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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).
These government switches rarely last long because it sets bad precedents. Luckily the decision makers in my government are so heavily convinced that proprietary software is "best of breed", what we'll never see any important use of open source software anywhere at the state.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Until they experience the SHIT that is Libre Office's failed attempt at styles. If you want to write something longer than 5 pages, its utterly useless.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
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.
I see these kind of comments all the time and barely ever anyone actually says what is wrong with it. I've been using LibreOffice (and OpenOffice before that) for a long time and I agree it had its issues at first, but it's been years since I ever had any problem with it. As a matter of fact, when a file is slightly corrupted MS Office will never open it, but LibreOffice will, and after saving it again the file becomes usable again.
I am honestly interested in this, I'm not trolling, so could you please give a few examples of "great potential but little usability"?
How much wood would a woodchopper chop if a woodchopper would chop wood?
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..."
This is why you won't see it in the US DoD, along with:
-MS Access is the only database a regular user has access to, so Access style "SQL" and VB is required.
-MS Project (and Project server) are in heavy use. I don't think LibreOffice has an equivalent for these (?)
-SharePoint lock in (and no, we can't access the SQL Server backend to use as a real DB instead of MS Access in most cases)
-Compatibility with whatever the Prime Defense contractor for that program is using, and we cannot compel them to use anything specific without something coming from OSD [Secretary of Defense's Office] or Congress that mandates compatibility requirements.
-Complete and Total PowerPoint compatibility is required as we spend 45% of our time in meetings, not including time preparing for meetings. PP is also used to save images and as poor-mans Visio. PowerPoint slides undergo more revisions than 200 page engineering documents, and if a design spec is presented differently in the slides and the report from which the slides came, the slides version will be used 70% of the time.
CAPTCHA: doomsday
Yes, when it comes to writing serious documents, most office packages struggle.
Word has been getting a lot better, especially the new equation editor is miles ahead of the competition, and although not quite as good as LaTeX, good enough for most purposes.
Styles are a contentious issues. LibreOffice has a very logical implementation of styles, but it only works if you are 100% disciplined and approach your styles with great planning and foresight. Microsoft styles have been getting a lot better, and they have always been easier to use. Again, Microsoft is good enough in most applications.
Tables are painful in any program I have used, but Excel and the LibreOffice spreadsheet can deal with them reasonably well.
...Calc doesn't come close to Excel....
Let's assume for a moment that you are correct. I'm not saying that you're right, but I'll accept it for the sake of argument. Neither I nor any of my customers that use Calc have experienced any major problems with it. Quite the opposite, in fact. Excel's amortization function, for example, rounds incorrectly in many cases; whereas Calc's corresponding amortization function rounds correctly.
I have learned over time to not trust Excel's math.
...most cube critters already have years of experience abusing Excel.
This is a non-sequitur that Microsoft likes to throw into arguments it is losing, and is the last refuge of the desperate. This is a particularly shallow argument, as new versions of Office have required extensive retraining due to major user interface changes.
Libre Office's styles IN THEORY are OK, but they DON'T FUCKING WORK, the implementation of that (and a billion other things) is so buggy its just plain unusable. I have 50 page manuals. The actual font, point size, etc for each logical style is UTTERLY RANDOM, if you go to a document, hit enter, select "H3" (for example) LO picks ANY arbitrary font, point size, etc with no rhyme or reason to it. This has been true for at least the last 5 or 10 versions of the software.
Try to make a horizontal rule in LO (or OO, its no better). You simply cannot do it without using some truly bizarro-world hack.
Frames, especially if they contain tables, are an UTTER DISASTER (and putting a table inside a frame is the ONLY way to make text flow around it, its not like you can avoid doing this in anything but the simplest document).
I could go on for hours. The program is a bleeding disaster. Its been years since I used Word, so I can't even begin to comment on what the situation is there, but LO is frankly just shit. Again, its fine for writing a 5 page memo where you just don't really give a crap what the formatting is or if everything is buggered, beyond that you need something like LyX, Scribus, or just plain write your stuff in LaTeX and live with the pain of constantly re-exporting it as you tweak every little thing into shape. At least you CAN get what you want, and Scribus actually has pretty good style management, for what it does. Problem with any of these tools is they're just not that good for WRITING. My current solution for serious writing where layout quality is going to matter is to just write the bulk text in LO and simply cut and past it all back into text frames in Scribus. You can do pretty large dumps of text if you know how, so its not THAT bad. The lesson is, each tool for what it is good for, and word processors are NOT good for doing quality layout, you have to use a separate application (I'm sure the various commercial DTP tools will work well too, but Scribus really is pretty good).
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I once commissioned a project in a petro-chemical plant in China. In the control room of the plant in the corner was a very dusty but incredibly nice commercial espresso machine, monster of a thing which looked like it hadn't been used in years.
I asked one of the Chinese operators about it. Apparently the original engineering / construction contractor for the plant was an Italian firm. They brought that with them to keep their workers happy. Once the plant was up and running they left it behind and no one had the heart to throw it out. Next to the machine was a well maintained green tea station.