The germans have been tinkering with policies mandating non-cloud dependent products for a while wondering if this is a start of it actually getting implemented on a large scale or if the delay attempts will remain successful elsewhere across the region.
If this is a start of an actual migration away from cloud dependence, it's a matter of time before windows(which is as cloud dependent as office those days for enterprise management features) itself is targeted, and the entire federation of germany changing from ms office formats to odf in practice could set some interesting balls in motions.
But as we have seen this before where a product is started and then sabotaged or delayed by lobbying and inertia from people who dont want to change how theyve always done things, it could be another one-off that dont set a trend.
I think that depends on which part of "Office 365" you mean: The name itself is, as I understand it, a moniker for pretty much all Office products nowadays, both the "MS Office in the browser" and the "traditional MS Office applications". More of an all-encompassing marketing label than any specific product. So the free-standing MS Word / Excel / Outlook etc I use at work are "Office 365" just as the webpage equivalents I could use in stead (but don't, because they're still pretty massively inferior to the standalone apps).
N.B: "As I understand it"; I could be wrong as Hell.
No clue. But the most painful point is not so much loosing web-based apps (we still have local versions) but Teams, OneDrive and some management tools which are moot if services are down
> sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.
While there might be issues with Office 365's reliability (I don't know, I use Google Docs), the online collaborative capabilities is a fantastic tradeoff. Mailing individual files amongst a group of collaborators impede productivity (even though it has other benefits).
You could make the argument that cloud solutions are not a prerequisite for collaborative tools like Office 365 or Google Docs, but desktop peer-to-peer systems like those that Groove Networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks) tried to create did not take off.
Hmmm. Compared to Google Docs and Google Drive, Microsoft's collaboration is just bizarre.
Yes, under ideal conditions, teams of people technically could use Microsoft to edit and review documents online at the same time. I have yet to see it in a real world setting. Often times, where I work, we just get confused by OneDrive's links vs direct sharing vs personal onedrive vs sharepoint onedrive. And we end up sharing multiple copies of the same file on Teams which is another source of confusion.
I don't know what you consider ideal conditions, but we do it all the time. It's pretty common for me to be reviewing a document and see the avatars of other people who are simultaneously reviewing and editing it. I've been doing this for years and have yet to have a problem.
Sharing multiple copies of the "same" file is where the problems come in.
There are multiple issues.
[1] If you drag/drop or upload the file to Teams, it creates a copy and shares it via Teams SharePoint?
[2] If you look in Teams, some people have automatic permissions because they are in the Team or already have access to the Teams folder. If they are not in the Team, then you have to give "direct access".
[3] For the paranoid, you first go into OneDrive and "manage access". Then you are faced with two choices whose UX is confusing to say the least. One option is to "Copy Link" which has almost the same identical choices as "Share with Specific People". Note that "Share with Specific People" gives you options like "Anyone/doesn't require sign in" and the dialog has a button called "Copy Link". Huh? I thought I was sharing with specific people. I am still unsure who exactly can see the document. Or if the document was shared externally outside of my company.
Below are snippets of MSFT's documentation of what happens when you upload a file to a Teams channel. I BOLDED the confusing parts and added ???.
> All files that you upload, create, or share in Teams can be found in the ONEDRIVE??? icon app on the left side of Teams for desktop.
> Files that you upload to a channel are stored in your team's SHAREPOINT???folder. These files are available in the Files tab at the top of each channel.
With Teams, the distinction is pretty easy: Within a Team, the file gets uploaded to the Team's SharePoint site. If you share a file in the Chat module, it gets uploaded to your own OneDrive.
It's clear as in "if you know the rule you can count on it" but there is no discoverability within the tool itself. It will even say if a file has been uploaded into the chat already, giving you an impression that the file is in the chat - while it really is in your own onedrive.
I only discovered it by chance while roaming my onedrive directory.
Confusing to the points where I had (university) students that told me "I _only_ have the file in Excel [and therefore can not share it with you]". That statement confused me until I left academia and was forced to work with MS Office for the first time. Having files in 4 different locations really does not help.
On top of that, Onedrive is the worst of the lot at handling collisions in files. I routinely find that files I work on using two machines in my office (gbit uplink) get garbled. To the point where neither has the latest changes, they’re just gone. Absolutely terrible.
Groove worked amazing until MS bought them out and basically killed them. I've only used it when it was included in Office, but it worked amazingly well. As long as you had at least 1 computer on, it synced pretty reliably. It even worked for Outlook when they were independent but ironical Outlook sync was disabled when they integrated Groove into Office. The next batch of syncing systems were a terrible mess. I think it turned into Sharepoint sync, then decided to go full internet cloud and decided to replace it Foldershare (they bought them about same time they bought Groove), updated it to Livemesh, and killed all that off finalizing with Skydrive which had to be changed to Onedrive. I loved Groove and tried all the iterations but found Dropbox to be hands down the best and have over 30GB free. Unfortunately they only offer 3 free devices now so I might have to go back to Onedrive which had a lot of sync issues last i tried it.
The drive here is to reduce dependencies to locations the state itself have jurisdiction over i.e. things that can be controlled.
It's essentially to avoid having the states data taken hostage when the slowly brewing conflict between America's lack of respect for it's foreign partners data protection regulation and the EU's very popular trend towards less and less tolerance for corporate data abuse comes to an head and we see actual blocks being mandated on high-security networks against US data harvesting companies(of which MS is but one).
And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US?
Companies buy Office 365 subscriptions so they can focus on their main business and don't want to think about their office solution and want something that JustWorks which is already compatible with what everyone else uses.
They have a business to run and money to makes, so spending extra time and effort on alternative office solutions with various degrees of compatibility, just to fight a virtual trade war, will slow then down significantly from their main business goal.
Why do you think Google uses SAP instead of rolling out their own solution? You think they don't have the technical know-how, or is it because it's not worth the effort and better use what everyone else is already using and focus your resoruces on what really matters?
This is precisely why Microsoft freaked out when Germany last tried this. It led to them inventing this nebulous "TCO" concept wherein they massively overestimated the costs surrounding moving to FOSS in order to try and convince clueless managerial stakeholders to stick with them.
To be fair in certain cases the cost might be very high and considerably higher than whatever the license/subscription fees paid to MS are. e.g. Libre Office doesn’t really have a drop-in replacement for Excel (for non trivial use cases. To be fair it still might be sufficient for the majority of users, but that would mean that some proportion of your workforce has to stay on Excel/Office which kind of beats the whole purpose).
To be equally fair, in certain cases the non-licensing costs of Microsoft software are higher than the FOSS equivalent.
