Slashdot Mirror
UK Government May Switch from MS Office to Open Source
New submitter Karashur sends this report from The Guardian:
"Ministers are looking at saving tens of millions of pounds a year by abandoning expensive software produced by firms such as Microsoft. Some £200m has been spent by the public sector on the computer giant's Office suite alone since 2010. The Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude believes a significant proportion of that outlay could be cut by switching to free 'open-source' software, such as OpenOffice, or Google Docs. 'I want to see a greater range of software used, so civil servants have access to the information they need and can get their work done without having to buy a particular brand of software. In the first instance, this will help departments to do something as simple as share documents with each other more easily. But it will also make it easier for the public to use and share government information.'"
Surely privacy issues prevent the use of GoogleDocs? Libreoffice on the other hand could save them a lot of money.
Any savings, of course, would be offset by the unproductivity of "tens of millions" of government workers who can't seem to get their open-source office software to "just work the way it always has" over the next 5 years.
I sure hope the powers that be take a long hard look at the definition of "free." Is anything from Google actually free? I'm sure the taxpayers would like to know exactly which non-government entities are getting access to their private information.
For actually doing office work, Microsoft stuff is hard to beat. Maybe it'll turn out great though, who knows.
Any savings, of course, would be offset by the unproductivity of "tens of millions" of government workers who can't seem to get their open-source office software to "just work the way it always has" over the next 5 years.
I can't get Microsoft Office to "just work the way it has".
...and normally appears to be the Government trying to force Microsoft to discount its licensed to the UK Government or invest in the latest boondoggle.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Its taken them years to understand they actually have a choice and can save UK taxpayers a huge amount of money and have a better safer system. Let's hope they don't mess it up.
Take the very successful example of Munich:
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-munich-rejected-steve-ballmer-and-kicked-microsoft-out-of-the-city/
Or did they get to open source too?
The original article doesn't even make this mistake: it just says that Docs can handle ODF. Nice summarizing, Karashur.
Sounds like your plain old customer "renegotiation" where they ask the vendor to lower prices. Have no fear - I would bet solid money that Office stays preinstalled on any UK Govt builds.
Only question is how much money they can save by threatening to leave. The UK government of cronies (doing their best to improve on US-style cronyism) would not benefit from any vendor graft if the vendor doesn't ever get paid, would they?
No danger of anything happening here as long as UK government is still for sale (Vote of no confidence? That's not remotely possible anymore given the Tory/Lib alliance charter).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Microsoft to strike deal with UK government offering them thousands of free copies of MS Office in 3...2...1...
Koans and fables for the software engineer
In that case, you want to first switch your mandated file format from MS's doc(x)/xls(x) to ODF's odt/ods. Then you can use MS Office, or switch to a new (possibly open-source, possibly even Free Software) office suite as you prefer.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
That old chestnut.
In my work, I've just upgraded from MS2003 to MS2010 with that ribbon format. It is a steep learning curve getting used to the ribbon and although I am slowly getting the hang of it and enjoying it, there are those options that only gets used once in a moon that forces me to go on the net to find out how to do it MS2010 style. In time It'll be second nature to me. The same thing will happen if my company switch to an open-source office suite.
The owner of the company I work for hates Microsoft with a passion, around 1/2 our office computers are now Mac's.
we have tried openoffice, officelibra etc. However the problem is they aren't 100% compatible, there is always formatting issues, colour issues, and in some instances data just went missing.
in the End, the owner gave in, and purchased office for MAC for all the machines, and also all the pc's. Unless something has massively changed in the last several months i can see this been a great waste of time and money.
With the amount of time it takes to get things done in government as it is, this is only going to slow them down even more.
> could be cut by switching to free 'open-source' software, such as OpenOffice, or Google Docs.
Where is the source for Google Docs?
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
I'm an OSS bigot but the realities of my workplace intrude on my idealism. I have yet to find a good replacement for Outlook w/ Exchange, so I look forward to seeing what they end up choosing for it.
The city of Freiburg in Germany embarked on a migration to OpenOffice.org and failed terribly while another German city -- Munich -- announced that the success of its open source migration had netted savings around $13 million. Partial migration / mixed environments seem to be a very bad idea.
