Switching From Microsoft Office To LibreOffice Saves Toulouse 1 Million Euros

jrepin sends this EU report: The French city of Toulouse saved 1 million euro by migrating all its desktops from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. This project was rooted in a global digital policy which positions free software as a driver of local economic development and employment. Former IT policy-maker Erwane Monthubert said, "Software licenses for productivity suites cost Toulouse 1.8 million euro every three years. Migration cost us about 800,000 euro, due partly to some developments. One million euro has actually been saved in the first three years. It is a compelling proof in the actual context of local public finance. ... France has a high value in free software at the international level. Every decision-maker should know this."

Comments

Re:Enjoy crumpets

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll pass.

As We Speak

[MightyMartian]

As we speak, Microsoft is instructing its European "business partners" to give a certain French city a shitload of really cheap Office licenses.

Re:As We Speak

[Tough Love]

As we speak, Microsoft is instructing its European "business partners" to give a certain French city a shitload of really cheap Office licenses.

Either that or members of city council wake up with severed horse heads in their beds.

Re:As We Speak

[mspohr]

Cheap is a better offer but it's hard to compete with free.

Re:As We Speak

[MightyMartian]

"Either your name is on the volume licensing agreement... or your brains."

Re:As We Speak

[hcs_$reboot]

I think we'll see more and more international organizations/companies migrating from US company products.

The problem is not using US products, the problem is having to use the expensive MS Office suite specifically.

Re:As We Speak

[Sudline]

But they use US products. Free open source US software!

Re:As We Speak

[turbidostato]

"As we speak, Microsoft is instructing its European "business partners" to give a certain French city a shitload of really cheap Office licenses."

Cheaper than zero?

Re:As We Speak

[JanneM]

Cheaper than zero?

Bribes would effectively create a negative cost, at least for the peoplereceiving them.

Re:As We Speak

[jez9999]

Actually, it would be more like "va te faire foutre". :-)

Re:As We Speak

[Noah Haders]

what are US products?

Re:As We Speak

[satuon]

But LibreOffice is still giving them value as a plausible threat, even if they're not using it. Besides, who knows how much time they must waste because of incompatibilities in documents they get from the outside world. If the offer is cheap enough, it might be worth it.

Re:As We Speak

[RockDoctor]

Either that or members of city council wake up with severed horse heads in their beds.

Or Jobbies?

(That's Scots for turds. as well as some Mac Fanboi.)

sure, works for France

[Anonymous Coward]

Try installing LibreOffice in America, and the users will whine, "why it not Microsoft????" They'll complain to your boss, you'll be fired and ostracized, and you'll have to learn French and relocate to France if you ever want to work again.

Re:sure, works for France

[OrangeTide]

If I could get a job in France, I think I'd move. I'd have more vacation time and I can drink wine at lunch.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

You can have all the vacation time you want anywhere you live, all you do is negotiate terms of your own contract. Vacation time is not something that government can force an employer to add on top of your salary, it is your salary, it is just a different way to pay you. You can get more money or more vacation time, your call. It is the same situation with anything that is mandated by a government that must be part of your employment contract. You want to get medical insurance through your employer then your hourly rate is going to be lower, same with any tax.

Re:sure, works for France

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't be the only person who drinks wine for lunch in America.

Re:sure, works for France

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do that in the US too. Just in the other order.

Drink Wine at lunch => More "vacation" time :)

Re:sure, works for France

[CQDX]

That was true until MS brought the ribbon then it was "Why is IT forcing me to upgrade?"

Now it's happening again with the latest Office with their Metro-ized GUI.

First thing I did when I got a new shiny laptop with Office 2013 was install LibreOffice so I can focus on working, and not relearning how to do my usual tasks with a new UI.

Actually what I really did first was install VMWare and get Xubuntu installed but you get my point.

Re:sure, works for France

[swb]

You can have all the vacation time you want anywhere you live

Which is why every American takes 6 weeks in the summer.

In my experience, most permanent job employers don't like to negotiate on vacation time. Sometimes they'll give on a day or two, but usually they're not crazy about vacation time that deviates from whatever the position qualifies for. The only explanation ever given to me was that because salary is "secret" it's easier to compensate employees differentially; vacation is visible to other employees at the same level and differential compensation creates tension.

In a contract employment situation you can negotiate anything, but I've found in shorter term contracts there's usually some kind of deadline that's non-negotiable, making free-lance vacationing a little bit challenging.

Re:sure, works for France

[ClaraBow]

funny!

Re:sure, works for France

[Anonymous Coward]

Vacation time is not something that government can force an employer to add on top of your salary, it is your salary, it is just a different way to pay you.

I don't know for sure about France but in many European countries vacation is by law on top of your salary, so you're still getting your normal paycheck when you're on vacation. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the case in France as well.

Re:sure, works for France

[AnOnyxMouseCoward]

In a theoretical world you would be correct, but in practice you're wrong. It's very hard to negotiate something out of the norm, which in the US, is vacation time. For example, try negotiating a role as an associate in investment banking while saying "hey cut down 5 weeks of my salary I'll take extra time off." It can't work, because the culture doesn't allow it. You either accept the role with no vacation and high pay, or you don't get hired. I can easily negotiate a couple grands on a salary, but getting an extra week off? Rough.

Also the "market wage" (or "market total compensation package") is highly dependent on the laws regulating it. If every single company in the US was paying you a pittance, with some paying less or more of a pittance, you would technically be "forced" to work for close to nothing because you won't have the choice to do otherwise. That's exactly what's happening with the minimum wage and people with no education. They can't work for themselves because they lack that capacity, and are stuck accepting $7/h because that's the only thing they can have (that, or crime, I guess). It would take extraordinary courage to pay your employees more than "you have to", even if sometimes that's the right thing to do for the company and the country (notice how Seattle isn't dying off right now, and how Ford helped bring a middle-class to America).

Re:sure, works for France

[kthreadd]

Your total compensation is just it. You can negotiate to be compensated in dollars, pieces of silver, gallons of milk, condoms or paid vacation days, but all of these are part of total price of your labour and where you get something, you lose something somewhere else.

I would not say that it's part of your compensation if there was a law that said that everyone should have at least x number of paid days off.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Before you make another comment on this, think, where is the money coming from to pay for your vacation? You think it's coming out of your employer or out of your own productivity? Obviously (well, it should be obvious) that it is coming out of your productivity. That means that you are compensated in those vacation days rather than any other form of compensation that you might have negotiated with your employer.

Your vacation days are just your wages that are not given to you as money.

Re:sure, works for France

[kthreadd]

I understand your point but I can't see how vacation could even be a factor when negotiating salaries. Salaries are primarily negotiated based on supply and demand, and when no one can be denied their paid vacation that factor doesn't matter anymore.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

But of-course it matters, what it does it lowers your expected salary across the board. Sure, it's market rate on top of a government mandated minimum but that's a mandated minimum that is not supplanted by a higher wage (like the minimum wage law is irrelevant from point of view of your rate if your rate is higher than the minimum wage, though it is not irrelevant if you realise that minimum wage pushes many prices of products you buy up and thus robs you of your purchasing power all in the name of hiding inflation created by the government in the first place) but in fact the minimum mandated vacation days are actually part of your total compensation.

My point is that in a system where government sets minimum vacation days your hourly wage is lower than it would have been otherwise. If a government comes out with another law that increases the number of paid vacation days your employer will likely not reduce your salary directly right away (though I would) but instead most employers will work this out by reducing your bonuses / raises and by attrition, where the new employees would start with a lower hourly wage and/or other benefits and/or with fewer raises, etc.

Basically again, money doesn't come from nowhere, the law of conservation of energy still applies. Your productivity commands your total compensation and your government mandated vacation days are paid to you in lie of hourly wages.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Again, in a system where there is a law mandating some minimum paid vacation days your hourly wage is lower than in an equivalent system where this law doesn't exist. Your employer already took the law into account when offering your compensation package, the market has taken your minimum paid vacation days into account while discovering price for your hourly labour. You are getting paid in vacation days, that's all it means, and the government dictated to you that you have to take part of your compensation in vacation days rather than in money or whatever you might have negotiated yourself.

Re:sure, works for France

[techno-vampire]

You want to get medical insurance through your employer then your hourly rate is going to be lower, same with any tax.

Back in the '50s my father voted in favor of a proposal by his union to accept medical benefits instead of a raise in the hourly rate. Years later, he told me he considered it one of the best decisions he ever made.

Re:sure, works for France

[Teun]

I'm not so sure about this 'on top of your salary'.

In The Netherlands a minimum vacation of four weeks is the law, the payment during this period is a deferred payment.

Meaning an annual salary is calculated and the first 6 months of the year 1/13th of it is kept back for payment of salary during your holidays.
The 1/13th of other 6 months are advanced.

Re:sure, works for France

[Teun]

How the hell can you predict these 15 sick days?

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Well of-course you should be able to negotiate how you want to get your compensation, but that's the point. What if government came out with a law telling you that you absolutely cannot negotiate the terms, you cannot be paid in medical insurance but instead you have to always be compensated in government bonds?

The reason that it was a good deal for your father was because the part of the total compensation that was the medical insurance was not taxed the same way as money. Income taxes didn't apply to that part of the compensation. The other reason was all the changes that government introduced related to health care and insurance, especially (if this was the USA) in 1965, with the introduction of Medicare, the prices went up because of government money in health insurance. The last reason is of-course inflation. The government likes to pretend that there is no inflation, but the reality is quite different. Inflation is rampant, so getting the same good (as a percentage value of the total compensation package) today as 60 years ago for example means that you are able to escape the horrific effects of inflation as well.

