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

[Giant Electronic Bra]

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.

Re:Awesome

[MightyYar]

Word's styles are better, but it makes up for this by making tables and pictures infuriating. Scientific papers are painful in Word.

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

[thsths]

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.

 

Re:Awesome

[Giant Electronic Bra]

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).

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.

Re:Free is not

[Grishnakh]

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

Yes, they can. There is no technical reason they can't. They just need to adjust their laws and policies to match Microsoft's offerings and policies.

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.

You keep making this mistake. Yes, they can. They absolutely can. If they want to use Microsoft software, then they better get used to working this way.

I for one hope Microsoft takes a very hard stance here and makes it impossible for anyone (including enterprises and governments) to not have a network connection when using Microsoft software. That includes computers handling classified information. These computers need to have internet connections so that they can "phone home" to Microsoft. Who do these upstart customers think they are, trying to tell Microsoft how to architect their software?

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..."

Re:Writer is fine...

[StormReaver]

...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.

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.

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

[fph il quozientatore]

To be fair, coffee-making is a serious business in Italy.

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

[thegarbz]

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.

Re:And they saved even more...

[jawtheshark]

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?

Re:Ugh

[Calabacin]

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"?

Re:And they saved even more...

[Calabacin]

(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?

Re:Not counting training costs...

[ichthus]

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.

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?

Re:Ugh

[HelpTheNewOverlord]

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