French Government To Use PostgreSQL, LibreOffice In Free Software Adoption Push | Hacker News Reader

French Government To Use PostgreSQL, LibreOffice In Free Software Adoption Push

computerworlduk.com

120 pointsEdwardQ55 comments

The upfront costs of migration (including retraining, coping with missing features, and solving a wide variety of little compatibility issues as they arise) will surely exceed what it would have cost the French Government to stay on Microsoft Office for one or two more waves of upgrades. The important question is: will the upfront cost and disruption be worth it?

The data presented by the city of Munich six months ago provides compelling evidence that the answer is a resounding YES: the recurring savings from migration will exceed its upfront costs.[1]

The city of Munich identified three types of cost savings: (1) it no longer has to pay for license upgrades, eliminating a significant recurring cost forever; (2) its desktop software and hardware no longer have to be updated as frequently, reducing another significant recurring cost forever; and (3) surprisingly, Munich claims its IT department is fielding fewer user complaints with free software, reducing another major cost forever.

Edit: There's an additional benefit from migration not mentioned by Munich which I think will become very important over time. According to this article, the French government intends to reinvest "between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save" on contributing to the development of the applications they use, so they will have direct, hands-on input into which features get added to such applications and even how such features are implemented. The French government, in other words, will become a 'co-owner' of these Free Software applications, giving them more control over their own IT future. How much is that worth?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3787539

Wasn't a huge benefit of the libre-software push by Munich the fact that local jobs would be created by the extension, maintenance and customization of the government systems? ie, instead of paying Microsoft/Oracle/HP/IBM US dollars for upgrades/features, they pay Müncheners some DM/euros for the same.

They also might preferably invest part of those 5-10% to french developers, keeping money in their own economy ("creating jobs!!!11") instead of sending it elsewhere.

If you don't reinvest at least some of the money you save, then 'forever' will turn into 'until the project dies', so well done to the French.

Why are people shitting so much over LibreOffice? I have both on my machine in the office, and I've set LibreOffice to the default and use it almost exclusively. It's faster than Office, has a better UI, more features I see as essential (save to PDF is nice), and the leap from Office to LibreOffice these days is tiny.

Why are people shitting so much over LibreOffice?

Possibly from past experience; I can't be the only one who's had a red face after emailing a document, only to find out that in Word, the formatting's off just slightly enough to make the entire thing look unprofessional.

This was a good many years ago, and I accept that things may have changed, but Word and Excel work for me right now, and have the added bonus that I can trust what I'm sending to clients.

Just for the avoidance of doubt, I realise that this entire situation could be avoided by using tools meant for the job. Sadly, that wouldn't go down as well with a lot of clients who aren't as technically-savvy as the average HN user.

I have found out that very, very few non-technical users (and even many technical users) ever use Word the way it is meant to be used; i.e., using styles. Most Word users are pretty much still manually manipulating Word documents like the very first WYSIWIG word processors, as glorified typewriters that happen to have some character- and line-oriented formatting features.

So I export my LibreOffice Text documents to PDF, then use Acrobat Pro to export the PDF to Word format. What Acrobat Pro does is render a pretty literal representation of the PDF into Word. For someone used to using styles in Word, it is a generally horrid conversion. But I'm in the minority, and everyone I've sent Word documents rendered in this way is satisfied, which completely mystifies me.

For documents that I'm frequently asked to share, like contracts, I deliberately keep them dead plain text simple as much as possible. I have a contract generation program that pulls customer and project data, and populates a LibreOffice template so I can focus on just the specifics of the proposal. The contract parts that a customer's legal team might want to mark up with track changes enabled is kept simple enough that LibreOffice can still faithfully export it to Word.

I generate simple spreadsheets for myself, but keeping formatting consistent from spreadsheets I get from others has held me back from ditching Excel entirely.

I still haven't been able to work out a way to switch away from PowerPoint slide decks that I have to share with others (which is pretty much every presentation deck I produce). I'm a pretty heavy user of animations in PowerPoint, and the faithful conversion of that is non-existent.

If Microsoft was better with keeping parity between OS X and Windows Office, then I would have never explored adopting LibreOffice, but since there are enough differences to matter, I figured it couldn't hurt to wean myself from Office where feasible.

>Just for the avoidance of doubt, I realize that this entire situation could be avoided by using tools meant for the job.

No, this situation could be avoided if Microsoft would actually correctly implement their own fucking pseudo-standard. Not that this is possible, of course, since the 600+ page behemoth that is OOXML is stock full of inconsistencies, contradictions, and missing details.

Oh, and of course there is ODF, which is just plain better than OOXML. If that doesn't work, there is again just a single entity at fault: Microsoft. So don't blame LibreOffice for shortcomings of Microsoft Office and start demanding Microsoft to get their shit together.

send as pdf if you need exact formatting (and not editing), surely?

That's why I wrote: I realise that this entire situation could be avoided by using tools meant for the job. Sadly, that wouldn't go down as well with a lot of clients who aren't as technically-savvy as the average HN users.

Edit: Being more helpful, have you ever had to try and explain to a client who would much rather be doing other things, why they can't edit the document you've sent them?

> has a better UI

You can not be serious. How can you possibly think that an UI that consists of 1) two stacked toolbars full of confusing icons and 2) a bunch of options menus with a million levels of nested items is any good at all?

The "new" Office 2007 UI is seriously amazing. For the first time ever I could actually find what I wanted in Office without looking for at least a minute. It's logically organized and it's clean.

LibreOffice feels like Office 97. That isn't a good thing.

Opinions differ, but I'm sure he is serious and I agree with him. I find the organization of the menus in Libreoffice much more intuitive than it was in Office when they used that style. I also prefer that style for use with a keyboard - it's much more intuitive when you're not entirely sure what the shortcut is.

Even if I did prefer ribbon, it would have to be MUCH better to justify the drawbacks that come with Office (cost, etc.)

It's not so much that it's a good UI, as that it's better for some users than one with:

1) A set of rotating toolbars full of icons that are just as confusing, though they are arranged better by default

2) No discoverable keyboard interface (Alt-menu access doesn't work without menus)

It's a preference thing. I don't think either one is strictly better UI; it just depends on the user's preferred interaction modes.

Press Alt in a ribbon UI, and the UI gives you a stable multi-level hotkey set:

http://imgur.com/ZYaxc,xQiiK,2WbYk,VVW0S - this is when pressing alt, r ("start menu"), au ("auswählen" = select), f ("fangen" = catch - the icon for "select" changes in the last picture).

You can move backward using ESC, too: "alt-r, au, esc, esc, a" puts you in the "Ansicht" (view) ribbon. Once in "alt-mode" it always shows you what you can do, and how.

Wait what? Are you talking about the horrible ribbon nonsense they've done to MS office recently? I've honestly never heard anything but negative reactions to that interface. It is awful.

I'm a LibreOffice user and it regularly pisses me off. It's not terrible, but it definitely has a lot of sharp corners that I keep hitting. Image placement is my current #1 gripe. It's apsolutely horrific. More generally, it starts up slowly, does many things automatically that I don't want it to (and stubbornly refuses to do some things that I do want it to do) and is hard to configure.

I haven't used MS Office in years, but I'm fairly confident it would annoy me about as much as LibreOffice does. Office suits are just really hard to do right.

I guess it comes down to Stroustrup's famous quote:

"There are only two kinds of programs: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."

I had the same gripe with image placement when I used Open Office on my Linux box a few years ago. I thought that MS office or Apple Pages would be better but ... well ... I don't seem to get much more done with them. Granted I did not try very hard either, since I had an alternative: Latex.

I started to use it to type my science reports and homeworks, then used it to make my resume (I simply couldn't make it not look like shit using MS Word), and finally switched to using it for everything. Now I know Latex is not for everyone, and it's not easy to have other people edit and compile it (especially if they don't know it), but as far as I'm concerned, it turned out to be good for my sanity ...

Oh and for the sake of honesty I should write that image placement in latex, although imho better than in MS Word/Pages/LibreOffice, still do drive me nuts at times..

I really don't know. I have never understood why anyone would actually pay for word processing software from 1992 onwards.

Most people use the most basic features (bold, center, adjust margins and printing). That is not worth around £200!

It's been said before in plenty of articles right here on HN, the move is minimal. Users see the same icons (open, save, print), the menus are in the same locations, Libreoffice and MSOffice look the damn same. It' just like most problems with marketing, a lot of people cannot differentiate products or companies.

Office also has save to PDF, at least the 2010 version.