I didn't say you shouldn't be able to be paid in vacation days or in insurance or in gallons of milk. All I am saying is that you should be able to make those choices for yourself and not have government dictate to you how to get paid.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

That is not the problem of your employer, that's your own problem. You should be worried about maintaining your own health, your employer shouldn't be in the picture even for this. This is what you should take into account while negotiating if you can afford to do that in the economy the way it is.

Re:sure, works for France

[dcollins]

Oh, to live in a libertarian paradise where everything on earth is explainable within the first week of Econ 101.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Oh, to live in a physical world, where the laws of conservation of energy cannot be broken.

Fixed that for you.

Re:sure, works for France

[techno-vampire]

I didn't say you shouldn't be able to be paid in vacation days or in insurance or in gallons of milk. All I am saying is that you should be able to make those choices for yourself and not have government dictate to you how to get paid.

Agreed. However, the whole point of my post was not just to show that there's more to your compensation than just what you see on your paycheck but to give an example of how such alternate forms of payment can be worth much more than most people think.

Re:sure, works for France

[Lennie]

Don't forget to mention something about healthcare.

Re:sure, works for France

[Rising Ape]

Without laws and regulations it is up to you to negotiate. With the laws and regulations it is already negotiated for you, you have no choice but to accept part of your compensation in vacation/sick days rather than in hourly wage.

And without the laws and regulations I have no choice but to accept sod all holiday time because employers won't budge on the issue. The average person's negotiating power is minuscule compared to a big company.

Before health and safety laws workers got killed on the job all the time, and the attitude was largely "there's lots of desperate workers, they can be easily replaced". If a safe working environment was beyond the power of the little people to negotiate, what chance a less serious matter like holidays?

Re:sure, works for France

[Maxo-Texas]

You are really quite mistaken. The attitude you are displaying is actually quite recent- it developed after 1980. "Business" is purely a social construct. If you look into the history of corporations, the legal constructs were explicitly created for the benefit of society in general in mind.

If all businesses had no employees- then no one could buy any products.

Money is just how we agree to swap things around in society to prevent violence.

Whenever things get too unbalanced, the violence is waiting around just under the surface. It's happened over and over throughout history. Even the wealthy are starting to be openly concerned about the imbalance of the distribution of income and wealth in society.

If we reach a point where business practices benefit well under 50% of the population, I assure you that things will change.

Re:sure, works for France

[Maxo-Texas]

1 Luxembourg $4,089
2 Norway $3,678
3 Austria $3,437
4 United States $3,263
5 United Kingdom $3,065
6 Belgium $3,035
7 Sweden $3,023
8 Ireland $2,997
9 Finland $2,925
10 South Korea $2,903
11 France $2,886

So basically, you get better, less expensive, more effective* mostly free national health care, better social security, better standards of living, shorter working days (8-4/9-5 vs 8-5/9-6), and 6 weeks vacation.

For that you surrender $387 a month. In france.

It costs you less in Sweden, Belgium, and UK. I think working conditions in Ireland are currently worse than in the U.S.

It costs you nothing in Luxembourg (atypical), Norway, and Austria.

*While exceptions exist in the U.S., they are usually for very expensive treatments. In general, the mortality rate, child and infant mortality rate, and lifespan are better in the listed countries. U.S. health care outcomes for the bottom 80% are worse than 28 or 29 other 1st world countries.

---

More generally (not in response to your post), you can't negotiate vacation in the U.S. It's a benefit- it's hard coded in the software. I did it once- getting a week without pay- after five years my new manager just arbitrarily cancelled it when I got my paid 3rd week. There was no one to appeal to if I wanted to remain employed.

Re:sure, works for France

[Maxo-Texas]

In ireland, you get 20 days vacation and 9 paid holidays a year.

The average Irish working week is 39 hours and the legal maximum 48.

I was forced to work 83 hours at my last employers. On salary.

Then a year later, they laid all of us off and replaced us with indians.

Then we found out through leaks they had been PLANNING to lay us off when they ordered us to work those hours.

People had heart attacks, divorces.

It's evil and society shouldn't tolerate it.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Actually you are mistaken. I do not have a "post 1980 attitude", I have the attitude that USA was built upon or pre-1908 attitude (before the Sherman act, before IRS, before Fed, before Medicare and Medicaid and SS and minimum wage and labour laws and all the departments and business regulations and income taxes, before the insane levels of inflation due to government defaulting on the gold dollar).

You shouldn't be worried about 'business practices', you should be worried about individual freedoms. Business practices in a free market deliver what the market wants. Without individual freedoms we get nothing we want at all.

Re:sure, works for France

[snakeplissken]

all you do is negotiate terms of your own contract.

oh ffs,
even if everyone on the planet had the best posible education and skills training that their brains and bodies could attain, the enormous majority would still be 'wage slaves' unable to negotiate the terms of a contract because the jobs where that would be possible would be so few compared to the number of job seekers, capitalism requires that there are winners, and winners are defined by the prescence of 'losers', and there need to be many more of the latter than the former.
note, this is not a call for communism, merely an observation that humanity is far from developing a sane way of ordering its affairs

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

I do not see how anything you said negates any single thing that I said. If the government forces part of your wage to be paid in vacation pay it means you cannot legally receive your entire compensation package in currency of your choice.

Re: sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

No, I am running my own business, I am creating value out of nothing by building stuff that didn't exist before I decided to build it. It's not a zero sum game, that's how businesses make money by making new products.

However this is not the subject under discussion here, while the economy is not a zero sum game your total value to me as an employee has a minimum and a maximum levels on it, so your total compensation will be within certain boundaries, thus if government dictates a minimum number of paid vacation days, those will be counted as part of your total compensation and your hourly wage is also part of that total compensation, so is the payroll tax (both sides of it, the employee and the employer portion), so is anything else.

The minimum boundary to your total compensation package is the your value in the market and the minimum dictated level of compensation by the government. So what you are going to get into your hands will be the delta: total compensation package minus all the other expenses that are government mandated (taxes, minimum paid vacation, whatever), the cash that you receive is the rest of it.

You are not going to be paid more than you are worth in the market and you are not going to be paid more on top of what you are worth in the market regardless of what the government dictates. Your total pay will include all of those components.

This, by the way, is a huge problem for the economy. To pay somebody 18,000 dollars for example, the employer has to shell out 27,000 (or so), so the labour prices are high while the wages are low.

Well, that's what you get for all this government, that and the falling value of your money and the rising cost of living.

Re:sure, works for France

[khchung]

In a theoretical world you would be correct, but in practice you're wrong. It's very hard to negotiate something out of the norm, which in the US, is vacation time.

Wrong. You have been fooled by HR drones if you think this way. Negotiating something out of the norm is done ALL THE TIME. That's why it is called "negotiating" your compensation (every part of it is open to negotiation), and not just "haggling" over the price (only).

For example, try negotiating a role as an associate in investment banking while saying "hey cut down 5 weeks of my salary I'll take extra time off." It can't work, because the culture doesn't allow it. You either accept the role with no vacation and high pay, or you don't get hired. I can easily negotiate a couple grands on a salary, but getting an extra week off? Rough.

That means you failed to sell yourself as a valuable money maker with a unique combination of skills and abilities during your interview. If the hiring manager thinks you are unique and you can help the company's bottom line that no other candidates can match, even if you got extra time off, then a competent hiring manager WILL twist HR's arm to MAKE IT HAPPEN.

If you sold yourself as just another replaceable cog in the wheel, then of course don't expect anything special.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

And without the laws and regulations I have no choice but to accept sod all holiday time because employers won't budge on the issue.

- and you won't budge on your hourly rate, it takes two to tango. I am an employer, I negotiate with my employees all the time, nothing is off the table.

Re:sure, works for France

[phantomfive]

In my experience, most permanent job employers don't like to negotiate on vacation time.

It takes more negotiation skill. I recently negotiated a 4-day work week. I took a 20% pay cut for it (totally worth it). Essentially, instead of framing it as an adversarial negotiation, I considered it a problem for us to solve together. "I want to work here, you want me to work here, but this is what I need. How can we solve this problem?" Most of the time was spent helping them overcome concerns. At one point, I said, "yeah, that's a managerial problem, but I'm confident the managers here are capable of overcoming it."

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

You sound a lot like a manager.

- you mean I know what I am talking about. I run my company, so you are correct, I am a manager - managing a business. I make hiring decisions, I make product decisions. I am also the chief architect, every one of my employees comes to me with the question "what do I do next?" when they are done with the current task. I deal with the clients, I search for new ones, I decide what internal products we are building, I decides what technology we use, I decide what everybody does here. Yes, I manage the place and I do know what I am talking about whether this concerns technology or hiring or client communications and of-course writing checks.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

I worked as a contractor software developer/architect for 10 years, always negotiating everything I needed to negotiate in every contract. I had probably negotiated 30 or so contracts (and contract extensions) in that time period and nothing was off the table. I worked for large companies and for small, negotiation was always part of the process.

Re:sure, works for France

[rtb61]

There is a phrase that covers you "I'm alright jack" http://www.urbandictionary.com...!. I can assure you by far the majority of American workers get to negotiate fuck all and are lucky to get reasonable health coverage let alone anything else. So for them moving to any other modern democracy with universal health care, set protective employment conditions etc would make them far better off even when by far the majority of them are to ignorant to realise this. As for the minority, well, "I'm alright jack".