Every time a government anywhere in the world decides to threaten a drop of Microsoft software you can bet that their seat license agreements are coming up for renewal. And the threats to migrate are only a ploy to cut a better deal. You can bet the Microsoft rep has already been authorized to sweeten the coffers of some politicians pet riding fund raising or do what ever is necessary to very quickly ensure that the by the time a real decision is taken that MS office and MS server products are the ones the government chooses. Same thing here in Canada, but with our government the decision to go all MS is a forgone conclusion there is no such thing as "looking for alternatives to save money", we just contract out every service possible and kill off labour unions like the CUPE instead and spec that contractors use nothing but MS office and server software compatible with existing government servers. We, unlike Great Britain have public money to burn now that Harper has gutted government services and pushed just about everything out to contract.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
Should standardize on a document exchange format and not the software which creates the documents.
I've been using the Ribbon format for about 3 years now and I STILL hate it. The newer versions of Outlook are the worst - the combination of the ribbon and the way MS couldn't be bothered to reimplement the compact header format really eat up vertical screen space for those of us who prefer the bottom preview pane layout (yes I know I can hide the ribbon but then I lose all the buttons which do what I use all the time, which is mainly the quick search box). On a laptop with only 768 vertical pixels (when I'm not docked) that is a serious headache which leaves me using OWA instead of the full blown outlook usually.
As you point out, the 2003->2007+ switch was therefore a huge opportunity for OpenOffice/LibreOffice/whichever fork is your favourite. The UI is great, easy to understand and the small differences from Office 2003 (like where the cursor ends up mid-editing a formula in Excel) are actually mostly positive incremental steps. You theoretically get the usability benefits of 2007+ (particularly for Excel, where memory/size constraints in 2003 were getting to be a problem for many).
Unfortunately though, interoperability is extremely poor - LibreOffice simply can't handle a big Excel spreadsheet (which is in my experience at least 60% of what most businesses buy Office for), and I've sent docx files from LibreOffice where, when people open them in MS Word, all the line breaks are suddenly gone or other formatting oddities appear. As another example, trying to use LibreOffice's "track changes" equivalent functionality left me with a docx file that Word (and often LibreOffice itself) is unable to open.
I would love to think that if the UK Government does move to LibreOffice they would fund someone to provide decent support who can fix a lot of these issues - that is supposed to be how the model works and fixing these issues would be of huge benefit to everyone. Unfortunately I can't really see that happening. I suspect instead it will end up being a typical government cock-up and massively overspend/under-deliver. I just hope that people don't end up viewing "Open Source" as the problem reason as it will be nothing to do with that and entirely to do with yet another display of civil service incompetence.
Star Office, sorry Open Office, sorry OoO, sorry LibreOffice, sorry whatever they're gonna call it by the time I realise there's another name, is shit. It has to have bug-for-bug compatibility with MS Office, for a start. Nothing that attempts to mimic, including retaining the functional flaws, can be considered superior to the original.
.doc-like formats where the authors have used the tab key or the space bar to align text in columns, even across lines. These people, whose jobs are to propagate information, would probably produce a better result if they used vi.
(Don't get me wrong, the last 10 versions of MS Office have been shit too. The last office package from MS I had any respect for was MS Word 2.0.)
Maybe people should start learning how to communicate again, rather than getting wizards to create bullshit for them. Every day our office receives documents in the latest
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I run a dual-boot system: Win7 and Mint. I would love to lose MSO for OO/OL but when I did opened my 2012 taxes in OL I got different answers on the same spreadsheet* when opened with with MSO: OL said I owed $1K more taxes. The IRS accepted the MSO version, so I assume it was correct. My wife is an environmental engineer who writes huge baroque spreadsheets (her idiot clients won't accept the database approach she would love to use.) Although there are no macros or VBA in those spreadsheets, they won't even open in OL. This despite my really doing my best to get them to work as I want to get the Microsoft monkey off my back. Pity.
*using the wonderful tax spreadsheet at http://www.excel1040.com - no endless inane "interviews" just fill in the forms you know you need.
It's too bad my mod points just ran out, or you'd have had one for being insightful.
The important thing is the data. Open formats matter, and if there aren't suitable open formats available yet for the data you need to work with, creating additional open formats matters. The specific tools you use to access data that is stored in open formats are much less important.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Actually, now I've read the article, that's what the Minister is saying. Move to open formats first.
