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Comment by a_wild_dandan | Hacker News Reader

> Regrettably, the marketplace is far from healthy

The unhealthy thing here isn't the marketplace, it's government policy. If you eschew popular open-source tools for closed/proprietary alternatives, this will happen. Linux will always have several orders of magnitude more experts banging on it than Windows ever will. Vendors pontificating about security will not change this fundamental asymmetry. Also, don't want product lock-in? Don't choose vendors with a significant risk or history of lock-in. Don't endorse face-eating leopards and then blame others when they eat your face.

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Save taxpayer money today by outsourcing to a vendor that might have a problem, but really isn’t your “fault” per se. OR spend a lot of taxpayer money running your own system; which if there is a problem is very much your “fault”.

I don’t agree with the outcome, but the logic isn’t hard to follow.

How is outsourcing a cost saving? You have to pay for the shit, you make it sound like its somehow free. Logic does not checkout.

SUM(O365 license cost) < SUM(Salary + Hardware cost)

Well, the hardware isn’t actually too severe as it’s paid upfront for very long time periods. The real cost isn’t even the salary. One system professional might be 150k, so let’s say employees are going to cost 500k for the system. I imagine that the annual cost for 365 for a single governmental department would be $2 million or more. I think that the biggest cost would be the transition and potential data loss.

It's not really about open source versus priority, it's about open source quality, which quite frankly isn't there. It's like living in a rickety shed at the best of times on the desktop.

> it's about open source quality, which quite frankly isn't there. It's like living in a rickety shed at the best of times on the desktop

First, we're not talking about the desktop here, we're talking about services. Open source provides much better quality for services. It is frankly appalling to me to see the government relying on Microsoft services given the quality and reliability and security of open source alternatives--not to mention the lower cost.

Second, the biggest obstacle to a standardized Linux desktop that everyone can use and rely on is the lack of a big player in the market willing to invest in one. Imagine if the government took even a fraction of the money it spends on Windows desktops, and spent it on developing a standardized Linux desktop instead. Isn't that exactly the sort of coordination problem that governments are supposed to solve?

Show me an open source O365 equivalent that scales to the 10,000 seats in my org.

I agree with your second point. I'm in the UK and have advocated this position for years. We have so much government infra here, considering NHS etc, that it would be cost effective to dedicate people to a "national standard computing" infrastructure. But it doesn't exist. Yet.

> Show me an open source O365 equivalent that scales to the 10,000 seats in my org.

I am forced to use O365 every day in my work. It's a piece of crap. The LibreOffice equivalents that I have on my personal Linux machines are better for everyday office applications. As for server side, even if we leave aside all the times I see supposedly reliable MS infrastructure break when I'm trying to do an everyday task, a quick Google search will show you plenty of equivalents, and as for "scaling", the government, or any large organization, could get better value for money paying someone to engineer whatever customizations are necessary in the open source alternatives--which it could then deploy for free on as many servers as it wanted--than from MS's licensing model.

I suspect you don't actually use O365. There's a lot of collaboration stuff in there which is pretty much unbeatable. I mean I'd rather use LaTeX and a VCS for some of the stuff I do but quite frankly that's just too hard for a lot of people.

Also a lot of assumptions about the ROI there and the availability of any engineers who can customise it.

> I suspect you don't actually use O365.

You suspect wrongly.

> There's a lot of collaboration stuff in there which is pretty much unbeatable.

Evidently you and I have had very different experiences.

https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/

You're welcome.

Now how do I collaborate with the people in the other 3 orgs I work with who use O365?

> It's not really about open source versus priority, it's about open source quality, which quite frankly isn't there.

...

> Show me an open source O365 equivalent that scales to the 10,000 seats in my org.

...

> Now how do I collaborate with the people in the other 3 orgs I work with who use O365?

I hope you used an excavator, moving those goalposts.

Not really. The reason those orgs use O365 is that there isn't a better option with the same ROI and staffing requirements. It because a defacto standard because no one offered anything better.

(I will add I despise it to the core, but I know why people use it)

> The reason those orgs use O365 is that there isn't a better option with the same ROI and staffing requirements. It because a defacto standard because no one offered anything better.

As you pointed out once the goal posts shifted, the reason they use Microsoft is because Microsoft is notoriously incompatible with anyone but Microsoft, but also ubiquitous.

O365 is a bloated piece of shit, I don't want an equivalent.

> open source quality

you are communicating on it right now

HN is proprietary and closed source. I am looking at it with Safari which a fair chunk of it is closed source on my Mac which is mostly closed source. It's routed over a bunch of commercial routers, which are closed source and infrastructure which is closed source.

YMMV.

But that isn't the point. The point is that the open source desktops do not even touch Windows in usability, quality, reliability and consistency. At best everything is fragmented at 80% complete. Show me an open source O365 and you might have something fit for an SME or government.

> The point is that the open source desktops do not even touch Windows in usability, quality, reliability and consistency.

I had a chuckle about this one. Seriously, none of MS crap comes close to a modern rolling release distro + KDE.

> Show me an open source O365 and you might have something fit for an SME or government.

Libre Office is pretty good, but its usability needs lots of work. To this day Libre Office still ships with templates that look like they were designed in 1998.

- You want a quick and dirty document or presentation that looks pretty good: MS Office is the winner.

- You want a large document with lots of figures, captions etc: Libre Office is the winner.Try to keep a larger document meticulously styled with named styles, MS Word will trip over tons of its bugs that lurks in the dark, and it will make an non-salvageable mess of figure placement, caption numbering, losing header formatting and what not.

What OSS software needs is more investment in UX. Libre Office needs a reality check here. In this respect KDE is a great outlier, as it looks great, is responsive and has tons of pro features that are discoverable.

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