In fact, I'd argue that in some cases these are higher. A good example of this is that piece of shit that is Microsoft Teams - both the horrid security flaws and the ways it keeps breaking. I've used FOSS equivalents and they have a smaller attack surface and are more reliable.
They also play all sorts of user-hostile tricks that make vendor lock in possible, and this often has an underappreciated impact on delivery.
Uh using an out of date and unsupported Excel version is a really bad idea. Lots of security vulnerabilities around VB scripting/macros which gives you the very real risk of being compromised by a malicious spreadsheet.
Better to just switch where you can and invest resources into improving FOSS offerings to handle the use cases it currently can’t.
Medical researchers in many places leak non-anonymized sensitive patient data to MS, even when they know better and that's one of the reasons Office LTSC exists
You don't need everyone switching over. Let's say that by next year, a total of 10% of orgs in the EU are using LibreOffice, and then Redmond is hit by a comet. It'd be painful for the other 90% to switch but there would be some familiarity with the process, whereas if there's an MS monoculture then it would take a whole lot longer and be a lot messier.
As someone who split his time 50/50 between AWS and vmware based instances, i cant really think of anything we run in AWS that is not eventually supposed to go back on prem when we have stabilized the specification and lifecycle expectations. And who could not have gone in on prem if we had been willing to spend capex upfront(which would likely had led to lower lifecycle costs).
The last time this debate came along ms was able to sweep in with an solution that did not require cloud integration with an price/support package that was by all estimate at bellow cost, and i would be surprised if the state in question have anything in the cloud that MS did not use to offer as on-prem solutions, and im pretty sure the current wintel/mso solution is based around those on-prem implementation of AD and SharePoint that no longer exists and viable alternatives to opensource based document storage repositories.
I guess the same as people have always done. You have more server rooms on ideally different networks and grids. That can be a rented room/ rack in a bigger DC, your own if you have a big factory with subsidiaries etc.
The IAM etc. will probably done by a combination of technical on organizational measures. You will have certain people doing certain things at least before the solution is ready for IaC. People will create roles, accounts, accesses and such. With networking gear that can be still tricky to implement, with virtualization solutions that is easier today. For databases etc. you can create accounts in them too.
Of course, K8s and similar make these things more formalized/ transferable. However there is a lot of stuff before you can deploy that.
People forget however that even if you have hundreds of servers you are tiny compared to the cloud providers. You don't have to have the same breadth and depth of offering. So while you need more baby sitting of hardware, probably will not get nearly as good deals on hardware as the big providers do, you will save their considerable margins. Also, they actually have some of the same expenses too - if a harddrive goes bad they will still swap them basically the same as you do. Big cloud providers will not get substantially different energy pricing than what e.g. a steel foundry would get.
By hosting things on premise or in a nearby datacenter(s) you can shave off a lot of latency too. Some machinery likes to store a lot of data and shaving off latency will decrease your need for thick router buffers because you will not have such a big Bandwidth Delay Product and will achieve the same speeds with much smaller buffers.
Building stuff on premise just for you makes some things easier too. Even if you loose some credentials usually you can just hard-reset the equipment as the last resort. There will be no credit card blocking that would affect the operations. If you are less strict with security it will usually matter much less - you are not sharing the hardware with unknown parties and all people that touch it have a contract with the company. So usually everybody want the company to succeed to get the paycheck. You build a deeper know how and can do some optimizations the cloud providers cannot do because you don't have to be general.
I mostly thought about the software infrastructure side. With thousands and even mere hundreds of servers over several locations you already want some uniformity. Would you run k8s? Nomad + Consul? MinIO or Ceph? MySQL + Galera? Would OwnCloud scale to many hundreds of users? How would you unify or integrate access control to all that?
Nothing unsurmountable here, just interesting how it's done in real big on-prem installations.
Well, hundreds or thousands of servers can probably be still managed by Ansible with Fabric, Puppet, Chef etc.
I don't think focusing too much on the technologies used is useful when planning the overall approach. Most companies could probably consolidate all the critical hardware to 2-3 racks of equipment if they tried nowadays with HA and everything. Hardware is just really powerful and having less of it makes everything else further up usually simpler.
What I would run depends on the particular customer I would have. I probably wouldn't try to unify or integrate access control much. You are not trying to build another public cloud, you want to develop and deploy applications with reasonable robustness in comparison to the cost and benefit of the solution.
Real on-premise installations usually are a mix of open and proprietary technologies. Many companies probably have a few Windows Server file servers on top of VMware vSAN or some kind of EMC2/ NetApp/ HPE 3PAR or whatever storage with HA capability. There is no S3 compatible storage and all the data is stored on the network drive and referenced in some MSSQL database or stored directly in it. If MSSQL or Oracle is used, they probably run on local storage and have are part of a cluster that are marked such that they are never on the same physical node. You can do similar things with Proxmox, GNU/ Linux and PostgreSQL too with a little more effort. You can run MinIO or Garage for S3 if you want to be cool or buy a supported Ceph installation from e.g. SUSE. Everything will be more rudimentary and half automatic but still a few people will be able to manage that even on a rather large scale without many issues.
Of course, if you have bigger needs, there are companies you can by computers from by the rack. Some will offer you a complete cloud management stack with it. It can be Oxide Computers (their own stack), or Cloud&Heat in Germany for instance (that is built on OpenStack). There are so many options.
For AWS we rely almost entirely on backup/restore and database level log shipping on prem this is is in some cases argumented by storage level(netapp and previously hpe 3par) replication but this is going away for cost reasons.
Given that my experience with AWS is to use the same application level cross region resilience techniques im used to on prem(i have worked with high end unix boxen most of my carear) im genuinely baffled when people start talking about cloud resilience as something magical, and nearly all our traffic happens inside of an private network(MPLS/VPN) that stretches across the different sites.
I really haven't seen any magic multi-az resiliiance in aws that dont have an onprem counter part.
None of this is in house whitebox hardware but relatively standard solutions from established vendors(VMware recently started abusing their near monopoly so everyone is looking for/at alternatives like proxmox, xen and nutanix but arent ready to move just yet).
Thanks! Certainly multi-AZ setups are not magical. I just wanted to know how it's now done on-prem, what are the tools, solutions, approaches. Doing this in a cost-effective way for 1000 servers likely takes different tools than doing this at a major cloud provider scale.
This is correct. The original comment was about having basically anything AWS has to offer run on-prem, assuming that these things are actually needed.
I guess MS could just find a way to guarantee that any data is only stored in data centers in Europe. It shouldn’t be too complicated and I don’t see how could they be considered to be a foreign cloud then.
I don't think so. The US government could kill Microsoft; no European government could. The EU / some European government could kill a European company; the US couldn't.
