Hacker News Reader

Comment by EduardoBautista | Hacker News Reader

> Why should local governments use taxpayers’ money to buy proprietary, closed software from a single vendor?

I don't want to be a pessimist, but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives.

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

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

View on HN

>but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives.

That is already a given with Microsofts own tools, office365 is a crippled mess.

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

Which is also something many companies don't pay for.

office365 is a crippled mess.

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

It is not like there are pages describing just what excels web version cannot display or dozens of features that the web versions break because they cannot handle them correctly (like connectors).

Correct the web version is not a 1:1 swap but the desktop version has been a stable product used by millions for decades. Most users use the desktop version and indeed it has few compatibility issues with itself.

Well the point wasn't "desktop vs. web version" but showing that compatibility issues are common even within the proprietary products of a single vendor, something which one of the previous comments implied wouldn't be the case. If you have to fixate on a single, non portable product (lets not talk about office for Mac) then you can easily get consistency from LibreOffice as well.

In response to the original comment where they said switching to Libre would introduce compatibility problems because the industry standard is Microsoft, I think its an incompatible comparison to talk about minor inconsistencies across the various Microsoft endpoints.

Different file formats. Different software entirely. Compatibility issues would be orders of magnitude more impactful than any issues intrinsic to the O365 suite.

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

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

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

Germany can afford to fund libreoffice development which will benefit the taxpayer by providing good free alternatives to microsoft products.

I also dont think any tax payer is concerned about the cost of a document being formatted differently.

And I don't buy the argument that a document not being formated correctly is costly. People mostly don't care and when real administrative stuff needs to be shared it is done via pdf forms where the output is controlled.

It matters when there One Dominant Vendor. In that case, when format errors and other small errors arise, the reaction depends. If it's the dominant vendor's software, then the user considers the other either normal or in their end. If the errors arise while using another software package, though, it's the fault of the "cut-rate, knock-off" software.

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

Thus probably why they said LibreOffice would be compulsory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> going to cost the taxpayers more money

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

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

A country spending money employing people to do unproductive work reduces the amount of useful work its populace can do. On paper you keep all the money, but no value is created.

There's opportunity cost, that's true, and I'm sure one can show that the most optimal situation in this case would be everyone on the world using the same office suite (i.e. free trade is optimal), _provided_ non-US countries would spend the money on actual production cost. However, the money paid is not only for production, but also for rent seeking, squeezing value out of a quasi-monopoly. That is actual money lost for unproductive work, _and_ it is going outside of Germany.

> I don't want to be a pessimist, but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives.

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

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

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

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

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?

The governments job is to work for and improve society. They should not ever be profit driven or penny pinching.

Some initial growing pains seem worthwhile though

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com