That will make it possible to switch software later, if they choose to. But even if the government doesn't, it will allow the people they work with to use their own choice of software, and prevents lock-in. Using MS Office becomes a choice, and can be selected (or dropped) on its merits, rather than being suffered out of necessity.
It's the BBC article and the /. summary which try to make it look like this is purely about switching software.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
why? because it is better that the money be paid to a corporation who at least employees people, pays dividends to shareholders and in general boosts the economy.
what will happen if the govt "saves" the money by going to open office or some other free software? Well I can say with certainty that they will not return the money to the taxpayers. Instead it will fund more bureacracy and more government programs.
off topic: is there any way at all to prevent slashdot from sending me to the beta site? It refuses to retain my login credentials.
seriously though, these are like the cunts from beyond infinity, something else happened today that required they post this third rate arsewipe distraction press release. kill them with hammers made out of aids as soon as possible.
Sadly, you really can't. MS Office doesn't support the widely used ODF 1.2 standard, only the older ODF 1.1 standard which was still plagued by serious underspecfication, particularly on spreadsheets. And of course MS went for a interpretation that was incompatible with everything else on the market at the time.
If you want to also purchase import/export filters there are some options out there, but they're potentially more expensive than MS Office itself once you factor in MS's steep "please don't leave me" discounts.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
LOL! /..
That is the funniest comment I've seen here today on
A tip of the hat to you, Immerman....my thanks for a well needed laugh.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
The switch to Linux is not about open office. The simple reality is that most people create very basic documents and don't need much more than a basic text editor with fonts and spell check. Most enterprise software is now web based and thus all the average government machine needs is a web browser. So paying for a Windows license an a word license for a zillion machines that don't need either is just throwing money into the toilet. Plus once you dip your machine into the OSS world people often find that all kinds of commercial software needs can be replaced. Email systems, scheduling systems, VPNs, etc.
While there will be a handful of machines that need to remain windows I suspect that it would be significantly less than 1% and even then they will be in clusters such as an accounting office.
But some of the greatest advantages of OSS is that you no longer have an onerous license audit problem. Basically you point to your dozen accountants hold up a dozen 5 year old MS licenses and tell the auditors to go to hell as you don't even plan on upgrading office for another 5-10 years.
As one government official said directly to Bill Gates, OSS gave them freedom from Gates himself.
What I can't wait to laugh at are all the MS white papers that claim that this will somehow cost the UK more money than they presently spend on MS software. Quite simply these white papers are driven by the hysterical realization that the MS business model of taxing governments and businesses worldwide is nearing an end. People now have realistic options.
But the tears will be even more real as many governments and enterprises the world round will be dumping MS not out of a desire to save money but a desire to keep their computers from being spied upon by US entities.
Not completely true.
The reason office has a stranglehold on the market is that they've implemented every feature you could possibly want in your word processor / spreadsheet.
That's why I currently run Office. Every time I try an alternative (OpenOffice, Pages, Numbers, etc.) there's something missing that the developers didn't consider "necessary."
That sort of thing makes it hard to use other programs for
a. school work (but professor, OO/Pages won't let me do a landscape section break and OO/Numbers doesn't have a Data Analysis pack!)
b. office work (sorry boss but I can't use existing visual basic macros with OO/Pages/Numbers!)
c. other professional work you need to share (sorry mr. recruiter but Word can't correctly render OO documents, you should blame them and give me the job even though my resume doesn't look good!)
Oh and I've tried to make things work. R or any number of statistical packages makes the Excel data analysis toolpack look like a joke. But providing the professor with a completely new format for your regression outputs is not good for your grade. He's familiar with the M$ way, and will only get annoyed you couldn't produce output in his predesired format. Even if Excel can't look at colinearity or autocorrelation or any other of a number of things you really might want to look at.
(All these are real examples from the past year when I switched to Mac. I ended up having to buy MS Office for Mac after quite a bit of headache.)
In the first instance, this will help departments to do something as simple as share documents with each other more easily.
If they are currently running MS Office, how would switching to OpenOffice help share documents with each other? The same 'difficulties' of moving a file from one computer to another still exist.
