idea what I’m talking about” vibe here.
Different file formats. Different software entirely. Compatibility issues would be orders of magnitude more impactful than any issues intrinsic to the O365 suite.
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
> 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.
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.
I also dont think any tax payer is concerned about the cost of a document being formatted differently.
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.
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.
How many malware attacks are based on some kind of Office exploit?
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.
Comes in handy for The Dominant Vendor, who can claim that "formatted correctly" is defined as the way their software formats stuff.
So I can understand Microsoft championning that definition, but why do you?
Most countries could dream of such leverage over a company like Microsoft.
If the open source solution works, where do Microsoft spend money to make it fail?
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
> 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.
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]
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.
That aside, at least in Germany, there is a considerable amount of volunteers, e.g. in social work.
People say 10x Software Engineer, rarely 10x Electrical Engineer.
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.
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
But trust me, I understand the sentiment. Housing becoming increasingly unattainable is a issue on many levels, I just think that there are other, worse, contributing factors to the overall situation. Compromising on fire safety or other reasonable safety factors effectively won't help anybody when there still is an ever increasing amount of institutional investment hiking prices on the market.
Most type of volunteer works require more people, with some level of organizations before it becomes effective.
While open-source software projects are often started by one very good SWE, as a hobby, in his own time: a very low barrier of entry. Plus, a project can live with a solo maintainer for a very long time. Though, I digress that can be detrimental in the long run, like the recent xz-utils fiasco.
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.
- 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.
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! :)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
The bubonic plague has been around for hundreds of years, so it must be great, right?
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.
So take all those "digital sovereignity" with a grain of salt. It usually means: "We want you to lower your fees".
The decision to revert to a Microsoft Platform was taken in November 2017.
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.
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...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylin_(operating_system)
Unsure what office tools they use though
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?!
Anyhow, it would be extremely simple for all of Europe to role out OpenSource: just ban the transfer of critical user data to the US. Microsoft Windows is technically a gigantic NSA backdoor, therefore installing it on a government PC should be considered treason. So, maybe we should start to put politicians on trial for treason and see how quickly MS gets kicked out of Europe...
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.
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.
Excel blazes through it. I feel it was a very good decision, even though I'm a miser.
There is good ones like
https://www.schleswig-holstein.de
https://www.baden-wuerttemberg.de
And then there is sites like this
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 ...
Also OnlyOffice is a much better candidate, it's very usable and OSS as well.
It was the top line item for the quarter, beating out health insurance line related line items.
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.
That's what we all said about Munich in 2003, too.
So, I'm hopeful, but not exactly holding my breath.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Not your main point, but: If they really were novice computer users it would be a snap; the problem is that they aren't -- can't be, if they're already conditioned to Windows being "the standard".
Then again, I think that this is often exaggerated, even for long-time Windows users. What's so hard about switching -- "Oh, but people are so used to all their handy Windows shortcuts!"? Bah -- they don't even know they exist!
(Though "modern" dc and bc are typically packaged together now.)
alias bb='bc -l <<X'
- 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)
What makes you think Microsoft would invoice their customers in Germany in British pounds? Weird unit to use when commenting on an article about Germany on an international site.
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?
It’s not going to go as smoothly as they think it will. I highly doubt their pilot program sniffed out all the complexities.
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.
Even the simplest things like text editor or using a command line will be disruptive.
The support staff is going to be overwhelmed.
But I do use nano and not vim.
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).
Windows isn’t dying anytime soon.
Just one, Microsoft Excel.
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.
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.
No, the question is how long it will take before the world admits that this "AI" emperor is naked.
> The current hype notwithstanding,
Whaddayamean "notwithstanding"? The hype can't be notwithstanding, since hype is all it is.
The point is that there is an entire universe of popular and very useful data science tools and models (built around Python, R etc.) of which the current AI/ML/LLM's algorithms are just a tiny and rather extreme use case. At some point libreoffice must move beyond VBA if it wants to remain relevant.