Italian Military To Save Up To 29 Million Euro By Migrating To LibreOffice (softpedia.com)

Reader prisoninmate writes: Following on last year's bold announcement that they will attempt to migrate from proprietary Microsoft Office products to an open-source alternative like LibreOffice, Italy's Ministry of Defense now expects to save up to 29 million Euro with this move. We said it before, and we'll say it again, this is the smartest choice a government institution can do. And to back up this statement, the Italian Ministry of Defense announced that they expect to save between 26 and 29 million Euro over the next few years by migrating to the LibreOffice open-source software for productivity and adopting the Open Document Format (ODF).

Comments

Awesome

[NeoGeo64]

Italy is officially smarter than the US.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole look/UI on the latest versions of the Office suite stinks. The ribbon is utter shit.

At work we have thousands of Microsoft Office documents saved in older formats which the latest versions of Office do not open. Yet in most cases Libre Office does. Admittedly it doesn't get everything right but at least you can read the damned documents (and then save them in an open format)

Seriously Office is expensive, has a crapulent UI, doesn't open files created with older versions of the same bloody programs from the same bloody company, uses proprietary file formats and is an all round PITA to use.

Why would anyone sane use it again ?

Re: Awesome

[KenHansen]

Scientific papers are painful in Word.

Do Italian soldiers write a lot of scientific papers?

Re:Awesome

[chipschap]

I published a 500+ page book using LO, and had no problem managing and using multiple styles. I had to put a little effort into learning how to do it but in the end it all worked well.

Re:Awesome

[MightyYar]

Just opened your thesis. For what you did, Word is fine. You didn't even use features like cross references or styles. It looks like you used spaces and tabs instead of justification. A picture pasted into the center of the page is indeed handled correctly. Using Word like a typewriter works fine, but some of us find that very frustrating.

Free is not

[s.petry]

One of the most overlooked items in these discussions is that Libre Office does not make it "free". "Free license cost" is the correct framing, but that is not what I read.

Don't misunderstand my point, I'm anti-MS and want people to succeed in migrating away from their products. Many Governments have gone back to MS after people point out what I start with. "See, that Free software cost money so it failed to be free and we need MS again!" The expectations have to be correct or projects, especially Government projects, end up failing for the wrong reasons.

Re:Free is not

[loonycyborg]

Both kinds of office are extremely inefficient and require a lot of training to use effectively. But even if they can't even afford the costs of training with libreoffice then ms office is even more likely to be a failure. Many people think that ms office is obvious and known to everyone, but going, say, from ms office xp to ms office 2003 will take as much training as going to libreoffice. And, naturally, MS will always expect them to use latest and greatest things with greatest retraining costs. So, you could as well go with libreoffice in any case. If you fail with it then you would fail with office 2016 either.

Re:Free is not

[peragrin]

You are also forgetting the Microsoft is pushing office 2016 into the cloud. Governments can't store their work on microsofts servers.

I expect to see more and more of this as Microsoft pushes more and more cloud based control of their software.

Yes I do know that you can use office 2016 without a network connection, but Microsoft is combining everything under a single login. Email calendar office 365 Windows 10 all tied to a single user login. All tied to the cloud. Governments militaries, even most business can't have any of their data exposed to the cloud that way.

Re: Free is not

[KenHansen]

You are also forgetting the Microsoft is pushing office 2016 into the cloud. Governments can't store their work on microsofts servers. I expect to see more and more of this as Microsoft pushes more and more cloud based control of their software.

Of course, you know that MS is making the entire Azure Cloud stack part of the next iteration of Windows Server, thereby allowing gov't entities to build their own private cloud that takes the place of MS public cloud, right? The gov't can run their own cloud on their own hardware in their own datacenter over their own private network.

Writer is fine...

[chispito]

Writer is a passable substitute for MS Word, but Calc doesn't come close to Excel, and most cube critters already have years of experience abusing Excel. It's the old saying, "When all you have is a hammer..."

What are they going to do with the savings?..

[mi]

Italian Military To Save Up To 29 Million Euro

Ukrainian military could, probably, equip several infantry brigades with that money... For the Italian that may cover the amount spent per year on office-supplies and coffee-makers.

Ugh

[kamapuaa]

LibreOffice kind-of works in a pinch, but it fucking sucks for easy little one-person projects, and is basically broken for an organization. How much is Office on a big license? $75 a year? How much are the salaries they pay? $37.50 an hour? Using a much higher quality product will save an employee more than two hours per week.

LibreOffice (with OpenOffice before it) is one of those projects which has had great potential and is about to be usable for like ten years now.

Microsoft shills in full force today

[LichtSpektren]

Anybody that's used LibreOffice recently knows that it's equal or better to MSOffice in just about every respect; the compatibility with OOXML has been particularly good since version 5. But you wouldn't know it from the flood of slashdotters that came in here a minute after the story was posted to talk about how bad LO is, in vague and undescribed ways.

Cost savings are bullshit, IMHO

[Britz]

I am very much in favour of governments using free software. Governments are the heads of communities, after all. Public funds should benefit public software (e.g. free software or community software) wherever possible. And when communicating with the public via documents exchange or otherwise, it should be possible for the public to engage in that communication using free software, if possible.

Mind you, those are all political reasons. I have researched this topic a lot. And I have to agree with Microsoft that licensing costs are a very, very small part of overall costs of software projects. Thus any cost savings could be offset by any number of slightly more cost effectiveness in another area that is costlier. Such as training, for example, where Microsoft argues that their monopoly in the Office software market lowers the cost of training. After all, a license of MS Office should not be more than a day or two of what a government worker earns, if you count correctly. And then there are all kinds of other nasty gotchas when converting from one office to another. Especially of not all government bodies convert. Because they no use partly incompatible office suites.

So I am not buying any cost argument. At least not for 5 years. After that, and if most of the government has converted, you get the benefit of not having to pay for the upgrade, and the next upgrade. But if you discount those future cost savings to the present, they become rather small.

Then again, politics is not about honesty and voters and the public don't understand community software or free software. So just keep using whatever questionable argument you want. For example the "Linux is more secure" one. Or this cost savings one. The other side is doing that too. Microsoft has spread so much FUD about Linux over the years. Ballmer himself compared free software to cancer. Just remember that it is all bullshit.

Do I sound jaded?