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

I think I replied to something similar already, so you can enjoy the answer if you like.

Re:sure, works for France

[CodeBuster]

in many European countries vacation is by law on top of your salary, so you're still getting your normal paycheck when you're on vacation.

That's a financially unsophisticated view. In such cases the salary always includes the vacation in so far as it's lower than it otherwise would be were the vacation not required by law to be part of the total compensation. A cost to a company is still a cost. It doesn't matter that half the cost is due to salary and half the cost is due to the otherwise salaried employee being unavailable to work because he's on vacation. It's the total cost that matters and the vacation must be a non-zero part of that. I'd rather be free to negotiate my own preferred kind and amount of compensation, whether it be through vacation time or more money (I prefer money), than have the government force me to spend a mandatory minimum share of my compensation on vacation, whether I would chose to "purchase" that much vacation on my own or not.

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

No, you're DEMONSTRATABLY not. Most people in the US are dissatisfied with the number of vacation days ( http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... ) yet lack ANY power to change it. If the market actually worked (hint: it doesn't) then employers offering more vacation days would get better employees, gain a competitive advantage and crush employers with less vacation time.

Of course, in reality it's a race to the bottom. If a minimum vacation time wasn't set by law, then there'd be NO vacation time at all in a short amount of time.

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

Read: "race down to the bottom", please. Only then you are allowed to resume your inane bumbling.

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

What laws govern conservation of monetary amount? Right now US and ALL other advanced countries have capacity to produce much more than needed.

Re:sure, works for France

[Anonymous Coward]

> You should be worried about maintaining your own health, your employer shouldn't be in the picture even for this.

A lot of people believe the government should be worried about maintaining everyone's health. Especially since it will pay the costs if you don't (yes, in many cases even in the US the government will end up paying the bill).
And some people are even crazy enough to claim that the employer very much must ensure that as well. Even if maybe not all go as far as in Sweden where they'll fine the hell out of you as employer if your employee doesn't take his 20 days of vacation or regularly works more than 50 hours a week or your construction site employees fail to follow your safety rules and you didn't prevent it (by firing them if necessary).

Re:sure, works for France

[Maxo-Texas]

CIA world factbook:

  Exports:

$113.6 billion (2013 est.)
country comparison to the world: 35
$119.3 billion (2012 est.)
Exports - commodities:

machinery and equipment, computers, chemicals, medical devices, pharmaceuticals; food products, animal products

It's 25th in the world for per capita income.
The united states is 14th.

Re:sure, works for France

[Maxo-Texas]

Woo hoo! Mr. Libertarian! You are so right.

Folks had a "choice" of quitting into the highest unemployment in a decade, losing their houses, forcing their kids out of college, and giving up any shot at retirement.

Free choice! America! Fuck yea!

Unlike so many other countries in the world, many of which have higher living standards and higher per capita income than the united states and where labor laws protect the ordinary citizens from such abuse.

In my case, I did exercise my "choice" as soon as I made my "number" and retired at 51.

Re:sure, works for France

[Maxo-Texas]

It's getting increasingly fucked up for healthy people in the bottom 80% as well.

Essentially the top 20% has taken almost every bit of wealth and income produced by increased productivity since 1980. And a lot of that is focused in the top 1.67%.

Re:sure, works for France

[Giloo]

If you work full time for a company in France, you get 5 weeks of paid vacations. It's the law. And as far as productivity goes, 5 weeks of rest is probably not even enough... Though if employers were reasonnable about it in the first place, it wouldn't have to be in the law...

Re:sure, works for France

[Bearhouse]

Sadly, the long lunch, with good cheap food (and wine) has long disappeared from the French business culture.
Sandwiches at the desk are more the norm.

Luckily, the women are still (mostly) slim and elegant :)

Re:sure, works for France

[Bearhouse]

It is, for most salaried employees, i.e. you get a set amount of paid vacation days as part of your salary.
Or put another way, the boss pays you less, but you get your time off "for free".
Since you pay tax and social charges on your salary, (and these are typically indexed to the amount you earn) it's actually a good deal, but most people don't think about it that way.

Re:sure, works for France

[Rob Y.]

A negotiation in which you, presumably, had them over a barrel. You can bet your employers are kicking themselves for letting you become essential enough to be able to negotiate such a deal. I'm speaking from some experience, since I "negotiated" a 3-day workweek after mass layoffs and indescriminate outsourcing, the results of which finally proved to them that they indeed needed me there.

Re:sure, works for France

[phantomfive]

A negotiation in which you, presumably, had them over a barrel.

No, as I said before, it was not an adversarial negotiation.

Re:sure, works for France

[strikethree]

I wouldn't... but those benefits sure are tempting! :)

Re:sure, works for France

[Maxo-Texas]

Well, we can say that we should not tolerate it and then make legal changes to prevent it.

For example, we could fix the abuse of exempt status and require pay for hours over 50 per week for people who are not actively managing at least a few other people or who are owners of more than 10% of the business or whose income is at least triple the average income (currently about $150,000).

The united states is somewhat unique among the top 25 countries with high hours, low protections, low services but yet only 14th in per capita income. And that per capita income is skewed because our gini index is so far out of whack compared to other non-3rd world countries.

The average wasn't 80 hours a week (that's goldmen sachs.. who recently officially cut back from 110 hours a week to 90 hours a week). The average was 72 hours a week for about 6 months (including a 27 and a 28 day "week" where we worked sundays and saturdays. It was about 68 hours for the rest of the 18 months. The insane hours were for releases where we were both on call overnight and had to work the next day (I slept in the car in the office parking lot- showered in the gym and went back to work after 4 hours sleep).

We can fight these trends by sharing the information that if you have indian contracting company workers, and you are changing your software in a huge project- the repeated occurrence is to lay off 90-95% of the american staff when the project is done. So LOOK FOR A JOB as soon as those conditions start.
Be aware that if the company suddenly starts working you 60-80 hours a week- they have no respect for you and you have no security. So don't wait til they dump several hundred of you on the market at the same time.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

False logic. You could have argued the same wrong point back when 90% of the population worked in food production. Industrial revolution, free market capitalism brought individual productivity up dramatically and thus allowed workers to work much less to produce much more, not just for themselves but for everybody else. Before government stepped in to destroy the free market capitalism by changing laws so that laws would not apply equally to different people, free market capitalism was working to reduce the length of the work week and to reduce work hours in a day. Without government intervention in the last 100 years, free market capitalism would have brought work week and work hours even lower. 3 day work week, 8 hour days while making enough to live middle class life? Free market was working towards that. Government destroyed that dynamic and stopped and reversed that trend.

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

Except that the industrial revolution happened when most employers were small companies and needed qualified employees with specific experience. Also, industrial companies had a healthy profit margin (because of lots of added value).

That sort of stuff doesn't happen anymore. Productivity is growing but wages are stagnating. Again, this is not a point of view, but a fact.

Re:sure, works for France

[unixisc]

In the case of Munich, a whole new Linux distro was created - LiMux. But here, the French could get back to what was once a great Linux distro - Mandrake. They could use either Mandriva or Mageia, and go from there. I doubt that either of those 2 would have deteriorated as far as internationalization goes.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

To work in manufacturing today it still takes experience, workers must be trained. Productivity of workers is growing in countries where businesses are still manufacturing, mining, producing something.

In USA there are very few jobs in manufacturing. Where people are mining in the USA, the people's wages are higher. However in the service sector the productivity gains are achieved by automating and getting rid of employees. The gains go to those, who are actually productive.

Most importantly, what you are looking at when talking about "productivity gains" is government stats on gdp, these underestimate inflation by a large factor. What is growing is not productivity in most cases but nominal prices due to all the money that is pumped into the system by the Fed. Under these conditions the productivity is falling not growing. Productive people produce, unproductive people print, borrow and run trade deficits that cannt be offset even by pickup in oil mining and exports. USA is even importing coal from Russia today instead of mining enough for itself. 90% of seafood are imports. There is no productivity, the government killed it and turned the entire country into dependents. Independance day? What a joke.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Amount of total dollars in existance does nothing to increase total productivity (well, inflation does cause shift of capital and plenty of misallocation, so the more they print the less productive output is created, but that is beside the main point). Number of dollars is like number of units on a clock or a thermometer face. Sure, you can increase the number used to measure something, you can split anything you are measuring into smaller and smaller units. You can even pretend that the smaller units you are measuring something in have not changed because of that change (inflation) but it does not change the item you are measuring.

So printing a ton more of dollars, you are reducing the size of the unit (dollar) that you are measuring in, but what you are measuring did not change because of it. 100 dollars in existance becomes 10000 dollars in existance by printing (or virtual printing). This does not increase the economy, it only increases prices and shifts purchasing power from those who produced and saved to those who got their hands on the newly printed, counterfeit currency. Inflation is theft, redistribution from the productive and frugal to the unproductive and wasteful.

Real money is created by work, real money measures productive output. Fake money eliminates productivity by misalocating scarce resources, by stealing from the productive and subsidising the wasteful and useless.

Re: sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Well, since it is my own business that I am running, a business that I started, I wonder how could I possibly "over promote" myself, but carry on.