You don't need a cloud to efficiently develop software. I've worked in companies that were running kubernetes on prem. It was a PITA for kubernetes ops but from a developer perspective it wasn't much different than using the cloud in a large company.
Cloud is very flexible for very small orgs that have little processes but once you get into a certain size with lots of processes, privileges separations and nomenclatures, it becomes so bureaucratic all flexibility of a cloud mostly disappear.
> You don't need a cloud to efficiently develop software. I've worked in companies that were running kubernetes on prem. It was a PITA for kubernetes ops but from a developer perspective it wasn't much different than using the cloud in a large company.
EC2 servers and Kubernetes are a very small part of what is necessary to run complex applications.
> Cloud is very flexible for very small orgs that have little processes but once you get into a certain size with lots of processes, privileges separations and nomenclatures, it becomes so bureaucratic all flexibility of a cloud mostly disappear.
That will be the same in any large company.
Friends working at banks have to make formal requests for new versions of Python that months to be accepted.
If anything, clouds can be much more flexible thanks to tools like CDK which bare-metal or OpenStack don't offer.
> These kinds of problems are organizational, not technical. Thinking cloud solutions solve organizational issues magically is naive and delusional.
We actually agree on this point.
Using OpenStack is actually not a silver bullet and won't solve this problem. This is an organisational problem.
So my point still stands that OpenStack is lacking in services and is not fit for complex applications if you do not want to reinvent the wheel every day.
> You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US?
I don't think they will stop, but they will become much more hesitant.
Concerning your other points: it is of similar economic importance for the company to invest in precautions to prevent that you are taken hostage of, in this case by Microsoft. Thus such measures are actually often in the company's self-interest in opposite to fighting a virtual trade war for someone else.
> And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US?
Well... yes, I think that's exactly the argument being made here. Reliance on foreign cloud infrastructure is a liability, and the US does not hold any of its companies accountable for blatantly unethical and reckless data practices.
I'll admit LibreOffice is relatively underpowered and unintuitive, but I've been using it for years and I find the compatibility issues to be overblown. I'd hazard a bet that most employees of companies using MS Office could make the switch and be used to it within a couple weeks. Certainly a much, MUCH easier transition than one between ERPs, for example.
> Why do you think Google uses SAP instead of rolling out their own solution?
SAP can be hosted entirely onsite, and at Google's scale that's almost certainly what they're doing. The problem is the infrastructure, not the origin of the software itself. Note how the EU never had anything against MS Exchange Servers.
Of course.
Same thing will all those environmental laws shenanigans.
Companies are better off investing in short-term gains and leave the governments taking care of the environment and digital accountability of its citizens.
If the alternative is not getting the security certifications required to operate legally in the sectors they depend on for revenue what alternative does an organization really have to seeking/implementation solutions in sync with the mandated regulations.
And this is not an private company whose demise is insignificant to the society at large(as all companies must be in an functional capitalist economy) but the government itself instituting policies to protect itself from dependence on a single foreign company.
Governments can take a longer and more strategic outlook than private enterprises. It's not even primarily about nationalistic trade wars: I want my tax euros to fund as little closed-source software as possible. It's crazy how much money even just our schools spend for software that can't be freely redistributed or modified. That said, I'm not holding my breath regarding the success of this most recent move.
> And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US?
Most workers in most companies probably don't really need an entire Office suite. It is just they use Outlook and from time to time open a Word document that could've been a PDF or HTML form if they had better processes. For the same reason, most people don't really need to use Windows. However people use Windows, because a lot of "professional" software only ships for it and nobody is going to rewrite an app that the enterprise uses for the last 20 years to prevent the use of Windows or some of its particular version. If it was that easy, why would Windows XP or Windows 7 be still so wide-spread?
> Companies buy Office 365 subscriptions so they can focus on their main business and don't want to think about their office solution and want something that JustWorks which is already compatible with what everyone else uses.
The problem is, many programs in the Office suite don't just work. Being an admin in a larger organization you will face a broken .pst file basically every week. 10+ GB of emails seems to be a problem also considering the search speed etc. The level of engineering incompetence behind Outlook is high. It even has special conditional HTML just so Outlook renders some things correctly, because Microsoft is long term incapable of implementing a web engine to a degree that they had to adopt and adapt a competitors product (Chromium).
Similarly for Excel. Most things that are in Excel shouldn't be and instead should be a table + some app in a database or a form + database backend. We have seen that during COVID-19, when essential health data was messed up because of wrong use of Excel but also because Excel just wasn't the right tool for the job frankly. We have been renaming genes or whatever, because Excel has insufficient auto-formatting algorithms and people have to learn how to prevent this - which is proof it doesn't "Just Work" for people.
> They have a business to run and money to makes, so spending extra time and effort on alternative office solutions with various degrees of compatibility, just to fight a virtual trade war, will slow then down significantly from their main business goal.
Most things in most companies should be formalized in digital forms backed by some processing backend. Most companies just are not very good at management therefore they fill these gaps by using more flexible tools where everybody can unfold their creativity generally making a mess making any kind of formalization much harder later on.
No question there are also jobs where you need that flexibility, e.g. where you get data from people precisely in these formats and are expected to produce output in these formats for them too. Because people are generally opposed to change and don't want to learn, if they can avoid it. Much better tools are available for so many activities yet people usually opt for a product out of the Office suite.
> Why do you think Google uses SAP instead of rolling out their own solution? You think they don't have the technical know-how, or is it because it's not worth the effort and better use what everyone else is already using and focus your resoruces on what really matters?
Because promotions are easier to get if you work on a product that makes money for the company (such as search + ads) or is a big cost center and a needed pre-condition for the business (such as the cloud infrastructure) and you can implement changes that safe the company a lot of money.
However, don't underestimate how much SAP was customized for Google. It could be that SAP is just the core of a much bigger system.
Listening to people talk about the 00s like we barely invented fire is something else. There's been very little new in computing since the arpanet was invented. The cloud is someone's mainframe and we moved away from those for the same reason why government wants to leave the cloud.
> There's been very little new in computing since the arpanet was invented.
Now there's a hot take!
I suppose for this assertion to work, you'd have to consider Arpanet orders-of-magnitude more sophisticated an advancement than modern gaming, blockchain, VR, LLMs with fully integrated real-time image processing... all just minor increments?
Nowadays they mail .docx around, haven't seen a .doc in a long time. I'm a software dev on Linux and haven't even LibreOffice installed. I tell the sender to please send it to me as .pdf. I write docs in markdown on GitHub (the company I work for uses GitHub, make of it what you will).
When did people stop doing that? Last time I checked (which was our soc2 audit last year) most people didn't understand the sharing/collaborative features of sharepoint/office365 and were still doing it.
I live in a badly-maintained, "3rd world" country, and since we got office 365 maybe a half decade ago (probably more) it's been down once, for one afternoon. And that was due to what looks like an undersea cable sabotage.
What kind of internet/IT department do you have where you have any sort of regular office outage?
Recently we had a Teams outage at work that wasn't AWFULLY disruptive, but the only reason that is is that we don't depend on 365 cloud services to get anything done. We use Slack for chat features and more casual calling services (non-meeting) though of course Teams managed to be down on a meeting-heavy day, and we ended up organizing Slack huddles to get around it.
The only real cloud service we use is OneDrive and the CEO is pushing us to get away from it because it has all kinds of strange problems with file permissions and we constantly have to call IT to unlock files.
https://twitter.com/MSFT365Status just scrolling through there is several outages, Teams, performance issues, etc. However it does tend to be only a specific area/country or a set of products rather then all of Office 365.
The fact that it would even go down and it requires online connection to vacuum up my data is such a bananas level oversight from MS. That company, man, that company.
It doesn’t. These guys are probably still upset about the ribbon.
Microsoft is not my favorite company. But the only reason O365 has been down for days is when customer integrations (identity, security stuff, VPN rules, etc) break. That was even true in the early days before 365 branding. Source: I’ve been accountable for 250k+ user O365 environments as a customer director or VP for over a decade.
Really? Or did that not make its way up the chain of command? None of your 250k+ accounts had issues because they didn't connect to the internet? What about license renewals - did anyone get shut out of their account immediately because they missed a license renewal date and happy to be off the internet?
The link is just about a move from one part of Munich to another (MS German HQ has always been in Munich). From what I remember it was more that we had a coalition with the CSU for four years and unsurprisingly, the moment conservatives were part of the cities government all went back to "help the companies".
(MS had tried to pressure against the move from the start, but wasn't really successful in the first years)
The problem was mostly that the only guy that was really backing the project (Christian Ude, SPD), was replaced with his successor (Dieter Reiter, SPD) who just didn't have the drive necessary to maintain the project.
The entire design of "LiMux" was doomed from the start: it was a highly customized version of Ubuntu that was only used in Munich (not even throughout the entire state). That made everything ridiculously expensive since the actual advantages of building on an open source solution was never realized.
That is combined with the fact that "open source" and "cost savings" were used interchangeably when in reality the budget for Windows should have been pre-allocated into development, rather than cut.
The entire project was half-assed to begin with, which basically meant that Windows and Linux had to coexist since many crucial tools were never ported to Linux.
The "Microsoft killed it" story sounds realistic, but the truth is the much more boring incompetence in execution.
I've no doubt that there was incompetence involved. Which is to be somewhat expected since Linux requires a set of skills to install and administer at scale, and few people have that particular skillset.
Equally I'm sure it was never going to be a cost saving exercise since firstly the cost of Windows is negligible, and second the conversion costs, in-house skill requirements, re-training of users, and porting existing software are all significant.
So you go from cheap software to free software, but from cheap IT staff to expensive, perhaps-incompetant, hard-to-replace IT staff.
If the savings aren't real then the fallback argument is privacy etc. But Libre Office runs fine on Windows. So by all means start there.
They always stated that it won't be cheaper. That was not the intention.
The main point was that Munich saw an opportunity to leave a monopoly for an option with competition. When the LiMux decision was made Munich had to change their whole IT landscape anyway (They ran on NT4 and even extended support was running out / getting extremely costly), so they thought: If we have to change anyway, why not change for something where we have more options?
Having more options, in and of itself, has no value. Leaving a monopoly to go to an alternative option in itself has no value. Plus of course, since they decided to basically build their own option, they did neither.
Firstly, the number of options argument. Choosing between lots of options, over choosing the best option, isn't some intrinsic good. I don't support say football over Formula 1 because there are more teams. I choose one over the other based on which sport I prefer to watch.
Going the Linux route "because there are more distributions to choose from" is a dumb argument if Windows is the best OS for your organisation. [1].
Equally, you may decide that you'd prefer to foster competition. You might decide that it's worth subsidising competition just to have competition. You acknowledge you're making an inferior choice, but the are unaccounted upsides to others having that choice.
But govt adoption of Linux (especially creating your own distribution) does little to nurture competition. Munich didn't spend its budget improving Linux. They spent the budget implementing it.
There are reasons Windows and Office dominate the desktop, especially in large scale environments. You may not like MS, but that doesn't negate those reasons. If you make a choice to forge a different road because you don't like MS then you'd better be very clear on what those reasons are, and what challenges and costs you are likely to face. Because if you aren't, then earn those challenges and costs come up it's hard to wave them away.
I'm not saying all this to rag on Linux or OSS, or to say its impossible to run Linux etc. As per the GP, there are companies that have made a choice, that hire people with the right skills, that make it work.
But thinking that rolling out Linux at enterprise level is easy, or cheaper, or has better desktop options, or runs more bespoke software, or is easier to get good desktop software for , or is easier (cheaper) to buy hardware for, is wrong. And that wrongness will lead to project failure. And those failures don't help Linux, arguably they hurt it.
> The link is just about a move from one part of Munich to another (MS German HQ has always been in Munich).
Nope. They moved from Unterschleißheim (administrative district of Munich in Upper Bavaria) to Schwabing (district of Munich town), which tax-paying wise makes the difference.
That wasn't a correction; you were right to begin with. If it's so much a part of the city that you don't even know if it's formally part of the city or not... Then it's part of the city.
Fuck, it seems (from Google Maps) to be about half as far from the center of Munich as the Munich Airport. If schitt that far out is called "Munich", then so is Unterschleissheim.
I remember that one... In the end the harsh truth for MS is that a guesstimate of 99% of all offices and administration users are using and, most of all, only need 1% of the features Office (including Excel) do offer.
The other harsh truth is that those using more advanced features are typically creating spreadsheets full of errors and bugs, which should be better rewritten in dedicated apps.
The world is using MS Office but the world really doesn't need that turd.
I ve both ported an Excel spreadsheet to dedicated app and helped SMEs move everything to Google workspace.
> The other harsh truth is that those using more advanced features are typically creating spreadsheets full of errors and bugs, which should be better rewritten in dedicated apps.
My experience has been the mirror opposite. I’m doing finance/accounting day to day but can also code. The attempts to replace excel with custom apps were consistently absolute horror shows full of consultants, endless meetings, coders not understanding finance nuances, endless parallel running, budget overruns. And then months and a couple of 100k spent later all to duplicate a spreadsheet someone had originally slapped together in a day or two.