They aren't talking about moving actual files to other computers isn't the issue. That's a solved and rather trivial problem these days. What they seem to be talking about is compatibility. Ever try opening a document created on one version of MS Office on a different version of MS Office? Most especially one that uses obscure features? They can't even get compatibility between different versions of their own software done properly, or perhaps MS deliberately sabotages this to get and keep people on the upgrade treadmill. LibreOffice/OpenOffice won't play these kinds of games with you; being open source sees to that, and if you have £200 million to pay MS for licences then you could instead use that to pay OO/LO developers to maintain it and have things done the way they're needed.
You stop paying for one thing and claim to have saved money!
(Meanwhile, back in reality, that "savings" creates a whole new problem as you have tens of thousands of workers unfamiliar with the new software tying up tech support people, spending hundreds of thousands of their own man hours trying to learn the new software, etc. etc. etc.)
It's like healthcare in the U.S. You can appear to save a bunch of tax dollars by knocking a bunch of people off of Medicaid, but then those people - instead of seeing a doctor at the first hint of illness - wait until whatever they have is at a catastrophic level and rely on much more expensive emergency room support or bankruptcy or something else that stops the individual from contributing to society, and tax dollars to the government. So the whole result ends up costing more money.
But hey, the masses fall for it and there is always some small, incredibly vocal group that celebrates the change as it seems to them a win for "their side". This is no different. So can you blame the assholes for doing it?
If you want a feature in Open Office, fund it. Better yet, considering the cost of Microsoft Office, put the funding of Open Office in the annual budget. Rather than giving $100 million a year to Microsoft, give $10 million a year to Open Office. With a programming / total-expenditures ratio of 1, open source funding is efficient.
Agreed, ribbons are a mess.
Why are they eating up so much precious vertical real estate instead of using simple menus, or do like OpenOffice does, and put this complexity on the side.
OO Example: http://www.openoffice.org/prod...
LO Example: http://www.libreoffice.org/fea...
I switch back and forth between OO and LO all the time, with occasional forays into Word/Excel. I much prefer OO to Word. No ribbons.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Maybe because OpenOffice is able to read documents from different versions of OpenOffice, whereas MS Office very often requires you to upgrade or get a compatibility plug in if the versions don't match or are too different. Microsoft has a vested financial interest in making its customers frustrated enough that they have to upgrade to make appear to work correctly.
Depressingly, there is an even worse implication:
1. This government knows it will most likely not exist in the current form after May 2015. Thus, any long-term 'thinking' should be considered with the pinches of salt including the thoughts 'dump as much chaff as possible for the opposition', and 'NOMFUP'.
2. This and the past several British governments haven't been able to get a single IT project right. The 'Universal Credit' which is being pushed through full-throttle was known to those who have to work with it to be a crock of shit several years ago, and is going from worse to even worse. The current Plan A) through Z) is: subcontract to the same litany of greedy morons that have screwed previous projects up on a basis that has to be admired for its consistency, complete with contracts so blinkered that there is _no_ way that the subcontractor can not make a massive profit on the deal. Could they manage even the sensible option mooted above of changing to .odf as the standard first, then changing software later on? _No. Fucking. Chance._
3. To mitigate the 'compatibility hell' problems, there is the nuclear option of putting everything in the cloud. I'd call this a no-no myself, but for a continuity of governments obsessed with pushing through ever more overarching intrusions on people's privacy in spite of any and all objection, it would seem to be a convenient avenue of 'fait accompli': "Well, we wanted all of your data to be secure as well, but, you see, it's all Google/Amazon/Crapita's fault you see, nothing to do with us. I'd as soon that the report about sexual health data in your clinical commissioning area that hadn't been adequately anonymised hadn't gotten released and linked with your boosted name/address/NI no/photo id data & zombie facebook profile, I'd be as glad as you would be I assure you, but it wasn't our fault you see. It was the subcrontractor 'SHELLCO29863247867572827CFBHWUEYHCBU32DB8, Cayman Is.' . No you can't sue there. Or see their accounts. Neither can we. You see our hands are tied."
And that sort of thing.
*disclaimer: former Msft office guy here*
The standard of use for MS office is Libreoffice, then it is obvious that the government will save on licensing costs, however those who use MS office in an enterprise environment as large as the government do not use Office simply as a suite of applications. Office is a software platform that connects with many line of non-MS business systems. Think plugins and addons on steroids. The engineering effort by vendors, in house IT, and analysts to convert all these things would be hugely disruptive.
