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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).
and they'll park the thing on a sidewalk!
Italy is officially smarter than the US.
I could save them even more - roughly their current defence budget minus the cost of a white flag - without any loss in effectiveness.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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)
And they saved even more on printer costs, since they can't print properly anymore.
(Anyone who has used LibreOffice Vanilla, and tried to print a landscape document, will know what I'm talking about)
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..."
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Why did they need 29 copies of M$office?
I like LibreOffice and use it a lot, but I can hardly claim it doesn't have issues. My work recently forced my boss to use it, and it has been a disaster costing far more than the cost of a Microsoft Office license. When all your old files are written in Office, and your employees are all used to using office, switching costs are significant.
The only one in the world with a dedicated "Panic" button, colored red for ease of surrendering.
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.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Shadows and smoke to get a better deal, just like the Germans did a few years ago. MS Office is the de facto software in the corporate world. It's not about what you do internally but about exchanging documents with other parties--if you're not compatible with the rest of the business world then you don't exist.
You people don't really understand the money game.
29 million EUR over a few years is absolutely nothing compared to the military budget over a few years for an entire country.
They lose official support from MS, gain basically a zillionth-percent savings, and will have no insurance when a very important document will no longer be displayed because a bug was reported 4 months ago and nobody from the open source community bothered to investigate it / or was overlooked (remember Heartbleed).
I wonder if this is just a ploy to get MS to negotiate a better deal. That seems to be what happens after an announcement that some major government organization is dumping MS Office.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Shitty companies and countries always count time as being free. In this case, the loss of productivity is not being taken into account. Another example of why Europe is going down the tubes lately.
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.
the Italian Ministry of Defense announced that they expect to save between 26 and 29 million Euro over the next few years
How many years is "a few" ? 3 or 20?
Show of hands: Who knew the Italians had a military?
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4Pk...
You are welcome on my lawn.
By not having a military that it doesn't really need anyway unless they want to invade slavic countries again in the near future.
How's this viral campaign working out?
I really wonder how much Microsoft dumps into making noises in sites like this.
Slashdot needs post editing
The decision was made final when they noticed that the built-in translation tool allowed them to say "We surrender" in over 200 languages.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Italian Military ditches LibreOffice and goes back to Microsoft Office because it didnt work out.
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?
LibraOffice is good for about 80% of what office workers need, and very difficult for the remaining 20%
It is 100% free so cost is not an issue
MS Office is Vastly overpriced for about 80% of what office users need and a bargain for the remaining 20%
Nearly all users have been trained, so ease of use is not an issue.
It depends on what you want to pay for: Training and documentation, or massive bloatware.
MS will offer a discounted or free license and maybe some free support for some period just to reduce the apparent benefit of migrating. Eventually they will ramp the license fee back up.
Does'n that disqualify them from being a NATO member. Everyone knows MS word doesn't inter-op with LO!
But.. but.. saving money is bad for the economy! Those Windows aren't going to break themselv-- oh wait, that's exactly what happens.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The problem is retooling does cost money. Libre and Openoffice do have plenty of bugs and lack features some users want. The biggest problem is that MS software just doesn't cost that much. Labor and hardware cost a lot, software is dirt cheap for how much you use it. If you want good software, stop trying to get it for free and instead just send feedback to the companies making the leading products. You can get the latest features without the things you hate this way. The the only real problem with MS Office is that there is no free home version, beside that it is a better office product and products like publisher or powerpoint are years ahead of anything in competing products. I've yet to see anything more compelling than WordPerfect and that did not win against Office then and probably won't for any professional uses now. There isn't any real money to be saved, relative to other savings, by switching to Linux and other open source and the security argument has only lessened. Linux has proven less secure than predicted over the last 5 years and Windows has proven more secure than predicted. Linux is losing the battle of compelling features. Other than paranoia about the NSA and backdoors in MS products, I don't see any real benefit other than general diversification. Users really can hate software changes and they are kind of being made into pawns in this silly battle over a rather small amount of money, often made on principle more than on dollar and ... sense.
I would make sure I was doing what the users wanted, they are the ones expected to use the software and be productive, so they should have a pretty heavy say in things. I think this is not often the case and IT and management make top down decisions that they wind up regretting. Large scale changes like OS and office software or financial software transitions are not fun at all. You really want to be sure you're doing that for ALL the right reasons.