As do recent libreoffice versions.

The main reason, would likely be its total lack of compatibility with MSFT Office. Just try opening even a simple Word or PPT file and saving it and then seeing it 'corrupted', even the most simple files seem not to be compatible. Whether this is MSFT's fault for changing the format all the time or LO's for not keeping up I don't know but whenever I need to edit an Office file I have to bring my Mac laptop to work and use MSFT's Office otherwise I will invariably ruin the file, inject wierd characters, screw up the formatting etc etc. LO just doesn't work when interoperability is needed.

> even the most simple files seem not to be compatible

That strikes me as hyperbole, as it's always seemed to do ok opening basic files.

sure, it can open them, but then it corrupts them when you save back and try to open with MSFT's office.

Even a simple pptx will change the bullets to some funky character, mess up the formatting.

It's not hyperbole, its actual real-world corporate experience. I tried recently to edit a pptx for a conference I am speaking at and as usual my linux/LO installation was unable to do so. I really wish it did work, but I just can't honestly say it ever does. try it for yourself, create a pptx in Office, add a couple slides, simple layout, nothing fancy, then save it, try opening it in LO and see what you have...

I remember reading about a largeish legacy French government system migrating to Postgres a couple of years ago, so maybe they've decided Postgres fits the bill for most scenarios they need a DB for.

According to these slides [1] that system did about a billion SQL statements a day at the time, so pretty good going.

[1] http://wiki.postgresql.org/images/1/1c/PGDayEU2010_CNAF_Post...

Part of the reason governments are interested in open-source software is their worry about the possibility of the U.S. government's inducing U.S. corporations to put back doors in popular proprietary software.

If by "adopted" you mean "are being considered in part of a plan pitched to the Prime Minister", then yes, otherwise... Well let's just say I've worked in a French administration's IT dept and they tend to take their time.

It's actively used in various institutions. Relatives working there asked for a little help a few years ago to set up Postgres and migrate their Access stuff over.

Poor French civil servants. Being forced to use LibreOffice is a demotivating and frustrating experience. F.ex. Writer is like MS Word 1997, but shabbier. If you're paying an employee more than minimum wage, don't kill their productivity and motivation by feeding them sub-par tools.

While it is true that LibreOffice still cannot compare to Microsoft Office (esp. Excel which I think is an impressive piece of software), I think LibreOffice fills the French civil servants' needs fine. It's not like they're consultants or bankers making the most out of Excel or Powerpoint, and the savings are significant. With the debt we have, these kinds of moves go in the right direction.

Frankly, I find your comment insulting. Why would a civil servant be expected to perform any less than a consultant or a banker? After all, many civil servants do the job a consultant could also do, albeit at a lower cost. I'm not talking about the people picking up the trash, I'm talking about the people designing city expansion policy, the people writing requirements for government IT systems and the people drafting laws.

Admittedly civil servants in many countries have the image of doing these jobs less passionately than someone working in business would, but this does not change what is expected of them.

Cutting on the productivity on an expensive workforce very seldomly leads to actual cost reduction.

I didn't mean to be insulting and surely didn't say civil servants "perform less" than consultants. I don't think that performance can be measured by the amount of time you spend on desktop software :)

Let me clarify my point: most people (civil servants being only one example among others) don't use even 10% of MS Office capabilities (esp. on Excel, I've never seen anything but basic formulas, no array formulas, no macros and so on). For these people using a tool that performs reasonably well on these 10% is not a stupid choice.

Of course, MS Office is better than LibreOffice. But LibreOffice is absolutely no shitty software and most of the time it gets the job done.

As a French civil servant I can say it doesn't fill our needs. We have difficulties to work with documents we receive sometimes created with LibreOffice, sometimes Microsoft Office. Documents are full of errors from bad imports and exports. I know many people loosing tons of time trying to fix the documents. An average French civil servant has many documents to write every month.

I agree, document conversion is one hell of an issue. But it doesn't bite everytime you open a MS Office document (at least it very rarely happens to me). I think that the lost productivity is made up for in terms of savings, which we do need.

We can hope that this issue gets solved if more heavily invested in. The "10% of savings go towards developing free software" rule is promising.

Here comes the FUD.

For most users, MS Word 2003 is like MS Word 1997, except that it takes a much more powerful system to run it. Most people never use any feature of Word that wasn't there in 1997.