Sure it fine to introduce choice for less sophisticated offices, but to mandate LibreOffice or any other product, commercial or otherwise is bad procurement practice. Licensing is chump change relative to the larger personnel & ecosystem costs.
The reason office has a stranglehold on the market is that they've implemented every feature you could possibly want in your word processor / spreadsheet.
For the record, as a "power user", neither Word nor Excel is even close to having every feature I could possibly want. I find it enormously frustrating that with all the resources available to them, Microsoft have mostly been free-wheeling and tinkering with the UI for many years now.
That aside, most of the problems you described are probably at least partially attributable to exactly the fact that MS Office locks data up in closed formats. It creates an almost unassailable barrier to entry for competition, because anyone else wanting to offer feature parity with Office needs not only to implement the feature itself but also to implement conversion algorithms for Microsoft's dominant proprietary file formats.
If, as an industry, we software developers established standardised, extensible representations for non-trivial data like mathematical expressions and for cross-references in structured data stores like spreadsheets and databases, then the kinds of issues we see with porting between Excel, Calc and specialist tools like R could be greatly reduced. Not all tools would provide all functions, of course, but at least the common subset would be easily portable, leaving different tools and developers to distinguish themselves by what they could build on that common foundation.
For all the ailments of the web standards bodies, it's really quite something that today you can write an HTML document, style it with CSS, and even add interactivity with JavaScript, and you can do it so that several completely independent underlying engines, each forming part of a different but widely used browser application, will all render the common aspects they support in almost identical ways and will even degrade somewhat gracefully if you use features that are only available in some browsers. But of course the browser industry was stagnant for a long time around the IE6 generation, and it took the arrival and subsequent rapid development of a competing product and the ready accessibility of the "file" formats to break the deadlock. I think it will take at least that much to dislodge MS Office from its throne.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The ribbon also changes state depending on what you're doing. If you don't know what you're doing, this would be helpful if icons, etc were recognizable, but many are not. Menus, etc, ate stateless and are always in the same place. Shortcut keys are easy to memorize. With the ribbon I found myself looking for icons and actions that were there a few minutes ago, still apply, but are now somewhere else.
The Blighty Gubmint sure isn't any good at reducing IT costs.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
To me the amazing thing is that within the Conservative Party (the dominant partner in the UK's coalition government, and usually presented by the press as anti-liberal, antediluvian, small minded and exclusively self-interested or overly class conscious) there are people who do sincerely believe in small government and the duty to spend tax income prudently. Some of these people have achieved minsterial office and are trying to put into practise what they believe and propound. I find it reassuring and entirely positive that they arrive at the point of advocating Free(dom) Software and decline to simply concur with the payment of hundreds of millions of our money to (mostly foreign) businesses for no public benefit or advantage.
It's a shame and a scandal that the "left-wing" and "liberal" representatives and parties have failed to realise that being bonded to unethical, solely profit driven (and mostly foreign) corporations does nothing for the public purse or the public good.
We had 13 years of supposedly liberal left wing government and the result was that we approached being bankrupt, handed over billions of tax pounds to greedy banks and foreign corporations for no result, fought wars that only benefited foreign powers and a handful of greedy politicians, and gave up rights bought in blood such as habeus corpus, jury trial and control of our own borders. The idea that the Conservative Party could be the UK's leading proponent of sound financial sense and a pragmatic and ethical approach to government IT purchasing and practise is almost enough to make me wonder if I took a lot of acid in the 60s or alkalines in the 70s but there it is, they are actually doing it, and for entirely rational reasons.
Hail Spode!
Hail Stallman!
Have a look at LibreOffice, 4.2 RC4 is out, a lot of work had gone into their spreadsheet. LO 4.2 FINAL is due out Real Soon Now.
http://www.libreoffice.org/dow...
or
http://www.libreoffice.org/dow...
uh-huh...
As someone else said, I get very frustrated because MS products don't have everything I need or obfuscate important functions.It was better before the ribbon methods of doing everything, but in the ribbon method it's horrible. If it takes 15 minutes to add a button or learn a magic keystroke for something, I have just wasted 15 minutes of my time.
Many very basic things are always broken to boot. Importing CSV for example is a nightmare in any MS product. They auto assign what ever the hell they want for a delimiter including what you select. I usually have to run CSV data through Perl to massage the format enough to keep Excel from adding it's own formatting.