Hereâ(TM)s a nice trick for you:
1. Open a new Excel spreadsheet.
2. Put a 1 in cell A1.
3. Copy that âoe1â down the screen by dragging on the dot in the lower right corner.
4. In cell B1 put the following formula: =SUM(A$1:A1) (Recall that the $ means absolute reference so the SUM will always start at row 1.)
5. Copy that cell down the screen in the same manner.
6. Notice how column B now shows a running total of what is in column A.
7. Drag select a bunch of cells in column A and move them over to the right somewhere past column B.
8. Notice how the running total in column B is correct in that it does not increment when there is nothing in the cell to the left of it.
9. Move that bunch of cells back to where they were. Do not just press Ctrl-Z.
10. Notice how the running totals next to those returned cells are now incorrect. In fact, they still show what was there before you returned the moved cells.
11. Click in an incorrect cell in column B.
12. Notice that the formula has been inexplicably changed. All the formulas in the cells next to the moved then returned cells (except for the last one) will have been changed. This means that you canâ(TM)t trust Excel 2010 to not change formulas on you if you ever move things around in the spreadsheet. Excel 2013 has the same bug, BUT LibreOffice Calc does not.
Please note: This is NOT a misunderstanding of the use of absolute references on my part. The cells with the formulas were not moved.
Spreadsheets aren't tables. If only the people who insist on using a freakin' spreadsheet to write a document because they want to communicate some information that benefits from a tabular format would realize how much of a pain in the ass it is for their readers to read much less make contributions to it.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
You said what you where doing when you had problems but left all the details out, so we do not know anything, beyond possibly style handling or direct formatting maybe. I, and I am guessing the parent poster, want details of the specific behaviour, what menus what features where you using, how did they "work against" where they buggy, hard to use, lacking in features, or bad in default behaviour etc. I wanted X and it was hard/broken is a non technical users way of describing problems, and is useless as an explanation.
Q. How many gears does an Italian tank have?
A. Six. One forward and five reverse.
Q. Why do Italian tanks have such large mirrors?
A. So the tank commander doesn't miss any part of the action.
etc.
Until next year when it will cost them 40 million euro to roll back to M$ office because of missing features and maintenance costs. Been there - done that.
Yes. I hope that you figure out that you're wrong eventually.
...this is the smartest choice a government institution can do.
If people think that libre is just about the cost they're sadly mistake. Libre is about the freedom. Otherwise it would be called GratisOffice. I'm tempted to create a GratisOffice just to make a point of how stupid it is to move to free software to save money. It may save money- but it's a bad idea unless you put some of that savings back into development. If you don't it's not going to work as well as it could/should.
While I have been using the Word variant for some years, and it does have its issues, most of which are formatting and conversion related, I generally was OK with it.
I've also used the Excel variant and it did the small jobs I needed it to do.
However just this week I decided to foray into the Access variant (Called "Base"), and insofar as first impressions go, it was unusable. What should have been an easy task caused it to fail several times badly, prompting me to give up and just do it manually in a spreadsheet.
So I guess it really depends on what your usage is, which will determine how successful or easy a transition it will be. If your entire organization is going to be using it, then the formatting and conversion issues disappear, until you have to share something outside that is. However that said, my abit brief experience with Base was horrible. I mean Access has it's issues, but for small tasks it isn't too bad, but Base couldn't even do that apparently. Then again your "normal" office user probably never touches Access/Base anyway, so maybe a moot point. Some military IT folks might be smashing some things in frustration however for some simple DB type tasks...
It would be great if all of these organizations would return a fraction of what they saved to Libre Office as a donation. That would also go a long way towards addressing many of the concerns about usability and bugs. A paid programmer is a lot more likely to actually spend time squashing bugs.
All roads lead to Rome
Casteism
LO is full of bugs and misfeatures, and when you make a bug report, some "volunteer" triage "expert" deems it your fault so it never gets fixed. Word has fewer bugs, more features, though just as many misfeatures. You can't really make a bug report, so it saves you time, because you don't have to make bug reports that they ignore.