Not wildly attached to excel but now actively steer clear from custom app projects due to career risk of being in proximity of these.
It’s the same as big SAP projects once the “customizations” start. The implementing teams incentives are the precise opposite of the business. Bill as much as possible, extend project timeline, add more features and widgets, make things seem more complicated than they need to be, pull users away from their work to test, cater to the execs with dashboard instead of the team in trenches, endless CYA processes camouflaged as “end user acceptance”, office politics shenanigans to promote the solution etc. I’d much rather debug & streamline a spreadsheet than deal with all that.
I do agree that spreadsheets tend towards chaos as complexity increases though…
> The attempts to replace excel with custom apps were consistently absolute horror shows full of consultants, endless meetings, coders not understanding finance nuances, endless parallel running, budget overruns. And then months and a couple of 100k spent later all to duplicate a spreadsheet someone had originally slapped together in a day or two.
"Modern Web Apps", based on "The Modern Data Stack", and so on...?
Give the spreadsheets (and access to two or three of the people who made and use them!) to one or two guy[s] with Delphi, and you'll have an old-fashioned client-server app -- which isn't a bad thing; it's what you want in contexts like this -- in a week or less. For the first one; the following ones are faster.
America is a very big place with federal, state, city standards. I'm not sure it is possible to say "exclusively" about anything.
That said, I've been in the IT world for 3 decades and I haven't worked for/with a government agency that used anything other than MS Office since the WordPerfect and Lotus 123 days.
What do you mean by "exclusively" and "government"? Outside of the DoD/US Military (where hardened Linux has quite a few uses), I'm pretty sure the US Federal govt is fairly Microsoft-centric as they offer them the guarantees and concessions needed to sign contracts. It's not that the Fed thinks Windows or Office is better than the open source alternatives, as much as it is that if/when they do fail they have a direct point of contact with strict SLA guarantees to get things fixed and they have full control of all of their software to do so without hindrance.
Local and state govts usually follow suit, as it makes sense that what works for the Fed will work for them. But I've seen plenty of open source softwares being used in various municipal and state offices. LibreOffice and CentOS would probably be the most common alternatives.
So, to answer your question, no it's not exclusively Windows. It's almost exclusively Windows in the Federal govt as there are mandates there, but otherwise it's a hodgepodge of what works/can be afforded throughout all other levels of govt.
> It's not that the Fed thinks Windows or Office is better than the open source alternatives, as much as it is that if/when they do fail they have a direct point of contact with strict SLA guarantees to get things fixed
Does MS provide SLAs? Are there no suppliers who will provide similar SLAs for FOSS software?
> and they have full control of all of their software to do so without hindrance.
That puzzles me. How can you have more control over proprietary software than over open source? If you mean MS have full control, how does that benefit their customers?
> Does MS provide SLAs? Are there no suppliers who will provide similar SLAs for FOSS software?
Gotta love how internet commentators feel like picking a statement apart in isolation somehow validates their point.
Yes, they offer SLAs and have full control of their software and its release cycle. So can offer guarantees and stand by them.
> That puzzles me. How can you have more control over proprietary software than over open source?
"They" is Microsoft.
> If you mean MS have full control, how does that benefit their customers?
It means they don't have to wait for Linux (or a plethora of other open source softwares) for upstreaming or need to fork / manage an independent branch. It means that they aren't at the whims of a community who decides to abandon projects willy-nilly or replace them with brand new implementations at the drop of a hat. Or commercial entities built on top of those projects that can only offer surface level guarantees.
No one here is saying Windows (or proprietary software) is intrinsically better. What they're saying is that what Microsoft offers to certain large-scale/enterprise entities is clearly better.
If you disagree, have at it. I don't care. The fact that people continue to sign with Azure, Microsoft, Office, etc makes it self-evident.
> It means that they aren't at the whims of a community who decides to abandon projects willy-nilly or replace them with brand new implementations at the drop of a hat.
Yeah, because only the Open Source community ever does that. Corporations never do... /s
(The "Google Graveyard" site is famous, but wasn't there one for Microsoft too? I want my Microsoft Bob to be maintained, dammit!)
ETA:
> The fact that people continue to sign with Azure, Microsoft, Office, etc makes it self-evident.
...that they're idiots. That's what you meant, right?
I think the sentiment is less that something catastophic can't happen by depending on M$ - it's more that you personally will never be blamed for their servers going down. Whereas if you advocate for a smaller/more open solution and that blows up in the company's face, it's your ass on the line.
It's reasonable. What would be strange is that they relied on Chinese or Russian software to run their government. That's sort of what we, the Europeans, do when we use Microsoft tech in our governments.
I feel like I've seen this very headline before in Germany specifically several times over the years, like I keep hearing that Germany is using LibreOffice/OpenOffice.
Googling to try to confirm this, I see that OpenOffice began when a program called StarOffice was open-sourced, and StarOffice was originally a German product most popular in Germany, so that could be part of German interest in OpenOffice descendents specifically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#History
And here's an article that may be what I was thinking of -- but turns out it was about Munich specifically. That has a history of saying it was going to switch to OpenOffice as far back as 2003, that not working out for them, then trying again...
2020: Linux not Windows: Why Munich is shifting back from Microsoft to open source – again: Munich's flip-flop back to open source is the latest sign of Germany's political sea change over proprietary software.
> However, the decision by the new coalition administration in Germany's third largest and one of its wealthiest cities is just the latest twist in a saga that began over 15 years ago in 2003, spurred by Microsoft's plans to end support for Windows NT 4.0.
> Because the city needed to find a replacement for aging Microsoft Windows workstations, Munich eventually began the move away from proprietary software at the end of 2006.
And here's a history of Berlin announcing/trying but not getting approval....
> It is the second time the opposition Greens had proposed switching Berlin's 68,000 workstations to open source software, and the second time they failed, said Thomas Birk, the party's spokesman for government modernization, on Wednesday. The earlier effort was in 2007.
Oh boy, which also mentions:
> Not every migration works though. The city of Freiburg announced in November it would dump OpenOffice and go back to Microsoft because of functionality problems due to a failed migration.
So yeah, German localities kind of have a history of trying this out without it actually leading to a sea change, although this one may be larger/at the state level instead of just city/etc. (Although I guess it's wrong to say this hasn't led to a trend -- its' an existing German trend of local governments trying to switch, without it necessarily working out!)
15 years ago. It was big news then.
Germany has always had a rocky relationship with USA software....
Remember when Lotus.... software could not be exported from the USA because the encryption was considered a weapon of mass destruction?
The German government developed a fully free and open source solution that is quite similar (consisting of Nextcloud, jitsi, Collabora etc.) and can be deployed using Kubernetes: https://gitlab.opencode.de/bmi/opendesk
It’s kind of a bummer that there’s a bunch of these separate OSS initiatives in Spain, France, Germany and a few other countries..
