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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).
Italy is officially smarter than the US.
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)
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!
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.
At this point, I hit Control-P, followed by Enter, which gave me a totally fine landscape printed "Lorem ipsum" text, as it was displayed on screen.
So, uhm... what's wrong?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
(Anyone who has used LibreOffice Vanilla, and tried to print a landscape document, will know what I'm talking about)
I print landscape (and non-landscape) documents all the time without problem so: What are you talking about?
How much wood would a woodchopper chop if a woodchopper would chop wood?
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.
You mean the loss of productivity whenever you have to retrain all your office workers whenever Microsoft has a brilliant new ribbon/metro every other release? Or the loss of productivity when VBA macros lose compatibility and have to be rewritten?
Just curious, what was the retraining costs when you switched from Office XP to Office 2007/2010 and had to learn the new ribbon and re-write a lot of VBA?
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.
Why don't you report a bug instead of shitposting?
I think you're full of shit. If you liked LO and used it "a lot", you'd at least provide some reason as to why it's been a "disaster". I'll counter your stupid, shill anecdote.
I like LibreOffice, and I use it a lot. I'm an engineer, and part of my work oftentimes involves having software tools interface with embedded systems, read data, and generate CSV files to be opened in a spreadsheet. Excel never opens the file correctly and, if you make a change to the file, excel totally kills the formatting by screwing up the delimiters or changing them (from comma to tab) altogether. LO Calc, on the other hand, always handles the CSV files properly.
sig: sauer
Heartbleed was patched. Even if it wasn't, OpenSSL is free and open source, so you could patch it yourself if you had to. On the other hand, how fucked are you if there's a critical bug in Windows or MSOffice and Microsoft says "lol just reboot"?
Try opening an xls document that was built with complex macros in LibreOffice. Enough said.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
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?
Plus the spreadsheet could have cornered the market overnight by allowing infinite rows, but someone in the "M$ compatibility team" whined.
They don't need to. MS office has enslaved millions to the banner of Redmond. They're victims of vendor lock-in with no way to free themselves. The effort, expense and time required to change is worse than the entire effort to change from inches and pounds to the metric system in the US and with more justifiability. Don't hate them, pity them.
thunderbird or whatever
no. no I don't. what the fuck are you babbling about?
portrait, landscape, reversed (cups option)...do it all the time
Another anonymous coward that talks about how great MSOffice is and how LibreOffice just can't keep up, without any specific details to this being the case.
Try opening an XCF file in Photoshop. Enough said.
Try opening a WPD file in Word. Enough said.
Try opening a ODS file in Excel. Enough said.
Try opening an XLS file from Office XP that was build with complex macros in Excel 365. NOW, enough said.
sig: sauer
Yeah, try that with a document made for Office XP, using the very latest version of Office.
I don't argue the point that some people should stay on MS Office. If you're in a shop that's been on it for a long time and you use the really deep features of some of the components, it will be hard to switch, and expensive in terms of doing rework.
I do argue that LO will do the job for 95% or more office workers. And I'm including Calc and Impress here. Both of them are adequate for most things.
Cannot reproduce this. I think you messed up somewhere obvious. Of course, if you have EPS with explicit orientation instructions in there, landscape printing will be broken. But that is a) not the fault of LibreOffice and b) you cannot even really import these files in MS office.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
However, my boss is not a developer. She makes slide presentations and writes papers. The problems she has with Libre Office tend to be font conflicts and mixed up formatting and figures when going between computers and formats.
Well, I have had MANY problems with "font conflicts and mixed up formatting and figures when going between computers and formats" in MS Word over the years. Open a document on a Mac, then on Windows... see the problems. Open a document from two MS Office versions ago... see the problems.
Personally, I've seen LESS of this when going between computers and OSes with LibreOffice compared to MS Office. If you're complaining about formatting problems going between MS Office AND LibreOffice, well, that's hardly all LibreOffice's fault, since MS Office does a poor job of rendering LibreOffice native documents too.
Are these insurmountable problems? No. But considering her salary, it only takes 1 hours of fiddling with issues like that to have Libre Office cost more than a Word license. The costs of having your highly paid scientists and managers diddling with fonts and trying to find a features add up VERY quickly.
Obviously. I completely sympathize with this argument. However, I would counter that if a SCIENTIST is wasting time "diddling with fonts" and formatting, she/he is using the wrong software. MS Word AND LibreOffice are bad choices for a consistent layout engine. If your boss really wants professional-looking output, she'd be better off with LaTeX or a dedicated commercial layout application (e.g. InDesign).
Way too many people seem to complain about stuff that could be more easily solved if they knew what they want. Word and LibreOffice were never designed or intended to create publication-quality output. Formatting is not consistent because that's not what they are primarily focused on. You want to do desktop publishing? Choose the right tool (which will reflow things and make reasonable layout decisions as necessary). Otherwise, stop getting hung up on your font choice.
More likely because MS started to bribe the right people, which they seem to have neglected recently.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well, I cannot comment for the AC, but I agree that the Ribbon has not really changed since it was introduced. As for Excel, I use it to do some calendars and cost tracking at home and user several functions to auto fill cells based on numerous other cells. The last time I tried Libre, it could not use some of the formulas that had 15 or 16 IF statements in one line. (Think of calculating base cost of something, based on what was used in its build. Where it looks at cost of packaging (which was a formula itself), cost of casing (which was a formula from another sheet), cost of hardware used (Could be one piece or 20), etc.) All this while tracking the part numbers used in each item. Libre could not do that, but Excel could.