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

Productivity in ALL sectors is growing, mainly as a result of IT advances. And it doesn't require much additional training, so wages are NOT growing: http://www.epi.org/blog/worker...

So much for your theory that wages should reflect productivity growth. They don't. And babbling about GDP and inflation and conspiracies is inane - show us a complete model, without magic "here be conspiracies".

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

Nope, it can and it does. If the industry stalls because there's insufficient demand, then additional dollars in circulation help to restart it. Without causing inflation (i.e. price increases).

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

If there is a conspirancy here, it is the conspirancy of stupidity. Every couple of years the government actually posts information about the changes to the inflation calculations and what is counted toward the gdp. If inflation in the 1970s was counted the way it is "counted" today, it would have been negative, yet at the time Nixon imposed price controls to "fight inflation". It was the wrong thing to do, but at least the numbers were not fudged yet. As I said, the measuring stick is changing, yet idiots keep pretending or actually believing that nothing changed. They change definitions and you straight out buy the propaganda. It is actually out in the open, posted for everyone's consumption, but you choose ignorance. See, that is a conspiracy, conspiracg of willful ignorance by denying facts. Now, if you do not actually follow anything, you are not paying attention to the changes in the gdp and inflation accounting, though it is not done in any secrecy whatsoever, then it is a conspiracy of ignorance, but then stop pretending with me here. Use your willful ignorance of the facts, posted, public facts with somebody else, agreed?

There is no productivity increase when you produce nothing that you consume.

Re:sure, works for France

[unixisc]

He took a 20% pay cut, which sounds like a pro-rated cut in lieu of the extra day off. I don't see how his employer is any worse off: if anything, they get to save 20% of his salary, while he gets to enjoy 3 days off. A win-win situation.

Re:sure, works for France

[nobodie]

Well, I use LO in the US, in an office environment with a hundred or so people, almost nobody knows that I'm not using MSO. What people don't seem to get is that most people would use a text editor daily if it said "Word" on the icon.

If I tell people that I am using a Linux desktop, they won't touch it. If I tell them I am just using a cool new desktop they try it out and like it. I don't bother to show them all the things I can do that they can't, don't baffle them, just keep work flowing and everything is good. The same thing with LO. Just bring up a document and let them write, no problem. Tell them it is different and they will freak.

stupid humans

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

the people that believe that are wrong for many reasons. Freedom being one, actually creating a moral hazard is another, eventual destruction of the economy due to government running things into the ground and then requiring more and more taxes and borrowing is third, inflation caused by printing to satisfy all that excessive spending is fourth, just pushing prices up for no reason by destroying normal competitive forces to set up government sponsored monopolies is fifth and I can go on.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Keynesian nonsense. Real demand is not fuelled by fake money. Fake money only steals and misallocates scarce resources. If the Keynesian nonsensical idiotic moronic irrational ignorant ideas were anywhere near the ballpark even, Zimbabwe would have been the most prosperous country in the world and then every other country that ran its currency into hyperinflationary mode.

Inflation is destructive to the economy, not constructive. The most productive era in USA history was during a slightly deflationary period of time, before IRS and Fed existed. You wouldn't know any of it for a very simple reason: you don't know anything about history whatsoever, public "education", you see.

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

Nope. You fail Keynesianism. Look, go and study orthodox saltwater economics. You simply have no idea what you're talking about.

For comparison, I read Austerian babbles and monetarism theories. I _know_ them, even though I disagree with them. But you simply don't know the stuff you're talking about.

Neokeynesianism says that "fake" money CAN boost output and growth, if conditions are right. One of the criteria is the rate at zero lower bound. Note, Keynesianism does NOT say that printing more money ALWAYS helps.

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

There are alternative ways to measure inflation. One Billion Prices project does this - it actually checks the prices of items sold on the Internet. Its values agree with the official stats.

Look, you've been preaching inflation for 5 years by now. At first it was hyperinflation round the corner, then it was 'delayed' inflation, then something else. Now it's the government conspiracy. What next? Aliens substituting people to fake inflation numbers?

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Which is why every American takes 6 weeks in the summer.

- this does nothing at all to contradict what I am saying, in fact it supports my position, not yours.

My position is that people need to be able to negotiate their own terms of employment, their own method of payment and most people select cash instead of vacation time in USA, but specifically this is happening because USA workers are very unproductive, because vast majority of them are employed in the service sector and this is a very unproductive sector as a whole, paying very low wages, it requires little training and the competition for these low wage unskilled position is high.

This means that the USA economy is extremely unproductive and most Americans cannot afford to take vacations, they need every dollar they get just to survive.

In this very thread I posted a number of comments explaining my point of view

and there were many 'back and forward' comments as well. The arguments presented against my position are not based on sound understanding of the economy, prices, money, they are mostly based on ideology, but ideology does not create a sound economy.

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Re:sure, works for France

[AnOnyxMouseCoward]

You're correct for all situations involving special snowflakes. If you're a superstar coder, recognized by the industry, you can negotiate the terms you want. If you're a salesperson with unparalleled network, you can negotiate the terms you want. If you're Robert Downey Jr, you can negotiate whatever you want.

However, the truth of the matter is:
1. Most of the time you negotiate with HR and not a decision-maker
2. You're not a special snowflake

I'm not saying it never happens, but for the vast majority of the population, it won't. Let's face it, the vast majority of the population is just another cog in the wheel, and entirely replaceable. In a world where the superstars get what they want, and the rest of the population eats dirt, you have raising inequality where a majority of the population suffers. That's not my ideal, and I think it's selfish to think that "people can negotiate what they want because free market yea!"

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Inflation is here, inflation is real, you have your eyes and ears closed in wilful ignorance of facts. The prices are rising, and while at first the money printing was mostly pushing asset prices, for the last few years actually consumer prices have been going up quite a bit faster (actually more like an order of magnitude faster) than the nonsensical government numbers.

Again, there is only conspiracy of ignorance on your part, obviously you are in fact not paying any attention whatsoever to the gradual changes that government introduces into the calculations of inflation and the GDP. As one tiny example last year the GDP calculations started double counting salaries that people are getting in creative fields, like production of movies, authoring books, creating music and such. These are now not only counted as salaries but also double counted as 'investments'. If a business was doing what government is doing in accounting and finances, the business owners would have been investigated for a massive fraud. Since you are not paying any attention, you are not noticing or pretending not to notice of such gradual changes, that's conspiracy of ignorance.

You are clearly not paying attention to the rising prices in everything, from education to health care and insurance, to energy, to food. You are probably celebrating the rising stock market and housing prices as something 'good', while in reality in a growing economy prices would have been falling due to increases in efficiencies and actual productivity.

As is, productivity is falling, not gaining, there are no increases. You are probably a somewhat rational person in other areas of life (you probably wouldn't stick your finger into fire for example, at least not more than once), however you are absolutely willing to cheer for yet another growing bubble in assets, real estate and bonds that the Fed is inflating even though the negative results of the last bubbles haven't even been fixed and will not be fixed because the fixes are not allowed.

All this money printing inflates larger and larger bubbles, they implode and then instead of allowing the economy to work through all the resource misallocations and incorrect pricing information, the government tries to avoid the pain associated with the recession (which is the actual fix to the problem) by printing and throwing even more money into the system. They can do that for a while, but that is coming to an inevitable end.

When I started talking about the inflation problems (more than 5 years ago, by the way), I already saw inflation, which you simply denied existed because you are participating in this wilful 'conspiracy', conspiracy of ignorance. Inflation was here, the inflating money supply was causing rise in the asset markets, now it is also in the bond market. Now inflation finally worked its way through to the consumer market, you can deny its existence as well, and again, AFAIC this is wilful ignorance. If you turn on any radio show where people call in, if you look at all the news, you would not be able to escape all the stories about people not being able to afford things due to rising prices. There is double digit inflation, no less. 8-10% increases in consumer prices (not in the electronics field, here the efficiencies in the free market are so huge, that they negate large amount of inflation), food, energy, utilities, health care, education, basically the items and services that people cannot go without are going up all the time.

Manufacturers do what they can, but you can only reduce quality and quantity inside a package so much, at some point you have to just increase prices, you can't sell 1 sheet of toilet paper at the price of a roll, you can only make that paper thinner up to a point, at some point you have to raise prices, which is what everybody is observing. While those, who run businesses see it much more clearly (after all, they have to know what they are buying and what they are paying in a more precise way), the general public is also concerned abou

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

So where _is_ this inflation? Why am I buying stuff for essentially the same amount that I was paying 6 years ago?

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

You are not buying stuff at the same price as 6 years ago, maybe you should actually pay attention to the receipts.

beef, pork, avocado, fruits, veggies, almonds, pinenuts, walnuts, mozarella, cheddar, other cheeses, seafood, grains, soy, soy, palm oil, milk, gasoline, beer and more beer, limes, canadian bacon, barley, restaurants, restaurants, restaurants,electrical energy, car rentals, hotel rooms, cab fairs,

air travel and air travel gets more expensive in many other ways, various extra fees, less room, more seats on planes

aluminium,

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Of-course I completely forgot to mention all of the service prices that are rising, from accounting, to lawyers, to court fees, to mailing, to education, to car repair, etc.

Did I forget to mention coffee and coffee shops?

Obviously water

They will talk about drought and bandits and weather and climate and every single excuse under the Sun except for the actual real cause of this nonsense: inflation.

