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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)
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?
(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?
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
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?
thunderbird or whatever
For the people I know, the main problem are macros. It is almost impossible to develop macros in Libre/OpenOffice. The language seems to be a mix of vb/java or python/java that makes it necessary to understand at least two languages to be usable, the API is HUGE and complex, and so on, and on.
On the other hand, it seems to be going in the right direction: Upcoming PyUNO improvements in LibreOffice 5.1 Matthew Francis
If it continues like that, it may soon be *easier* to write macros for LibreOffice than for MS office as python is much better/easier/powerful than VB
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.
If I use MSOffice, I'm tied to a specific version of Visual Basic for Applications that breaks between the different versions. LibreOffice has a compatibility engine for VBA (works pretty well in my experience but I haven't used it too much), PLUS they offer Java and Python as alternatives. That's a great reason to avoid MS right there.
I really agree with you, but I already know Java/Python/VB/VBA so it is not that hard to jump from one to another.
On the other hand, performance was a bottleneck while running scripts outside LibreOffice process and it seems to be solved in 5.1(also in the PDF that I linked)
Wait, you're complaining about default styles as if that somehow constrained you? Yes, it's a problem with the defaults, but if you really expect to be productive in LO.org, you should have your own styles, made from scratch.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.