Not claiming OO is better mind you, but rather correcting your claim that MS is that much better than everyone else. 10 years ago I would have agreed with you, but not recently.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Saving money is great and all. Woopee. Wouldn't the real value in switching be to get away from a company that has been compromised by US intelligence services? It seems to me that having your entire government running software written by a company known to put backdoors into their software is negligent. If they are using office, a member of parliament makes an interesting powerpoint presentation and the US president knows about it 5 minutes later.
Has Google Docs been open sourced now? Can it be hosted on a private server, so that the UK government needn't share every single document of them - and therefore their citizen's most private data - with the NSA?
Its not so bad here, but on the Guardian site, ..a massive number of mickeysoft shills. They are crapping buckets because 1) they are *double naught spy double gold special extra mickeysoft certified and have spent way too much for the books, manuals and courses and 2) they don't know anything else and (of course) are massively threatened by something they have no possibility of understanding. The word "probably" is used to assert the most bizarro of scenerios, eg: "Pregnant woman using Libre Office might give birth to a baby with 3 heads", "Tried to print with Open Source Software, printer jumped up and sawed off persons arm", and then of course the more mundane "So its free software, but that doesn't mean the computer is free or the electricity or the support people" ....as if 1) the "free" meant cost instead of freedom, 2) they don't have to pay those costs with the software they are using now. Some even argue that the cost if the software is insignificant... but if thats so true, how did bill gates get the 50 billion dollars again?
My wife is a corporate accountant for a large city in New Zealand. I've asked her about this as she uses Excel every day and has used OO/LO at home on occasion (a while back). She says they use so many third-party reporting plugins that work with Excel that a switch to a FS option would be nearly impossible. Word may be crap but Excel will rule the bean-counter world for the time being.
The main bit of software councils need to wean themselves off of is SAP. My jaw nearly hit the floor when I found out the seat license cost for that (I've forgotten the exact amount and am not waking her to find out), and any individual of a company that runs it who enters their own timesheets must hold a seat license, even if that's the only thing they use a computer for in the firm. We're talking thousands of dollars per seat here, not dozens.
The UK government has been in Microsoft's pocket since the 1980's, with hundreds of millions flowing non-stop from the British tax payer into Microsoft's coffers. Most comments are saying this is a license negotiation tactic, and this is probably true. The decision makers have spent decades paralysed by fear, brainwashed into believing Microsoft is the "safe" option much like in the prior decades people used to say "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
The government needs to clearly define a set of document interchange formats. The ODF format for word-processing is a good start. This makes the software a level playing field for all vendors, closed and open source. Only 100% compatible software gets onto the government buy list.
Until now there is no incentive to anybody to write a decent competitor to Microsoft. It's a huge investment and at the end of the day the government will buy Microsoft anyway even if it squeezes the British public's purse until it bleeds. You cannot even attack markets attached to the government as Microsoft will keep shifting their file format to make any competitors subtly incompatible. With a level playing field suddenly the incentives change. The government is a huge win and a fixed goal means the game is on to try and provide the government with best value for money.
Open Office still has an important part to play as it can set the baseline. GCHQ can vet the source and then make available a version for government employees to download (Microsoft Windows, OS X, Debian, etc). It can come pre-installed on all new government machines. If Microsoft can convince a gov't department to install Microsoft Word alongside it and pay for it, good for them. It must be adding extra value.
Francis Maude is definitely on the right track, if the article is to be believed, but he has a lot of inertia to overcome. Good luck to him.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
The UK government "may" go back to WordPerfect 5.1, too - but this isn't news unless there is some sort of definite probability assigned to the possibility.
This is what you see everywhere open source products are used.
More IT employees, with more power, less supervision from the management, and even dependency on IT employees.
If you want to reduce IT costs, standardize as much as possible. Outsource where possible. And hire a select team of replaceable but well-payed IT people to manage it from the interior. Especially in software, this is critical.
Those 10's of millions in licence costs are totally irrelevant in the total cost picture, even if you count only the IT departments : IT staff salaries account by far for the biggest part of IT costs. And the less you standardize, the more staff you'll need. For those who are unfamiliar with it : the cost to employ 1 single person in IT is around 100.000 $ / year. Standardizing on software may save the government not 10's, but 100's of millions of dollars in reduced personnel costs. And increase productivity ! It may make Bill Gates even richer, but who cares if the total costs come down and service is better ?