Instead of everyone rolling their own subvariant of Nextcloud, Matrix, LibreOffice etc, imagine if there was an EU mandate set up and some serious money was budgeted to it.
You’d get a triple multiplier of more budget, less duplication of effort, and a self-reinforcing cycle where more use means the product becomes better through contribs which makes use even more attractive.
Speaking from the Matrix side: it would definitely be preferable to have a large reliable source of funding for public sector Matrix deployments rather than juggling between loads of small overlapping ones (especially when they end up failing to route any $ to the upstreams). That said, Schleswig Holstein is looking to route $ upstream in this instance.
This is a mistake at this phase. Right now, we europeans still didn't figure out what is the best way, so each country tries something different. With time, failures will be replaced with winners.
You are /s'ing, but the fact that it didn't spread out of Munich until 2020 is a success in itself: the failure got confined to a very small part of Europe, instead of getting deployed in the whole Bavaria, Germany or even Europe. Damages were limited, they had nearby neighbors to compare, they did the partial rollback (losing "only" 90 million instead of 900), analyzed the failures and fixed a lot of them just by going LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice.
The second attempt they had better outcome, and the German government agrees. Now they have the know-how from Munich, and can have a degree of confidence that things will be fine. You don't need an overwhelming success, just be on par with the Microsoft Office solution using free software, and you are already ahead. It's Microsoft who needs to be clearly ahead to justify the cost.
Still, it's better to have it limited to Germany while others watch for a year or two if it works as intended.
You are underestimating German federalism - there are several competing providers for each specialized software used by German municipalities, often with huge customisations. There is no way you could mandate a specific product. What can be done from above, in some cases, is specifying requirements (for eg data storage, privacy laws, code auditability...) and APIs (like APIs to federal agencies) and let the customers and providers create solutions. It might be messier, but in the end you are not dependent on a single product.
While your small projects with next to zero market share fight it out between themselves, Microsoft keeps swallowing more market share making more billions.
Who do you think is the real winner of your sandpit fight?
Keeping the separate projects at the national level also precludes the furious lobbying efforts against it that could target members of the union with... "friendlier ears". It also allows for smaller scale testing to work out kinks, in the same way that some US federal law started as laws in specific states.
You are right, we need to make a bloated project and need to pour in millions into it like we did with Gaia-X. Then it will be a big trash-fire with smoke visible from afar and not just some small sandpit.
Until you can bribe officials to the tune of billions the quality of your software won't matter. The only reason why ms keeps winning is that it keeps bribing.
MS also keeps winning because they have billions of dollars to pour into the UX of their Office suite. The FOSS community doesn't spend a lot of money on hiring professional UI designers, and it's "do-ocracy" doesn't handle UI design well because UI design isn't seen as "doing" so much as nitpicking the choices of the programmers who are "doing all the work".
MS bribery is a factor, but if we use it as an excuse to ignore our own faults as a community then we're just screwing ourselves over.
Centralization is about infrastructure, so no. This would be a monoculture, assuming nobody forks. But if it's a FOSS monoculture and nobody forks, that implies that everyone is fairly satisfied with it.
"The pricing page is a PDF" is right there in my post. I can get deeper but as we say in my language, "for those who want to understand, half a word is enough".
Very typical for Germany, they rather roll their own solutions than cooperating with other countries and pooling resources. But it's even worse than that, each state within Germany does their own bureaucracy differently as well, to varying degrees.
My wife just started a new job in the Netherlands and I was super excited to hear that her office uses Ubuntu and LibreOffice for all their PC's. She wasn't interviewing for a tech job but apparently her being reasonably familiar with both was helpful at her interview (all those years of Raspberry Pis around the house paid off!)
Is this normal? It certainly would be an outlier back in the US.
Don't know specifically about Europe-wide or Netherlands specific, but it's not unheard of in various European countries.
As an example, the city government of Barcelona started to migrate things away from proprietary systems back in 2017. First applications and later the OS itself. Not sure what the progress of that is though. Old article about it: https://elpais.com/ccaa/2017/12/01/catalunya/1512145439_1325...
Similar moves been done in various agencies and entities in France and Germany as well.
I think most of the french gendarmerie has been using openoffice then libreoffice + thunderbird for 2 decades already. Initially on windows that have progressively replaced with linux over the years.
I've read 4 years ago that out of 85k desktop computers, only 8% where running windows 10, the rest was running ubuntu LTS.
I would say that being a branch of the french army, migration was easier.
It's an outlier in Germany as well. The municipal government in Munich tried to migrate to OSS around ~2004, but had to roll back after a couple of years. Most municipalities and government agencies would _like_ to utilize more OSS, but don't really have any concrete idea of how to proceed.
This was probably completely, utterly unrelated to the migration of the german Microsoft HQ to Munich at that time and there was no corruption involved at all.
Indeed. Microsoft is extremely aggressive in such situations. I used to contract for this big corp here in Belgium that was on track to replace office and windows with Linux and LibreOffice. A few months later, they got a new VP of something, previously working for MS… fast forward to the next all hands meeting announcing the return to Teams and O365.
If a similar announcement came from my government i'd just assume one of their mates had set up an open source consultancy business and it'd all be abandoned once enough money had been siphoned off.
Normal no but it's in the 2-3% range so not completely unthinkable and usually supported well enough by the core organisations that an company must interact with to be entirely feasible.
> Why should local governments use taxpayers’ money to buy proprietary, closed software from a single vendor?
I don't want to be a pessimist, but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives.
Linux is successful on the server because it has huge corporate backing. Linux has not been successful on the desktop because it has low corporate backing.
The cost of Microsoft Office is comparable to the cost of keeping their workplace stocked with coffee throughout the year.
>but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives.
That is already a given with Microsofts own tools, office365 is a crippled mess.
> The cost of Microsoft Office is comparable to the cost of keeping their workplace stocked with coffee throughout the year.
Which is also something many companies don't pay for.
It is not like there are pages describing just what excels web version cannot display or dozens of features that the web versions break because they cannot handle them correctly (like connectors).
Correct the web version is not a 1:1 swap but the desktop version has been a stable product used by millions for decades. Most users use the desktop version and indeed it has few compatibility issues with itself.
Well the point wasn't "desktop vs. web version" but showing that compatibility issues are common even within the proprietary products of a single vendor, something which one of the previous comments implied wouldn't be the case. If you have to fixate on a single, non portable product (lets not talk about office for Mac) then you can easily get consistency from LibreOffice as well.