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

You know, you are an idiot, right? I clicked one of your links at random:

"Wheat futures for March delivery climbed 0.8 percent to $5.735 a bushel, the first gain in six sessions. On Jan. 10, the price fell to $5.605, the lowest since July 2010."

Wow, we have deflation!!!111ONEONEONE. Hmm, maybe another link?

Bad news for burrito addicts: Chipotle announced it will raise its prices for the first time in three years, by 5 percent, in response to the increase in beef, avocado and cheese prices.

Whole 5% other 3 years, that's like 1.5% of inflation each year! The sky is falling!

If you actually could follow a logical argument, you'd have checked http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/ - it tracks the actual prices. So far their numbers are in agreement with the official stats. But no, libertards prefer to live in imaginary worlds, they are too scared to actually admit that their mythology of tax cuts as a universal treatment is wrong.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

No, you are the idiot. Deflation is not a price but is a monetary phenomena. As I said, wilful ignorance. Good luck.

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

No. Deflation is defined in a dictionary as a "general decrease in market prices". Inflation is defined as "general increase in market prices". So far there's been no significant inflation since the start of the crisis (no significant deflation in the US either).

Feel free to call your monetary phenomena something else, and then explain why they are good or bad.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Ha ha, as I said, once you redefine the words you can claim all sorts of nonsense.

1927, New Century Dictionary
Inflation: "The act of inflating, or the state of being inflated, specifically expansion or increase of the currency of a country by the issuing of paper money especially paper money not redeemable in specie or that is insufficiently secured by precious metal."

Not even a mention of prices.

Deflation is defined as the opposite of inflation.

Of-course the earlier in the dictionary world you go the more correct the definition, and the closer to the present, the more propaganda and nonsense is added to the definition, inserting the level of prices into definition of expansion and contraction of money supply. Prices do not inflate or deflate of-course, only total supply of money inflates and deflates. Inflation and deflation are changes in the measurement units, not changes in the economic output. Once you redefine the meanings of the words you lose all meaning altogether.

Once you ask the wrong question it doesn't matter what the answer is.

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

Maybe you should reach into the early days of the Roman Empire for a definition? According to YOUR definition - inflation is good and we ALWAYS should have A LOT MORE of it.

According to MY definition (which is a generally accepted one) we right now have inflation that is lower than an optimal target. But larger inflation (which may happen in future) is also bad.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Fake money cannot boost real productivity regardless of any conditions, it is shamanism through and through. But relax, nobody is fucking you in the ass, you don't need to squeeze that hard.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

There is no 'your' definition, the definition that you are cheering for is the definition of propaganda, redefining the meaning of words in order to promote wilful ignorance.

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

And? Feel free to invent your own term ('gazonk' sounds nice), build a theory that makes useful predictions around it and then explain to us why gazonk is so bad.

Right now you _dishonestly_ try to exploit a fear of inflation by redefining it to your liking.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Nonsense, inflation is expansion of money supply, nothing else. Rising prices (or prices that are failing to fall) can be a result of inflation. Inflation changes the size of the measurement units of the economy, value of the currency. Inflation does not improve economy in any way, it destroys the economy both by destroying value of savings and rising prices of real savings, thus denying access to capital for productive purposes and pushing up nominal prices of assets, creating asset bubbles, making it look like economy is growing (faking the GDP), while in reality the economy stays the same (or shrinks), only the units change.

You are using this in an Orwellian fashion to confuse the population on the causes of inflation and its effects.

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

Nope. You're talking about gazonk. Inflation is _defined_ as "a continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services " in the Mariam-Webster dictionary. Simple increase in monetary supply doesn't mean anything.

If you're arguing that increased money supply is ALWAYS bad, then the burden is on you to create a model that demonstrates this. And then to validate the model by making predictions about the past and future events.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Wrong, you are talking about 'gazonk', you do not get to point at shit, call it cheesecake for your political agenda and expect everybody to accept your nonsense.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

As to 'increased money supply being always bad' - you are putting words in my mouth.

Expanding FIAT currency, as in paper not backed by anything is always bad and the history is my witness, every time it was done it led to long term economic damage.

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

Nope. Expanding a fiat currency supply is not bad. And history is my witness.

Feel free to create a model that correctly predicts the result of 3x increase in the monetary supply. What's going to happen and why? Does it happen in all cases?

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

Sure. We can call increase in the monetary supply (fiat or any other type) a 'cheesecake', 'gazonk', 'blurb' or anything else. It's just not 'inflation' unless there's a corresponding increase in general prices for all goods.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Wrong, you do not get to rename rising prices into inflation and expansion (inflation) into rising prices.

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Expanding fiat currency leads to economic reduction, stagnation and often collapse, history is on my side, you don't have anything on yours. 1971 - the year of default on the US dollar was the beginning of the end of USA economy, since then the productivity has been shrinking, deficits and debts growing, government growing and individual freedoms shrinking at an increasing rate.

That's one example, obviously there are thousands, including USSR, Weimar Republic and at least 30 examples of countries destroying their currency that way in only the last 100 years.

As to whether any amount of inflation of fiat currency is bad, yes, theft and thus misallocation of resources from those who produce to those who do not produce in the free market (not enough to be compensated for it by more than what the stolen or inflated currency allowed) is not good by any stretch of imagination, unless you have your head stuck all the way up into your ass.

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

So to sum it up - you don't have a working model that can correctly predict the result of 3x expansion of the monetary supply. So you simply start raving, repeating discredited cliches. For example, Weimar Republic fell after 2 years of _deflation_. USSR had no inflation until it decided to allow free market.

And 100 years of currency destruction got us from muddy roads filled with horse dung to modern cities, airplanes and computers. I call that a win.

Re:sure, works for France

[Cyberax]

Ok. Then the burden is still on you to explain why inflation is bad. Why is expansion of fiat currency supply without corresponding price increases is bad?

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Prices are rising.

Prices would be rising much faster of-course if the foreigners weren't absorbing the inflation (taking US dollars in exchange for their production). What do you think 20 years of 500 Billion USD / year trade deficit means? It means that the money that is printed in the USA is transferred to companies that provide the USA with the products it consumes. The foreigners then take the US dollars to the foreign banks, the foreign banks buy the US dollars (exchange to the local currencies). The foreign central banks are just as responsible in this case, they also print money in response to the USA printing, so they take in the US dollars and either hold those dollars or buy US bonds with them.

Not only the USA was and still is benefiting from foreign productivity with all this money printing, it is also benefiting from foreigners buying up its debt, financing USA government spending.

In the short run (and I am talking about a few decades this has been happening) this gave Americans a boosted standard of living they couldn't pay for (they weren't producing themselves).

In the long run this destroyed productivity in the USA, because with all this debt financed consumption and growing government the only economy that USA is left with is taxes. USA lives off of other people's productivity and it's economy is tax and borrow and spend type of economy and this economy produced enough government, enough regulations, enough costs that manufacturing sector left the country.

So in the long term, what this created is a situation where Americans have no productive capacity of their own, the population is no longer able to produce, there are almost no factories, there are almost no skilled workers, able to work in factories, there is no real capital, only printed money, thus the real interest rates are sky high, which is why there is now more business destruction (starting in 2014) than new business creation in the States. More businesses shut down and/or left the country than were started in 2014.

That's the long term damage of inflation, that and also of-course all of the pensioners, who have to come out of their retirement, because they can no longer have any return on their life savings, there is no return on the money that is saved, the savers in USA are destroyed, the debtors are favoured. This policy is the government policy, the policy of the biggest debtor - the government.

The government will pretend that inflation doesn't exist because the wages aren't going up, well, the labour costs are going up, the wages are not, that's not a paradox, that's stagflation and depression, that's expected unlike the Keynesians believe it to be an impossibility.

The reality is that USA has no productivity gains, very few people in USA are more productive than before, the share buy back programs the socialists in the media and government are touting as an example of greedy corporations, hiding their money is another example of this problem, since vast majority of that cash that is on hold by companies is borrowed. The money is borrowed, the large companies that actually have large assets and thus can get the loans (based on newly created fiat) from the banks (unlike new businesses), believe that the future value of money is lower than relative value of their shares, so they borrow money at these artificial rates and use it to buy back their stock, thus also artificially boosting the stock prices. But hey, I would do that too if I could get my hands on cheap money from government, why not? That seems to be a much simpler way to 'boost earnings' in USA now than actually growing sales, which is impossible at this point, consumers are out of money, out of credit, the new housing bubble that the Fed was inflating is bursting already, so the 'wealth effect' will work in reverse now.

In any case, I am sure you will be just fine, so don't worry about it. What do you care what I think?

Re:sure, works for France

[roman_mir]

Weimar Republic destroyed its currency via money printing, deflation should have been allowed to work its course, it wasn't.

USSR was printing trillions every year and had no production at all to justify any of that printing. It collapsed once it pretty much ran out of gold to buy food.

100 years of currency destruction in USA got you from a well working private rail road system, largest in the world at the time, to a bunch of unsustainable government subsidised roads, that cause massive pollution by burning all that oil that gets the Americans from their unsustainable suburbs to where they actually need to be - near some jobs that are still there and back. However the actual productivity is destroyed, instead of being world's largest creditor nation, as USA became over the 19th century, it is now largest debtor in history of the world, probably largest debtor in our Galaxy, running 500Billion USD/year trade deficits.

By the way cars and airplanes in USA were a product of the previous economy, the productive economy. Modern economy in USA would not have produced any of that, modern economy in USA has failing airlines and failing car companies all in need of being shut down and restructured, but instead being bailed out time and again.