Open source software tends to make you dependable on your own staff, at the end of the day the only people that can manage your software will be the ones that chose that obscure but o-so-great and "free" software, that hey happen to know well, what a coincidence.
I've seen many organisations stuck in this situation. Results : frustrated management, frustrated users, high IT employee costs, happy IT department who think everyone else is stupid and they rule the place.
Didn't we have HTML "standard" yet every browser interpreted it in slightly different ways? Remember the days you had to use IE6 or else?
So, again, where is the accuracy of "retraining costs are higher"?
Whats stoping them to use PDF ? Public document has to be revised or someone has to look at it before being released. All that person needs to do is convert it to PDF which is super easy
For sharing them within the same environment and save money, yup OpenOffice or LibreOffice might be the solution but its certainly not free as you have to spend cash for the software lessons to employees and to make sure you hire dev's to have all features you got in Microsoft suite into OpenOffice or LibreOffice. But at the end in the longterm it is possible and you do save cash.
PC Gaming enthousiast that gives comments, opinions and reviews on Games. I'm just having fun with games while doing let
et viola!
Maybe I am missing something, but isn't OOXML the default document format MS Office versions since 2007? They seem to already be using open formats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
I know it's not very popular around here, but your argument was that open formats could allow users to use the software of their choice. Any office productivity suite is free to implement the ECMA-376, ISO/IEC 29500 standards used by MS Office.
The reality is, the competitors don't do a very good job of supporting it. But isn't that the same argument as MS not doing a very good job of supporting ODF?
The only people to benefit from this would be the consultants who would have to spend years (yippee! lots of contract hours!) getting this to work. And it will cost a hell of a lot more in the end. Every single large scale attempt to shift a public authority away from "expensive" software has ended in over-priced, under-quality and late-delivered alternatives - that the actual end users didn't want in the first place. Microsoft was rightly kicked around, a decade ago, for locking people in through proprietary storage formats - the *only* driver for anyone to get involved in the alternative of ODF. Now that their Office suite generates output that is readable and useable in any other product - and can read and save content to ODF - they have taken the battle to the quality of the actual product and service delivered. OpenOffice and LibreOffice look and behave like amateur POS because that is what they are - the strength of their following was simply "this isn't Microsoft and can manage open formats". Now that the latter is no longer true, their only raison d'etre is anti-Microsoft - and you know what? customers don't give a crap about that any more.
The UK Cabinet Office (not supported by *any* other UK central government department) is simply indulging in a near-religious love-in with anything, everything, open source - sponsored by the great guru Liam Maxwell and with the tacit support of a spineless and hapless Minister - which says more about his faith-driven obsessions than it does about real concern for the UK taxpayer dollars spent on technology.
[Captcha: "Compete" - you heard it here]
File -> Export to PDF
Right in the menu
This is something I've always loved about OO/LO. Sure, you can install a PDF printer for use with MS Office but it's a lot more complicated and less intuitive. I tried setting that up for somebody and explaining "no, it's not a real printer, it's a fake printer that goes to PDF" was a lot harder than just saying "use this menu to save in PDF format"
Putting a name behind it should have no influence on the validity of the case being made. Most people can't tell BS from truth on this topic, but they can usually spot a personal attack, like the one I'm going to make on you because you're advocating polluted discourse. So fuck you, you fucking fuck.
There, I stooped to your level for a moment. I'm not proud, but you can't call me on it without dissing your own worthless argument. Now, back to rational discussion: Where did the AC lie?
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
Don't just use Open source, contribute your money and resources to its development.
Casteism
I just hope that people don't end up viewing "Open Source" as the problem reason as it will be nothing to do with that and entirely to do with yet another display of civil service incompetence.
I've been an open source proponent my whole life, but even I have to ask: How is OSS not the problem? The typical consumer-oriented open source program has a few dozen half-implemented features, lacks critical features its competitors have, and has a UI from ten years ago.
Most businesses I have worked with love their open source-based servers/storage, Filezilla, and Firefox. Everything else is proprietary stuff. They hate Office and Windows, and they still prefer ot to OOo or LO.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling