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

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

[MightyMartian]

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

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

[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

[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).

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: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