Enjoy your 'win', I think it will not last for too long.

Good to hear

[redmid17]

Germany experienced both sides of the coin: http://www.infoworld.com/d/ope...

The French police seem to have had a good amount of success as well: http://www.zdnet.com/french-po...

There are probably always going to be use cases for the majority of users to be fine with Open or Libre office. Some specialized functionality in finance might merit excel. There is nothing I've found on Linux that easily replaces Visio or Project ( libre-project is fine for reading, but I've had many issues with creating them). It's what I use at home (lubuntu). At work, I do have to say I prefer Outlook/Exchange for integrated mail and calendar, but I could probably live without Word/Excel/PPT.

Here's to hoping Libreoffice and the other forks can continue to expand and refine their software.

Re:Good to hear

[just_another_sean]

Most of what I've ever had to use it for was pretty simple so genuinely asking here; is Dia not a good Visio replacement? Are there features in Visio that make it more attractive for even simple stuff or is it that Visio has advanced features that haven't been replicated elsewhere?

Re:Good to hear

[silas_moeckel]

It's native objects can look rather childish, look at the cloud object that looks like something from ms paint for an example. But the big issue for me is it's missing the tools built around visio. Network discovery being the big one. Sure could I hack something together to use an existing tool and get the objects into Dia. I may be wrong as it's been awhile since I looked at it.

Re:Good to hear

[UnknownSoldier]

From your first link, with emphasis addd:

Five years and at least $600,000 on, with unhappy staff complaining of interoperability problems with Microsoft Office documents, city administrators called in a consultant from a Microsoft partner to support the city council in fixing the problem. The solution proposed: a complete reversal of course, switching back to Microsoft Office for a sum of at least $500,000, with a $360-per-seat cost for licensing Microsoft Office and no firm estimates for undoing the earlier migration.

There are no details on what the "interoperability" problems were. Was it features lacking in LibreOffice? Was it bugs in LibreOffice? The article doesn't say.

If businesses actually pooled their resources they could actually get LibreOffice "fixed" -- but they would rather piss money away on licensing costs.

Re:Good to hear

[xeno]

Visio... ugh. I have a love-hate relationship with Visio, and got off the train at Visio 2010 -- which is ok, because it runs acceptably under Wine.

Some detail: At work I have a major publication based on about 50 complex diagrams in Visio, now in its 5th edition over the past 5 years. Originally drafted using 2003, the move to 2010 was annoying but acceptable, as it brought no discernible benefit but took away no features I needed. I was also ok with 2010 because it runs acceptably under Wine, which means I can load it at home where I much prefer Linux.
Since I work somewhere near Redmond, I got pushed to 2013, and I find it completely dysfunctional. The interface is hideous, object manipulation is difficult and requires many extra clicks for common tasks... and FFS the PDF rendering is totally broken. Even our IT and product support can't get pub-quality resolution out of the v2013 PDF engine. For a while I used Visio 2013 + GhostScript to generate acceptable PDFs because the file format incompatibilities between 2010 and 2013 made it a PITA to roll back, but there were other problems with that and eventually I just rolled back to 2010.

Upshot: If you're content with Visio 2010, then I'd say to use it on Windows or Linux as you prefer.
But Visio 2013 has regressed in UI and functionality to the point where I prefer to use DIA on Linux.

Re:Good to hear

[Lennie]

I still prefer the way Visio worked before Microsoft bought them.

Re:Good to hear

[Kilobug]

Well, if Dia is fine functionality-wise, but the art assets are not good enough, when you look at the involved budget for a big city ($1.8 million in that example), paying a graphical design studio or a couple of freelancer to make more adequate art asset wouldn't cost as much as the MS licenses.

Re:Good to hear

[Bearhouse]

It's not so much the features in Visio, (although it is one of the more mature and sophisticated tools of its type), but:

1. Everyone you need to work with probably already knows it/has it installed.
2. There's a huge ecosystem around it, (not just m$), with a bunch of fine stuff such as Mindjet Mindmanager that plug right in.

Shame - I've been using Visio for years and it should be so much better...

Re:Good to hear

[redmid17]

I have know. It appears more painful than a root canal. Pass

And...

[Stargoat]

And how much time was lost from (1) employees needing to learn a new system, (2) reintegrating email onto a new client platform, and (3) finding a new way to conduct patching. (Microsoft, for all their deficiencies, is better than its competitors at keeping patches up-to-date. I'm looking at you, Apple.)

I'm not saying that the move may not be correct in terms of dollars and sense, but please answer these questions before blowing sunshine up my ass.

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

Item #1 assumes the public workers were doing any work to begin with. The cost to pay an public employee to sit in front of Microsoft Office doing nothing is likely the same pay they would get in front of LibreOffice or a blank terminal.

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

This. I think half my company--including those associates in France--would die of a heart attack if we took Outlook away from them.

Re:And...

[Knightman]

Regarding point 1, I think users are relieved that there is no fscking ribbons in LibreOffice which makes it much easier to transition...

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

And how much time was lost from (1) employees needing to learn a new system

You're talking about the ribbon, right?

Re:And...

[just_another_sean]

Well, if you read TFA (no, I'm not new here) they have a sidebar call out that answers your question...

"Software licenses for productivity suites cost Toulouse 1.8 million euro every three years. Migration cost us about 800,000 euro, due partly to some developments. One million euro has actually been saved in the first three years. It is a compelling proof in the actual context of local public finance," says Monthubert.

So about 8K in migration costs vs. 18K in licensing. Assuming another 2-3K of unforeseen support over training issues or missing features that haven't been caught yet it should be a significant savings. And if you factor in the migration cost as a one time payment and assume support costs go down over time as people get used to the new system than the savings become very large indeed after the three years cited in the article.

Re:And...

[dskoll]

In my small company, we all use Linux on the desktop. Here are our answers:

Time to learn a new system: It took my employees maybe a day to learn LibreOffice (they already new MS Office). Anyone who needs more than a day to come up to speed with casual use of LibreOffice is too stupid to be employable, IMO.

Reintegrating mail onto a new client platform: Well, I just said "Here's your email program" and gave them Claws Mail. They were up and running in about 30 minutes. Again, anyone who cannot learn a simple graphical mail client in a day or so is too stupid to be employable.

Keeping patches up-to-date: One word for you: apt-get

Re:And...

[Em Adespoton]

In my small company, we all use Linux on the desktop.

I really see no reason for using MS Office if you're a small company.

However, for large companies, collaboration tools, internationalization of documents, corporate-wide style hints, advanced spreadsheet macros, shareable diagram objects, integrated calendars, meeting room tracking, distribution policy enforcement, etc. are important, and just aren't quite there on most of the alternatives. Google Docs does a reasonable job at some of that, but not all.

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, people actually use Excel for more than just filling in cells with data and formulas? I'll admin, I haven't worked in a large company yet, but what you're describing there I encountered only because I wanted to show off my mad skillz yo, no because anybody knew they even existed.

Re:And...

[Kjella]

Thats cute, you think Outlook is an email client. (...) Hint: Email is about 1/10th of what Outlook is and does.

He did say small company. which makes it fairly plausible. Many pay a lot for Outlook/Office and use it only for email, meeting scheduling and simple documents/spreadsheets because it's the de facto corporate standard.

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am working at a big well-known technology company which was featured in one of today's Slashdot stories. Posting anonymously for obvious reasons. Let me tell you: the business analysts here are using *enormous* Excel spredsheets for very complex tasks because that's what they know. Honestly it would be easier if their team hired a few software engineers who could implement the business logic in some sane programming language but they don't. So the analysts, who clearly have no background in programming, do all their work in Excel. Imagine the largest Excel spreadsheets you can and multiply that by a factor of 10. If they change a few numbers, it takes minutes for Excel to recompute everything. And they print out some of their Excel spreadsheets and bring those to meetings. Imagine stacks of tabloid size Excel spreadhseets printed in 10pt font.

Re:And...

[serviscope_minor]

However, for large companies, collaboration tools, internationalization of documents, corporate-wide style hints, advanced spreadsheet macros, shareable diagram objects, integrated calendars, meeting room tracking, distribution policy enforcement, etc. are important, and just aren't quite there on most of the alternatives. Google Docs does a reasonable job at some of that, but not all.

LibreOffice supports styles just fine and by that I mean it's just as bad as word, because you can't force people not to fuck with the font settings by hand. People still do that in MS land. So everyone does it and all the documents look like shit. But for internal documents (and external) basically no one gives a fuck, because most people couldn't see a pixelated image even if pixellated dog ran up and bit them on the leg. Something about the visual equivalent of tin ears or something.

I have worked for both large and small organizations, the former both with and without those "solutions". I'd say that the integrated meeting room booking and calendaring is about the most overblown thing ever.

Firstly, it doesn't absolve people ov the responsibility of actually remembering to book a room because you might be booking phone meetings, so it never forces you to book a room. People seem to forget just as easily. The integrated calendaring is a massive meh, unless your week is 50% meetings, I guess. The thing is it all integrates with outlook which is about the worst email client ever. It seems to do weird shit so people can't quote properly and as a result it is very, very hard to figure out what the hell is going on.

Shareable diagram objects? Um, this has never been much of a problem with me. Most people seemed to use whatever their favourite tool was and then exported it. Some teams seemed to settle on the same tool. Very few people are actually capable of producing worthwhile diagrams anyway since they lack the artistic skill so this never seemed to be much of a problem.

Anyway end result: I've worked with that stuff and it's just not that great. It does some things a little better, and some things a little worse. Mostly it's a wash.

Re:And...

[serviscope_minor]

Thats cute, you think Outlook is an email client.

It's not of course. It's a binary forged of pure evil of which email is one necrotic outgrowth.

It's integration with Lync makes the email part of it look almost good.

Re:And...

[dskoll]

LibreOffice can do most of that, with the exception of integrated calendars. Claws Mail has a plugin that can generate and accept Outlook invitations. Also, our CRM tool, (SugarCRM) has a usable shared calendar; it was pretty easy to hack to to generate Outlook-compatible invitations for our external partners.

We use Subversion for revision control and collaboration. My first choice would have been git but I realize there are limits to what you can expect non-technical people to learn. :)

I don't believe there's anything magical about MS Office that couldn't be done with open-source alternatives. MSFT just does a very good job of marketing. Also, people are lazy and go with the familiar.

Re:And...

[DUdsen]

Yes and companies have lost billions and crashed entire currency markets when they got one little thing wrong. Those days you probably can get fired for even suggesting using excel for anything critical, but 10 years ago complex excel sheets were common in the finance and accounting departments.

PowerPoint is suffering a similar fate after the pentagon labelled it dangerous and banned it's use among staffers, not to mention that it have entered the corporate lore as synonymous with poorly given superfluous presentations.

The red hearing here is to think that libreoffice is deployed as a drop in replacement to MS Office without a general strategy to move away from the whole office metaphor and onto more specialized applications. It's usually more of a stop gap to give the drones some access to lower grade free form tools for the odd case when the specialized tools are too complex for the simple task at hand.

The last app standing is outlook but it's only really valuable if the organization moved wholeheartedly onto exchange and a that's not a given for large organizations where domino and notes often still have a footprint. And there is a trend towards web interfaces especially for organizations that dont have the entire workforce behind a desk.

Put some of the money back in...

[recoiledsnake]

The exemptions were given because some Word macros and sophisticated Excel files could not be reproduced in LibreOffice or other open source productivity suites. These are examples of what Serp calls “some less mature features” in free software: “When it comes to making some kinds of presentations, for example, there is often a little extra to do [compared to the same process in PowerPoint]. So for some people the process is not so clear, and this can cause adaptability problems in everyday work.”

How about they use some of the saved money to either donate or contribute code to make the software work better?

Instead we have companies and other organizations making and saving tens of billions of dollars off Open Source(like Google, Yahoo, Red Hat, Facebook, Twitter, Apple etc.) and then we end up with catastrophic security nightmares like HeartBleed because no one could be bothered to send a couple of bucks over to the overburdened couple of folks that everyone relies on for security. And then we have asshats on message boards like this one who likely never contributed to OpenSSL or looked at the code for bugs but feel entitled to call the coders stupid for the bugs after the fact.

Re:Put some of the money back in...

[mehrotra.akash]

Isnt that the point of FOSS that users dont need to give back? If they need to give back anything, might as well use a paid software.

Re:Put some of the money back in...

[Kidbro]

Isnt that the point of FOSS that users dont need to give back?

No, the point is that the users should have the source, so they can fix it if it's broken. Everything else is optional.

Re:Put some of the money back in...

[koreanbabykilla]

hear, hear! PWNed by Theo and friends and soon to be PWNed by Google.

Re:Put some of the money back in...

[vadim_t]

No, FOSS is about freedom, not being free of charge.

The Free Software movement was started when Richard Stallman got annoyed because he couldn't make his own modifications to a printer driver.

Re:Put some of the money back in...

[carrier lost]

"Conan, what is good?"

"To see your enemies driven before you, to have their libraries forked and to hear the lamentation of their wizards"

Re:Put some of the money back in...

[hax4bux]

Points!

Re:Put some of the money back in...

[Lennie]

Google, Yahoo, Red Hat, Facebook, Twitter, Apple etc

euh....

Actually, Google, Yahoo, Red Hat, Facebook, Twitter, Apple all have open source projects of their own or collaborate on existing projects.

Heartbleed happened, because it wasn't coordinated.

Now the Linux Foundation has a budget for that, to search for important projects and fund them.

Re: Put some of the money back in...

[Anonymous Coward]

Heart bleed happened because the library was a walled garden, protected by the wizards of security.

Even if the bug was spotted, documented, patched, tested, and vetted by a million eyes, they wouldn't accept your patch. You are not allowed in their walled garden.

Now it's been forked, and others can help.

The real question

[Starteck81]

The real question is, what is the long term impact to productivity and work flow? Sure you can save money up front by switching to a different software suite but that doesn't matter if it disrupts your business in a significant way. Before the shouting starts I'm not implying that there is anything wrong. I'm would like to see an actual study done to determine the effect.

Re:The real question

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a municipality. In France.

Productivity doesn't enter into the equation.

Re:The real question

[watcher-rv4]

It's sounds very funny to me.

Re:The real question

[myrdos2]

In my experience, the opposite tends to be true. You initially get the cost of deploying a new platform and training users, then the savings kick in over the long term.

Re:The real question

[dcollins]

Translation: "I am butthurt that I've been whipped in the productivity game. By a municipality. In France."

Re:The real question

[Bing Tsher E]

What does any of that even mean? Who has been 'whipped in the productivity game' by this municipal entity?

Re:The real question

[khchung]

The real question is, what is the long term impact to productivity and work flow? Sure you can save money up front by switching to a different software suite but that doesn't matter if it disrupts your business in a significant way.

And what is the long term impact of MS Office changing their UI every couple versions?

Not to say open sourced software don't have this problem *cough* Firefox *cough*, but the point is these things happen all the time, and cannot be avoided just by sticking to MS Office. You just plan the migration at the right time in the cycle then it won't become an additional cost.

they just got confused....

[Anonymous Coward]

thinking "libreoffice" was french-made.

Re:they just got confused....

[stooo]

>> thinking "libreoffice" was french-made.
Nooooo. Never. Absolument impossible. "office" is an english word, it's fobidden by law to use too much english words. It would have been "Bureau Libéré"

Re:they just got confused....

[Godwin O'Hitler]

Nods at your joke but points out that office is absolutely a French word.
I'm not saying it means office or anything, mind; at least not in the sense of desks, filing cabinets, inkwells 'n' stuff.

Can't fix limited functionality in MS. $1M / year

[raymorris]

> or you're functionality is limited, or the feature plain sucks

Our experience is the cost of limited functionality in off-the-shelf software is a significantly higher cost than the license cost.
With the old proprietary system, an employee would spend 4 hours each Friday copying and pasting from one program to another.
With the new modular open source software, I spent an hour authoring a module to completely automate the data transfer, and have it happen in real time.

For just that one little function alone, this year we saved 4 hours X 52 weeks X ~$40/hr = $8,320 per year.
I do one of those every week. A little change to the software for a big change in the process. I'd be surprised if we haven't saved at least $1 million / year total, from all the little tweaks, correction, and additions we've done to the open source software to make our process better, faster, more efficient, and more accurate. I know the P/L from the from the program using the open source stuff sure has improved, but it's hard to quantify how much of that is due to the software. I could easily prove it's saved at least as much as my salary though, and my salary was being paid when we had the proprietary software too, for a specialist who was paid to admin the system and figure out hacks to get the proprietary system to almost meet our needs using duct tape and bubble gum.

Re:Blah

[nine-times]

Of course, the employees probably already spend 2-3 hours/year dealing with the piece of shit that is Microsoft Office. They probably also devote some amount of IT time and resources to dealing with licensing and activation issues, additional troubleshooting associated with imaging and installation procedures, etc.

Actually, really, I'm not being fair. MS Office is not a piece of shit. It's a really good application, though the whole installation/licensing/activation thing can be a bit of a nightmare at times. LibreOffice is also a very good application that most people could use as their office suit without serious difficulties. Mostly people just get upset because people know it's free. The fact that it's cheap makes them think it's "cheap" in the sense of "flimsy" and "poor quality", so they resent being moved onto it. That seems to be the single largest issue, in my experience.

Re:It's TCO, not licenses only

[Noah Haders]

no, we're talking about government. workers need something to do.

Re:Blah

[digsbo]

Yep. I was explaining to an old-headed unix guy that I use Linux at home, and he didn't believe me, and called it cheap shit, etc., etc. (he railed against Linux, being an old school Unix guy), so I brought my laptop in and showed him, especially OpenOffice (this was a few years ago). He said he was surprised at how professional it seemed. All preconceived notions, which a five minute demo swept away.

Munich did it already

[WoOS]

Munich decided to move completely to Linux (so not only from MS Office on MS Windows to LibreOffice on MS Windows) 10 years ago and managed to complete the move last year. One of the main complaints of users seems to be lack of compatibility when exchanging documents with the MS world.
Now if more cities move to Open/LibreOffice, companies trading with them might have to produce more compatible documents and MS might finally loose its compatibility "strangle" on its user.

Re:Munich did it already

[BitZtream]

Bullshit.

RTF is entirely undocumented, even within Microsoft. Every app has its own flavor.

If you've never had a problem with RTF than you've never actually used it for anything more than basic plan text.

RTF's lack of compatibility and documentation is FAR worse than the standard .doc format

Re:Munich did it already

[Teun]

The incompatibility stems from MS Office's poor support for .odf.

Re:Munich did it already

[hcs_$reboot]

Indeed. And this is unlikely to change unless many more people migrate to LibreOffice, then the compatibility issue will be reversed.

Re:Munich did it already

[stymy]

You would use a 9-year-long migration as a success story? Also, Excel has many useful features not in Calc, that I couldn't live without. I'm an actuary, and none probably work for a municipality, but I can see accountants and the like getting a lot of use out of them.

Re:Munich did it already

[stooo]

>> You would use a 9-year-long migration as a success story?
Yep. Better think an plan before acting wildly. It was a migration done in 3 steps, there's a lot of doc online on it.

>> Also, Excel has many useful features not in Calc
VB is bad :)

French dialog boxes

[Snufu]

Do you want to save the changes to your document before surrendering?

Re:French dialog boxes

[rogoshen1]

i wonder if members of the french resistance would get angry over hearing that tired goddamn joke time and time again? Anger in the
Buzz Aldrin punching a dude in the face for saying the moon landing was a fraud.. that type of anger.

Re:French dialog boxes

[dcollins]

Don't worry: someday they'll have another decades-long African occupation, or nuke somebody, and then Droolin' Joe Sixpack will be making the opposite joke for the next half-century.

Re:Reality - Support

[ClaraBow]

Really? It's just as easy to install LibreOffice as it is to install MS Office.

administrative operations

[tomhath]

For local government purposes the city is part of Toulouse Métropole (“Greater Toulouse”), which includes 37 neighbouring communities and has a total population of around 714,000. Toulouse Métropole employs some 10,000 staff to manage its administrative operations.

I don't know much about local government in the US or France. But that seems like a heck of a lot of administrators for that number of people.

Re:administrative operations

[marcosdumay]

"Administrative operations" is everything a governemnt does.

Re:It's TCO, not licenses only

[xeno]

or the feature plain sucks (track changes in Office > Libre)

Huh? Have you used a recent version of LOffice? The track-changes feature in LO is considerably more elegant than MSOffice, both visually (in page view you still see the tagged and ordered comments/changes while displaying an accurate representation of the print view), and logically (I can reply by comment on a comment in LO, and record the justification for edits as the comments are ordered in a threaded conversation. And you don't lose the comments if you select and type instead of explicitly deleting text. By contrast in MSOffice, if you overwrite a section with track changes turned on, it always deletes the comments that went with the old text -- so MSOffice only has "track SOME changes."

I know it's a minor issue, but that in that respect, LO wins hands-down.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Can't fix limited functionality in MS. $1M / ye

[BitZtream]

And this wasn't possible in Office because of your incompetence? So its hard to argue that you're saving massive amounts of money when you clearly don't know how to work with the technology your users are using. Instead you forced everyone else to change because you were incapable of doing something.

Thats pretty stupid, certainly not something you should be bragging about.

Every Office app has had scriptable i/o since before LibreOffice was a thought in someones mind.

God I hate when you clueless fucks say something so stupid, it makes me end up defending Office, but every time someone like you speaks it just shows how incompetent you actually are.

The cost of an office license is less than the cost of one week of minimum wage per employee, wether you realize it or not its almost certain that it takes more time than that to adjust throughout the course of a year for any user who makes REGULAR use of office.

So basically, you're too inexperienced to know how to work with the tools you have and so instead you cost the company a fair amount per user to retrain because you, one person, was incompetent.

Again, this isn't something you want to brag about.

Re:Blah

[Teun]

Yes you are a troll and I shouldn't reply.

But hey, it's Friday night and I'm happy for a good week, including the use of LibreOffice AND MS Office.

Yes MS Office is more polished, and yes hardly anyone uses the stuff LibreOffice doesn't have.
So below the line, for 99% of papers LibreOffice is a fine application.

Re:Reality - Support

[Teun]

I can better your statement:

It's easier to install LibreOffice than it is to uninstall MS Office.

$1000 if you can get Word to read Word documents

[raymorris]

I'll give you a thousand dollars if you can get a current copy of MS Word to read old MS Word documents, like OpenOffice can. Since Microsoft can't pull that off, I'm guessing you won't either. I suppose you could shellExecute(OpenOffice.exe) from a Word macro. :)

So yeah, you COULD throw out all your company's documents in order to avoid having two "power users" of Word learn different menu locations for a few things. That would make sense, if you had Balmer's dick in your mouth.

Hidden Cost and Bias.

[enter to exit]

Whenever i hear of local councils (or any bureaucracy) claim that project X has saved $Y i am cautious. They have every incentive to fudge the numbers, and no one has an incentive to debunk them except MS (who no one will believe). I have no reason to doubt their claims, but a third-party audit would be nice.

I have heard of a few municipalities doing this now, perhaps some sort of coalition to exchange knowledge and coordinate development funding is warranted?

I usually have LibreOffice installed on my computers alongside MS Office. I find LibreOffice sluggish and not as responsive or as easy to use as MSO (although this might be a familiarity thing). I am one of those people who like the ribbon. Sometimes formatting doesn't come out properly as well. There is also the question of productivity.

Re:Blah

[kamapuaa]

Not a troll. I actually do use Libreoffice, both on Mac and on a Linux. However even for my very simple jobs, I often find Libreoffice has some bug I can't work around and I have to load up my pirated copy of MS Office, which actually works.

I keep using the open sores software based on some weird principle. It's fine (but not quite as good) for editing basic text documents.

Re:Blah

[Provocateur]

You know, very few people can claim to have actually met the guy that invented Get off my lawn!

Re:Can't fix limited functionality in MS. $1M / ye

[Maxo-Texas]

Don't get me wrong- I've been primarily on Libreoffice and then Openoffice for several years now.

But I see no reason that you couldn't have automated the data transfer in the microsoft environment too. I've written programs both in VBA and in Openoffice Basic which implement that kind of functionality.

The significant challenge to the openoffice side is better integration with email an the calendar. It provides microsoft with a lot of lockin.

Re:IT support costs

[jandersen]

As for IT costs - I have worked in several companies over the years with both UNIX and Windows server rooms. Being a UNIX person, I may be a bit biased, but my personal impression is that supporting Windows servers is a lot more painfil than supporting UNIX/Linux - at one point I supported some 50 UNIXes alone, while the roughly similar number of Windows systems had a team of 5; I had a pretty relaxed daily routine, but they were always overstretched. Not because they incompetent, I learned a lot of generally useful stuff from them, but so many things in Windows seem to require either clicking through graphical interfaces, system by system, or require a specialised, graphical tool, where I would just run a few scripts from a command line. The power of tools like ksh (or bash), ssh, sed, grep, find etc should not be underestimated.

The other thing I have heard increasingly - from Windows admins themselves - is that Windows is just such nightmare to handle. I wouldn't know - I left Windows behind as soon as Linux became viable, and that's a long time ago.

Re:Reality - Support

[stooo]

>> Instead of hiring 10 cheap indians...

We do not hire "cheap indians" here in France. We use french speaking staffonly.

Re:genuinely curious

[stooo]

>> How do you automate detection and deployment of important security updates
apt-get.

Re:Producitivy?

[stooo]

>> Hello, how about savings or losses in productivity from having to convert all the documents or not being able to read stuff sent from other places who are insistant on MS Word?

Two answers :
- compatibility problems have mostly faded in the last few years
- new laws are coming out slowly in the EU to force administrations to use odf -> Libreoffice is a big advantage.

Re:EMAIL ?

[stooo]

>> I have never found anything better than the Outlook / Exchange combo for outright business usage
You probably have never tried lightning + thunderbird

Re: I tried the switch also

[stooo]

>> Try using LibreOffice in a typical business environment for a couple of weeks

I use it for 3 years now, with shitty xlsx and docx from colleagues, no problem.
Compatibility issues in Libre have faded away since years.

Re:Some questions

[stooo]

>> Someone gets an Office file, modifies it with LO, sends it back. Then they receive the e-mail "hey buddy, everything looks wrong". What happens now?

Not a problem. Everybody uses Libre, and that's the whole point of migrations well done.

>> How much of those €1M savings will be used to sponsor LibreOffice?
Don't know for toulouse, but Munich contributed a lot back, in the form of a kind of frameword, at least.

>> Can we please hear a "status update" of these cities or governments switching to OSS?
https://media.ccc.de/browse/co...
https://www.google.com/search?...

Re:Reality - Support

[masterofthumbs]

Installation of enterprise versions of Office are incredibly easy. Pop in a disc or download the executable and run it. I believe its maybe just one prompt asking where you want to install it. After that, it just installs without any interaction.

But in reality, IT would just have an image to push to every machine that would include Office so install time is negligible.

Re: I tried the switch also

[masterofthumbs]

I had a class this semester where the professor distributed homework in .docx format. LibreOffice had the worst time displaying even the simpler circuit diagrams that were made using Smart Art. Even if I converted the document to PDF, the screwed up formatting would carry over. I ended up finding out that Dropbox would convert any docx to PDF when you would preview the document in your browser. The formatting Dropbox would display was identical to how the document was displayed in MS Office so I would just save that PDF and work off of that.

On Linux, the problem was even more of a pain. Any of the .pptx he used in lecture would have really weird fonts (font size was either too big or too small) when I would open them in Libre. I found out that I didn't have any of the MS ttf fonts installed but even after installing those, the slides still weren't exactly right. These were both slides that he had made himself and slides that were given out from the publisher of our textbook.