So the Germany has been moving back and forth between Microsoft and Linux / open-source.
When Munich decided to ditch many of its Windows installations in favor of Linux in 2003, it was considered a groundbreaking moment for open source software – it was proof that Linux could be used for large-scale government work. However, it looks like that dream didn’t quite pan out as expected. The German city has cleared a plan to put Windows 10 on roughly 29,000 city council PCs starting in 2020. There will also be a pilot where Munich runs Office 2016 in virtual machines. The plan was prompted by gripes about both the complexity of the current setup and compatibility headaches.
Do you know what this smells like? Corruption and consulting companies with friends in the govt looking for ways to profit.
What else can be more profitable for a consulting company than shifting the entire IT of a city or a country between two largely incompatible solutions? :)
Do you know what this smells like? Corruption and consulting companies with friends in the govt looking for ways to profit.
No it doesn’t. It smells like Microsoft has a monopoly on office software, and city employees are not tech enthusiasts. Anyone who used Office at home or in another job is going to complain when they have to learn a new software (regardless of which is “better” - for the average person, different is bad)
Plus, every document they receive from outside is almost certainly formatted in Office, so if there isn’t 100% compatibility, people will again complain.
Migrating an entire enterprise to FOSS software is not easy, and in government where leadership changes can be more regular, it’s not shocking to see the pendulum swing back and forth.
Could be both of those things as well.
Definitely could be both, but I’d posit that it would still happen regardless of corruption, just because they’re taking on the ambitious task of trying something new.
Plus, every document they receive from outside is almost certainly formatted in Office, so if there isn’t 100% compatibility, people will again complain.
That’s not like that with governments. Governments are huge clients, they can and should dictate file formats to suppliers.
If the state of Santa Catarina in Brazil, with a GDP of 2/3 of that of Munich, could transition to Open Document Format almost 20 years ago, Munich can.
They definitely can dictate requirements, however that means that you’re now making your staff play document format police.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that it’s an additional headache. If I were working in that office, I’d die a little inside each time I have to go back to a consultant/contractor/community member and say “can you please resubmit this, the formatting is broken when I open it in Libre Office”
Yes, again, they have the authority to do this, and it is technically feasible, but it’s going to be a bad user experience for a long time until everyone is properly “retrained”. Especially if you’re working with partners outside of Germany who have their own document standards.
I’m not saying this is a bad move, just that I understand why they might be inclined to jump back and forth.
your staff play document format police.
Often the email filter will just convert everything not allowed to PDF.
For the average person; msoffice and libreoffice function pretty much the same. Even the icons mostly match.
Oh, cool, so I can have multiple people editing a live document at the same time?
Only Calc / Spreadsheet
https://help.libreoffice.org/6.1/en-US/text/shared/guide/collab.html?DbPAR=SHARED
Because there’s no “Germany” in this movement. Different lands, different governments, different offices, etc.
IIRC the last time this made big headlines they tried to roll their own distro and it went very poorly longterm. The TL;DR version was they so thoroughly took the hardest route and made questionable choices that it was almost sure to fail, and then MS swooped in with some great offers and that was that. (This is entirely my dusty recollection of articles I read about it at the time, FWIW.)
I don’t know whether it was malicious compliance because the folks doing the change didn’t actually want to do it or what, but that effort was as doomed as Firefly was when Fox aired it out of order and with a constantly shifting schedule.
Hopefully they make some sensible choices this time around (at a minimum not trying to create a custom distro) and it goes better. It would be great to see this become a cascade effect.
they so thoroughly took the hardest route and made questionable choices that it was almost sure to fail
Typical government move going full malicious compliance while allowing “a few selected friends” from consulting companies to make a ton of money. They could’ve just picked Debian and rolled with it. Let’s face it, nobody develops desktop applications anymore most of the govt work is already done on custom built web platforms, any OS that can run a browser is good enough to address around 90% of the govt daily work.
Meanwhile China is creating their own distro that will be successful for sure because they’ve plans to move the public sector and whatever private they influence to the thing.
No.
Things were very different “back then.” Linux was less friendly at the time. And non-Microsoft products still had noticeable gaps. Web browser office suites didn’t exist.
The parts I remember reading were just that it took a long time for workers to get used to the system. Back then, home computers were uncommon for the average person. And what computer experience the average person did have was noticeably different from Linux.
I did not see articles about tech issues such as viruses or data leaks or configuration issues. Please show any if you have them.
What else can be more profitable for a consulting company than shifting the entire IT of a city or a country between two largely incompatible solutions? :)
See that’s the neat thing SH has (together with HH, HB and ST) its own IT consultancy. Public enterprise, not some public-private partnership, and 5300 staff a quite a bit more than what Munich’s IT department has.
And yes of course Munich is corrupt what do you expect it’s Bavaria.
So… it’s exactly what I said but with extra steps.
A way to provide money to the friends and have underplayed govt workers without the benefits and the stability 😂
Nah dataport doesn’t make profit, or at least it’s not paying out any to the states. It’s about as close to a ministry as you can get without being required to pay government wages and there’s not many in the industry who’d work for that. They don’t pay as much as FAANG or even SAP but among the wider industry it’s definitely competitive, especially if you don’t plan on job-hopping and dodging lay-offs.
If they put as much money into these foss projects as they where giving microsoft before, maybe Libreoffice will become halfway decent.
I use Libreoffice and it’s fine for a non-power user, but it sure has some rough edges
It has some rough edges to be sure. I’ve found myself fighting with it quite a bit. But it’s usable.
I’m just glad there is more incentive for [organization] to help patch the issues.
While I’m all for OSS, I’m also objective enough to know where it’s not a good idea. And I think this is one of them. They have commercial one available in their own country called softmaker, which comes with support which is really important for a business or organization. I’ve been using it for many years because the OSS where just not right for me. Also liked WPS more but Linux dev was slow, but now I found my match
LibreOffice does “develop and maintain a certification system for professionals of various kinds who deliver and sell services around LibreOffice.”
Doesn’t Germany do this every so many years to get a better Microsoft deal?
Which is leas good, but still fine.
One of the marginal transitional benefits of open source software is keeping proprietary shit at least kind of in it’s place.
A good number of European cities and countries have tried Linux and open source software in the past. They use it for a few years and then they have almost always have quietly gone back to MS Windows and Office products.
As much as I enjoy using Linux, (and no, I don’t use Arch), and open source for my own needs, I would be willing to bet after a few years, this German state will quietly move back to Micosoft products again.
The intense pressure from Microsoft doesn’t have anything to do with it I’m sure.
Microsoft certainly tries it’s best to keep you locked into their ecosystem by making it inconvenient but not impossible to leave though that’s not the real reason, it’s security. Businesses and especially governments are scared of nation state hackers contributing malicious code to open source products and falsely assume it’s safer to use closed source software because those incidents aren’t public. There’s so much great software out there I’d love to use and the first question I’m asked when I bring it up is can you prove China hasn’t contributed code?
I wonder if this is related to https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/. This as it shouldn’t be about saving cost. It should be about being sovereign.
Again with the squeaky shoes
The last time I tried it, which is now a few years ago, LibreOffice Calc was substantially slower than Excell for larger spreadsheets. Like a difference between night and day, it was no acceptable substitute if productivity was a concern, which it usually is.
Imo a big swoop change like this, which is done for ideological reasons, but without practical considerations, is doomed to fail and leave a lasting bad impression in peoples’ minds. Imo it would have been far better to only drop windows 10/11 for a familiar looking Linux distro, while continuing to use Microsoft Office.
Software freedom is about being in control of your computing. We can’t verify what proprietary software from a foreign company is doing on a government computer.
Public money public code is about citizens getting back the code we paid for. When a proprietary company improves software to get paid then they keep that advantage to themselves. LibreOffice is a collaborative project, everyone gains from it being improved by our money.
These aught to be valid concerns as much as productivity: to the degree it affects people. It cannot be dissmssed as being idelogical.
Those are ideological reasons though and me calling them idealogical does not mean that I dismiss them as valid reasons. Idealogy in itself is not a bad thing and it should certainly have a part in decision making.
Where we differ in opinion is in which should take priority: I’m of the opinion that practicality should trump ideology (in this case), while you find the idealogical reasons more important.
Are you working on ods formats? Anyways… We need more people using LO so we’ll have more developers and rhen comes a point in which LO surpasses everything else. Meanwhile, if we stick to proprietary software,we would be stuck in a vicious loop. We need to break trough and sometimes inthat transition there are some concessions to make. If we manage to make it aa a big collective of people,the transition process will be shorter.
I’m not using it anymore, I just tested it to see if I could propose it as a substitute. In my testing I tried both open and ms formats: I started with old excel files which didn’t work well, so then I tried open format files that were build up from a clean slate state, with the data imported from CSV files. After that didn’t perform satisfactory either, I turned to the internet. After searching for the major issue that I encountered (slow in a large sheet), I came to the conclusion that calc could not be a full substitute for excell, so I never proposed it and we’re still using ms office to this day.
I’m just going to copypaste some other people’s thoughts with which I agree, saving me a bit of time:
*"If you work at a large company for a while you’ll encounter a class of user that Calc doesn’t really address. They’re like super-specialists. They often have a deep knowledge of Excel, but are otherwise completely computer illiterate. They also work with large datasets and specific models. Calc isn’t a replacement for them. Not just on a feature level, but on an accessibility level.
Look for Excel resources. Classes, books, articles, howtos, everywhere. Do the same for Calc and you’ll struggle a lot more. There is stuff there, but it just isn’t nearly as professional and rich. There is no great way to transition Excel users to Calc users and have them still be as productive.
In the Linux world, when we get those style of work-loads we generally put aside Calc / Excel as a tool and begin looking at programming languages (e.g., Python, Matlab). I feel like this somewhat handicaps our ability to reach those users.
for basic use though, it’s perfectly acceptable. I just wouldn’t consider it a poweruser tool, and those power users are what make Office a multibillion dollar product for MS."*
*"Sadly, it’s just not there in book.
The only time I try to use LOCALC is when I have a few hundreds/thousands of rows of formatted values to sort into a simple graph and performance is just abysmal.
I just tried again earlier this day and though most daily features are there for your regular user, all my “casual” uses of it ended up underlining the severe performance problems.
Maybe my uses are far more corner case than I believe…"*
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9yjwyf/is_libreoffice_calc_truly_a_worthy_replacement/
Wow. i dont know. Ive never used calc nor excel for things that big. For that Ive used python or php/mysql. I use spreadsheets a lot, even complex ones, and calc always work for me. Anyways, you are right in regarda to the lack of support/books. Of course. Same happens with a lot of things. They are not mainstream (yet) because they are projects that havent had the money or power corporations like microsoft has had for lobbies and marketing. So we can struggle a little on the transition (some very brave pioneers have already paved the way for us, so its not that hard anymore) and hope we are contributing to a libre/free future in which digital technology helps build a better and fairer society for all. And then, they’ll become mainstream and we’ll have more books, support and communities than we ever dreamed of before.
I think we should aim for what is ideal and then take into consideration the constraints of what we can do. If it’s not plausible enough to go for what is ideal then aim to make that more likely while doing whatever is the next best thing. We risk being stuck on a peak of possible good if we refuse to go down to eventually go up higher.
I only use LibreOffice but don’t need it much. I can’t comment on how practical it is, or isn’t, for use in a government. If there’s another free software option then we aught to consider that. Else spend money to make it good enough for frequent and important use cases.
I think reducing their reasons to ideological is not fair. They stand to save a lot of money, reduce the risk of leaking data (to MS or hackers), and will have the ability to fork/add their own features.
While I am not familiar enough with Calc or Excel to comment on the speed, I imagine having an entire government using it could get the ball rolling on optimizations.
They stand to save a lot of money
Do they? They’ll now have to start training people to use Linux.
These people aren’t going to be enthusiasts like us. They need to be shown where everything is.
The money that will be saved is peanuts compared to the cost of the workers. Loss of productivity through the implementation of bad tools can be very costly. The various Microsoft Office programs also offer the possibility to add bespoke features. Microsoft Office does not leak data unless you chose to let it do so, at least in the eu.
Optimizations that might happen once a program with unacceptable performance is in a production environment, are generally optimizations that never happen. I’ve never seen a program make such a turnaround, it’s wishful thinking without a basis in reality.
This thing really is set up for failure. I’m not against organisations moving away from products from large monopolistic companies, rather the opposite, I’m very much in favor. But if the move is done in such a way that it’s bound to fail and then cement itself into people’s mind as a bad thing, then it has accomplished the opposite of what it has set out to do. Right now Linux is ready for widespread adoption in environments where productivity matters, but in my experience libre office is not.
the possibility of bespoke features Such a shame you can’t do this with open source software.
Every time I see someone say ‘I’m actually really a fan of open source’ it reads like ‘I’m not racist but’.
Wow, Schleswig-Holstein meaning well and starting beef by doing it. I’m sure there’s no precedent for that.
MS will erect another campus and things will go back to “normal”. Hopefully this will last at this time…
Good documentary about MS hold over German government: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duaYLW7LQvg
it’d be funny if municipalities all over the eu started switching to Linux because they want a Microsoft campus
BASED
Let’s hope they put the money they save into the projects
Well, guy who actually lives there (Schleswig-Holstein) here. Be precise in what’s written in tfa. What it laments about is that one (single) work place is about to be installed and that subsequent steps are about to follow.
I don’t want to sound too pessimistic here. The fact, that this topic is on the high level agenda shows that it has strong supporters - for the moment.
But weighing in past decades’ province goverment’s spendings in large scale software projects and peoples’ fear of everything even marginally IT, I’m very reluctant to see the big move here. Opposition against changes to my windows is simply unfathomable strong.
Nevertheless - and I mean that - it’s a good development.
Do they seem like they are paying for a integrator like SUSE (they are THE German commercial FOSS/Linux company in my head) or is it more enthusiasts trying to push changes and providing support?
I guess it will be even worse. Instead of taking good money for hiring good people (I know this strategy is over simplified, as there are mandatory regulations for gv not being allowed to compete with the private sector. But if there would be the political will to find a way, there would be a way), gv will take even more money and found a consortium of ‘experts’ who will spend most of the funding to invent an exceptionally complex new wheel that none has ever seen before and take years in development… And the next gv will roll back. And that’s that. Thinking about it I notice how desillusionated I became over the years…
Hopefully I will be wrong. This time. At least once.
Doesn’t matter, it only needs to stick once. And each year the big projects FOSS/Linux have tremendous improvements so if it’s half decent in the eyes of the gv users it’ll be a big Win
o7
Haaa! It feels good to hear. I hope that theyll support free software financially.
… told them 20 years ago already. Well then, finally …