In response to the original comment where they said switching to Libre would introduce compatibility problems because the industry standard is Microsoft, I think its an incompatible comparison to talk about minor inconsistencies across the various Microsoft endpoints.
Different file formats. Different software entirely. Compatibility issues would be orders of magnitude more impactful than any issues intrinsic to the O365 suite.
Why bail out the US auto companies in 2008? Japanese cars had better gas mileage, it would be a win-win for the taxpayer, right?
The need for sovereignty in these areas of national strategic significance is going to override concerns about UX or a learning curve. Most LibreOffice apps are similar to Office anyway, and the Open Document Format it uses is standardized in ISO 2600.
And I don't buy the argument that a document not being formated correctly is costly. People mostly don't care and when real administrative stuff needs to be shared it is done via pdf forms where the output is controlled.
Trying to collaborate and send revisions to each other is a nightmare when you are using different programs. You spend way more time fixing the nth mangling or redoing the other's changes in your copy than you do actually getting work done.
It matters when there One Dominant Vendor. In that case, when format errors and other small errors arise, the reaction depends. If it's the dominant vendor's software, then the user considers the other either normal or in their end. If the errors arise while using another software package, though, it's the fault of the "cut-rate, knock-off" software.
Linux was successful before corporate backing from just a handful of volunteers. If it was a failing product, corporations wouldn't have chosen it to develop on. It has been greatly enhanced by corporate contributions, but it would have gotten there without them too, albeit much slower.
I do agree though that MS products will likely play hard and fast with the compatibility game in order to exhaust local government workers from using FOSS
Linux started receiving corporate backing within a few years of it being released. Red Hat played a huge role in providing support and someone to turn to when something went wrong.
> but it would have gotten there without them too, albeit much slower
No, it wouldn't have. There is no way that a bunch of volunteers in their spare time could achieve the same results, what took many full-time employees and contributions from the largest and most powerful corporations in the world.
I counter these assertions by simply saying the opposite with exactly the same authority supported by exactly as many citations.
Even the bsds, which allow companies to steal without giving back, have kept essentially apace in any important ways with a microscopic fraction on Linux's individual or corporate investment, and without Linux's copyleft to ensure all developments go back upstream.
Both of these comments were nothing more than religious faith opinion.
It's an investment in a public good, which is one of the roles of governments. Sort of like how the German taxpayer helped kick start the solar industry decades ago.
A country spending money employing people to do unproductive work reduces the amount of useful work its populace can do. On paper you keep all the money, but no value is created.
There's opportunity cost, that's true, and I'm sure one can show that the most optimal situation in this case would be everyone on the world using the same office suite (i.e. free trade is optimal), _provided_ non-US countries would spend the money on actual production cost. However, the money paid is not only for production, but also for rent seeking, squeezing value out of a quasi-monopoly. That is actual money lost for unproductive work, _and_ it is going outside of Germany.
> I don't want to be a pessimist, but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives.
That is a bit short sighted, if we didn't work with non-traditional tools the whole computer/internet wouldn't exist and we'd still be writing stuff down.
National governments have more considerations that purely saving tax payers' money, because such savings can be short sighted. Saving money on munitions during a war effort, for example. Would you be as eager to have your courtry's military equipment built and purchased from an adversarial super-power? This is exactly the same thing.
if all DE will switch to libreoffice, they'll use a single format, so shouldn't be such a big problem. The problem may arise when communicating with other countries (maybe?)
> I don't want to be a pessimist, but working with non-traditional tools is going to cost the taxpayers more money when important documents are not formatted correctly or the software behaves differently than the proprietary alternatives.
Comes in handy for The Dominant Vendor, who can claim that "formatted correctly" is defined as the way their software formats stuff.
So I can understand Microsoft championning that definition, but why do you?
It's a sad story.
My spouse is working for the city in some legal department and she was happily using LiMux for years with no big issues.
The main problem was that the IT department was understaffed and underpaid...
One reason for their switch might be that Microsoft thought about opening up a big office here.
Another reason might have been the study conducted by Accenture [1], who have some close ties to Microsoft...
I also enjoyed reading the interview of former Munich mayor Christian Ude [2]. Apparently, Steve Ballmer was interrupting his ski vacation in Switzerland to visit Ude and personally try to convince him to ditch LiMux.
> It's a sad story. My spouse is working for the city in some legal department and she was happily using LiMux for years with no big issues. The main problem was that the IT department was understaffed and underpaid...
I worked on LiMux in the developer team at the start of my career. HN is a village, lol. And the situation is more complex, and long enough has passed for me to detail out what actually were the problems without revealing anything top secret...
1. most of the desktop hardware was OLD. Like really fucking old. We're talking of systems with 256M of RAM. Anything would send these into swapping. But instead of blaming the finance department for not upgrading the computers, everyone was more than happy to blame LiMux because many people hoped that enough blaming would bring Windows back eventually (as it did...)
2. A lot of the hundreds of sites that the city of Munich has weren't connected to fast fiber, but via 10/10 SDSL (or slower) links. That's enough for Active Directory to work, and most sites had cache servers on-site to make life bearable, but still: everything was SLOW for a lot of users. From what I hear through the grape vines, that has changed at least for everything inside the Mittlerer Ring demarcation as M-net/SWM built out FTTB across the entire area, but some sites more remote still are on crap links.
3. LibreOffice, or rather OpenOffice was shit back then - I was there right when the fork happened. (And from what I hear, it's not gotten much better... developing an office suite actually requires funding which barely anyone wants to provide)
4. Many of the special applications ("Fachverfahren") were only available for Windows. Some (e.g. SAP) were available as Java apps (with all the problems JVM has, particularly being a memory hog), a few were available as Linux applications but usually in rpm format and not deb which made every update a PITA with alien (LiMux was Ubuntu based), but the utter majority were Windows-only. Some could be made to work with WINE, but some (particularly those interfacing with proprietary hardware such as specially hardened printers) still required a few Windows workstations here and there.
5. We were fucking understaffed. Like 4 FTEs working on packaging and development, but a whole externally sourced test department (that was, to be fair, really needed to catch regressions, and there were a lot of them). But each and every single one of my colleagues were absolute experts and a joy to work with and learn from. Without them, the situation would have been much worse.
6. Political interference. Not just from the city government and its bullshit, but especially from the entrenched "micro fiefdoms" in the administration. No one wanted to cede control to us or the central IT@M organization that was being formed when I was there, instead they all wanted their own decentralized teams (dIKA). Some wanted to opt out of LiMux entirely, and had good reasons for that (chiefly, their applications not running on LiMux).