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.
Oh, also forgot, I use some Marcos to merge several CSV files into one document at work in Excel, then put the outcome into Pivot Charts, Libre did not support them yet. Perhaps one day they can do all of this, but I do not believe that all users of Excel use complex formulas or Macros, so I could be in that 10% or so, that uses spreadsheets for more than basic expense reports.
I'm not aware of Excel being 100% compatible with ODS files, so I would never open an ODS file with Excel. On the other hand, my place of work has XLS files floating around with macros embedded that have been used for ten years or more. I am talking about basic Excel macros here have have been around forever. Since it would be too much trouble to rewrite those macros in every file that has come to be reused over time, we cannot switch to LibreOffice until those macros work in LibreOffice. I do not call it 100% compatible if there is an XLS file that has been the same since Office 2003 that works in current Excel but that doesn't work in a new version of LIbreOffice.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Most of the documents we have floating around our office were made with Windows XP, or Windows 2003 at the latest.. and they still work fine with newer versions of Office.. So I am not really following you.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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
No problem ever with landscape either.
aaaaaaa
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.
Try to open an excel document in photoshop. What's your point. If you use proprietary software you will always be required to use it. That's not a reason why you would use a standards based system. The best example I can show you is that standardized html pages written back in 1995 open correctly in modern browsers. Pages written with proprietary tags/plugins don't. If you want to avoid this problem then get off proprietary software.
As far as I can see is you make the OP's point. I've never had an issue with standards based documents. De facto is not a standard.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
thunderbird or whatever
Thunderbird works great if you're using IMAP or POP accounts. But if you're using Exchange then you have to pay for a plugin for it to work with MAPI and even then I don't think you get full functionality. Sure, you could connect to your exchange or O365 account as IMAP but then you lose things like calendar and address book integration. There doesn't seem to be a decent free client that works with Exchange besides EM client and I think you have to purchase a business license if your a business and want to use it.
What do standards have to do with anything? We're talking about one piece of software being compatible with another. A type of document created by application A cannot be used with application B, therefore they are not completely compatible. Standards don't matter to me when I get a spreadsheet with a button I am supposed to press to perform a validation of the data I have entered and the button does nothing.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
And one day a troll will admit to being clueless about the actual technical details of the matter at hand.
Incidentally, most FOSS software sucks, just as most commercial software does. LibreOffice is just not one of those. Still there? Then I must not be an "OSS zealot".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm not a troll. I'm a disappointed Linux user. I first installed Red Hat Linux in 1999 in the days where we were stuck with the appallingly buggy Netscape 4.7 and Firefox was only a distant dream. I used it almost exclusively for years. I set up my first wireless router using it long before you could buy them cheaply on Amazon. I used to love tinkering with it and it was streets ahead of the pathetic mess that was Win9x.
I gradually got turned off as it didn't seem to be improving as a desktop while Microsoft had fixed the worst of its flaws. I tried it again and again over the next 10 years to find that it had stood still or gone backwards. Wi-Fi seemed to be a particular problem.
I decided that I'd give it another chance this weekend and installed Ubuntu 16.04. At first I was impressed. All my hardware was detected and it installed really quickly. Everything looked really slick. Then I decided to install Chrome to see how Netflix runs.
Fuck sake. I double clicked on the icon, it opened the software manager and I clicked Install. Nothing happened. Clicked it again and nothing. That is garbage. I dropped to the command line and spent a while with really unhelpful circular dependency error messages before I figured out why it wasn't working. The install on Windows is just a double click and responding to a couple of dialog boxes. You may call me a moron or a troll but I'll post the console output if you want and defy you to tell me how that isn't really poor.
The software manager not giving any indication of success or failure is terrible and this has been my experience of a lot of OSS software. There seems to be this mentality that if you slap a GUI on a command line process that makes it user friendly when there's a lot more to it than that.
The fact that people would rather pay a fortune to Apple than use something that doesn't cost anything is very telling.
I just repeated what I tried to do before, and now the problem isn't happening anymore. I'm guessing the most recent update fixed the problem?
I had this problem consistently on two different macs, using both HP and Brother printers. And I wasn't the only one, cause if you googled for it, lots of other people had this problem, with no solution.
I'm glad it's now fixed, but this experience has seriously soured my perception of LibreOffice as being a viable alternative to Microsoft Office.
Ok, so I opened LibreOffice 5 (which comes with Ubuntu 16.04LTS), created a new document, went to Format/Page, selected the radio-button "Landscape" on the "Page" tab, clicked "Ok". Then I went to www.lipsum.com, generated 5 paragraphs of "Lorem ipsum" and copy/pasted that in my newly created document.
At this point, I hit Control-P, followed by Enter, which gave me a totally fine landscape printed "Lorem ipsum" text, as it was displayed on screen.
So, uhm... what's wrong?
Obviously LO printing ONLY works with Latin. Try doing it in Cyrillic and see what you get.
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...
All roads lead to Rome
Casteism
was replying to person who said "Outlook"
Exchange or O365 ever easier to replace, just throw that garbage in the dumpster and use something else. plenty of both proprietary and free alternatives. or continue to enjoy the malware infestations that come on a regular basis with MIcrosoft's badly designed rubbish