2007 is different because of the ribbon, I'll grant, but preference for the ribbon is far from universal.

They could donate some of the savings to LibreOffice to improve the interface

Which is what they plan to do. Either through donations of cash or through manpower.

"He also wants them to reinvest between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save through not paying for proprietary software licenses, spending it instead on contributing to the development of the free software."

I'm amazed this is getting downvoted. I didn't expect LibreOffice's lack of quality to be a controversial fact. I though it was accepted as the status quo. After all, everyone agrees that Gimp is inferior to Photoshop, although it can be used fine in certain scenarios if you are willing to fight with it. LibreOffice is absolutely dreadful, much worse in comparison to Word than Gimp in comparison with Photoshop.

I find LibreOffice to be good enough for all my needs.

> everyone agrees

So let's see some examples then.

Why is LibreOffice "absolutely dreadful"?

So let's see some examples then.

In GIMP, where are the layer groups? The nondestructive editing?

These are basic tools to a professional workflow.

And don't get me started on CMYK. You cannot do prepress without CMYK support; GIMP was going to get it Real Soon Now for the past ten years and it's still not there.

The reason for why no CMYK and why no non-destructive editing is that GEGL development took way longer than expected. Now that more and more of the GIMP core is converted to GEGL I am confident GIMP will eventually get these features.

GIMP is the story of what happens when you wait with new features until "the right solution" is completed. Not that I really blame them since they have very few developers.

If you're doing professional work, you should stump for a professional tool. Otherwise it's like complaining that your family car, though ideal for its purpose, is a load of crap because it can't take pallets.

Excel.

pivot tables and VBA sucks (you may NOT comment on what a horrible language VBA is. )

So the reason why LibreOffice sucks is: Excel?

I didn't ask which of the programs in the Microsoft Office suite is better than the programs in the LibreOffice suite, I asked why LibreOffice sucks.

Also LibreOffice has Python.

As a long time Linux user, I have to say this is sadly true. I actually like Google Docs better than LibreOffice although it has less features.

Everyone doesn't agree that GIMP is "inferior" to Photoshop. They serve different markets. GIMP doesn't have as much manpower to put into the super high-end features, like tightly integrated RAW editing, but then people aren't paying 700 bucks per copy of GIMP either. GIMP does have features that Photoshop doesn't have (like a Python scripting interface) that makes it better for some use cases. For generic bitmap editing, either one works just fine, though GIMP is better for the casual user in most cases as it allows you to save your 700 bucks and put it toward something important.

LibreOffice is much the same, but I think the gap is actually much smaller. Microsoft Office does have some niche features that are not replicated by LibreOffice, and Microsoft has made their formats for annotations and other features that should be simple sufficiently complex to make import/export difficult, but LibreOffice in my experience is faster and has more of the features that I like and use (at least more accessible; apparently someone has said Office now includes direct PDF export, so that's nice). I use LibreOffice even if I'm using a computer with Microsoft Office installed. As with GIMP, in some specific cases, Word may be required, but in most cases LibreOffice works just fine and saves you hundreds of dollars.

The exception here is probably Calc v. Excel, because it seems true in my experience that Excel has many more features for power users than Calc.

Having used both Word 97 and LibreOffice Writer, the latter is definitely not 'shabbier'. It's just kicking a popular target.

Using PostgreSQL is just a damn good idea. LibreOffice, well I would say not so much.

It's a nice idea, better than their mighty OpenOffice Firewall. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4LofqPCQew

(yes, this is an ex French Ministrer of Culture talking about open source)

I don't understand what she's saying, in French or English.

Hi,

I'm french.

She's saying that you can protect your computer from illegal downloading stuff form internet using a firewall, and you can get one for free. (fun) She wants to give an example, and she said that on hers gov computer she got an opensource one which is called openoffice. After that she become a meme on french websites.

Not exactly, she said that OpenOffice as Office has a firewall. Not that it is a firewall.

If i had one dollar for every time i saw a "Government X installed open source Y" post... it's started in 1999 and still haunts me

This is a good move, any government using Oracle is wasting taxpayers money and being irresponsible and negligent with its citizen's data.

One could talk of NSA backdoors, but there is no need, the security of Oracle products is laughable at best, there is no need for backdoors.

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