7. Dieter fucking Reiter, the successor of Christian Ude as mayor after the 2014 elections, as well as the Social Democrat-Conservative government that came into power with him. Ude, for all he turned wrong after he left office, was a staunch protector of LiMux, and we all knew what would come once he left, and so it inevitably happened. And that's just one thing in the long list of reasons to despise Reiter.
I dug back into the archives and found two old comments of mine back when my memory was more fresh [1] [2]. Happy reading. To add a few corrections to my top post - the upper limit of machines back then was 2GB of RAM, usually 512 to 1024M, and it was 10/10 fiber not SDSL that was the norm.
I am not saying this was the reason, but it is suspicious that the Munich Linux project was dropped, after Microsoft moved their headquarters back into Munich.
And the reasons given were made up. The recommendation written by Accenture claimed that "users weren't satisfied" while a poll from a newspaper showed that most users were indeed satisfied
If I remember, there was also an issue around people working in the administration not wanting to get used to new software/ not being able to do some tasks.
The "lesson" does not seem so clear according to the article you have linked:
> Schneider claimed that the decision had been political, “not made on the basis of facts”
> “We do not see any compelling technical reasons for a change to Windows and Microsoft Office… We solve compatibility and interoperability problems by providing MS Office, mostly virtualised, at workplaces that need to work together with external offices on office documents.”
One point of critique was the difficulty involved with 3rd party programs on the Linux laptops. But with MS Teams, Zoom etc. running in the browser and/or having actual Linux clients these days, this may be much more feasible today.
The opposition claimed the decision to abandon Linux was a purely political one. The mayor who pushed the return to Microsoft, Dieter Reiter (SPD), was a known Microsoft fanboy, but he (of course) denied personal investment in the reversal.
I predict it will yet fail again. Desktop Linux maintains it's bad reputation very well, and 20 years is just enough time for everyone to forget the details. Unless they have an insane user to IT ratio (perhaps 6:1), the adoption pain points will soon be rediscovered and overwhelm the project.
- Legal professionals will sometimes offer their services for free to needy individuals (I don't mean no-win-no-fee, but more writing a letter to a landlord on a tenant's behalf)
- Many people in the accountancy profession will offer their services to local groups/societies as treasurers or to do annual accounts, (indeed the whole boards of such groups are often unpaid, but may be less of a profession),
- Often at least some members of a board-of-directors for a charity will be volunteers,
As a more out-of-left field example, I recently met a really quite famous academic volunteering as a tour-guide at a historical house.
Pro bono legal work, which is unpaid, is actually a requirement for practising lawyers in some jurisdictions. New York is one such example.
> Often at least some members of a board-of-directors for a charity will be volunteers
Depending on how you define the terms, all of the directors will be volunteers.
The most common structure for charities is a board of trustees/directors between around 5 and 10 members, who are all unpaid and part-time. The board is led by the Chair(man, woman) of the Board, who is otherwise just an ordinary board member. The meetings are facilitated by the Chief Executive, who is not a board member but a full-time, paid employee of the charity.
Underneath the Chief Executive are other full-time paid staff who are supposed to follow the leadership of the Chief Executive, and who often don't get to attend the board meetings. This group may be any size between zero and thousands of individuals! Confusingly, some organisations call certain people in the middle-management of this team 'directors'.
To conclude:
Board: unpaid - '(Non-executive) Directors', 'Trustees' or 'Councillors'.
Staff: paid, usually full-time - includes 'Executives', '(Executive) Directors' and possibly many other non-management roles.
Some charities' boards get so large they become more like the parliaments of liberal democracies - Speakers, votes, elections.
That's only the most conventional structure - I'd be happy to elaborate on the edge cases too! :)
I had a language teacher that before working professionally spent many months as a volunteer teaching free classes for immigrants and refugees. The way he made it sound was that nobody got hired without doing that free work.
Collaborative writing (1), movie making (2), terrorist hunting (3), and volunteer forum moderation (4), are all things. Fanfiction (5) is also written for free.
All of these have been, in the past, variyng degrees of professional.
>> Genuine question, is there any other professional field in the world where people work for free like how Software Engineers work in open source?
Woodworking, restoring old cars, building airplanes. These are all things that people do for themselves at their own cost. The difference is that software has a marginal cost of zero, so they hand it out to everyone and collaborate to make it better.
Maybe, but I'm just talking about the potential here.
Most type of volunteer works require more people, with some level of organizations before it becomes effective.
While open-source software projects are often started by one very good SWE, as a hobby, in his own time: a very low barrier of entry. Plus, a project can live with a solo maintainer for a very long time. Though, I digress that can be detrimental in the long run, like the recent xz-utils fiasco.
Would you like to see your house burn completely to the ground? Would you know how to deal with a car wreckage?
I don’t, I’m grateful for those people existing. Regarding safety regulations, those were most often driven by tragedies that occurred prior to those regulations being in place. I prefer being alive over saving money
well its been 5 hours and it doesn't seem like it has happened (yet).
But trust me, I understand the sentiment. Housing becoming increasingly unattainable is a issue on many levels, I just think that there are other, worse, contributing factors to the overall situation. Compromising on fire safety or other reasonable safety factors effectively won't help anybody when there still is an ever increasing amount of institutional investment hiking prices on the market.
That's not how people use 10x (which I think is a silly article of marketing at best or a pretend metric people like to claim as some sort of totem of achievement), usually it means someone 10x more productive(???) than a supposed 1x software engineer.
In that case if we applied the same make believe as we do with software, then sure a 10x electrical could exist, just think of what you think an avg electrical engineer does and 10x it, boom.
In many smaller communities, at least in the US, they are just volunteers with other jobs, but they still have to do hundreds of hours of training each year to keep all the certifications.
Less of my tax money into the hands of companies that do comply with EU law, ergo criminals, great! I hope they have some solution in mind for cooperatively working on documents. That seems to be a big hurdle. Maybe some Nextcloud thing, that outputs ODT and only for locally working using LO? Or does LO offer collaborative features now?
Someone is salty as hell, chill bro. Also, calling Microsoft a company that complies with EU law is kind of funny. I guess they must be constantly fined due to some prejudice?
I haven't really used a WYSIWYG word processor in almost a decade (I like Pandoc), so these are old memories, but I remember feeling like the interface to OpenOffice (before it was split into LibreOffice) was more intuitive than MS Word 2007 and beyond. I feel like they doubled down on 90's-era MS Word-style interface, which I personally have just found to be extremely intuitive and easy to work with.
That said, the equation editor for LibreOffice and OpenOffice utterly sucks. This bizarre, quasi-TeX, quais-WYSIWYG interface is extremely unintuitive and hard to work with. The equations themselves generally render fine, but back when I used OpenOffice on Windows I purchased a copy of MathType and would OLE equations in. This didn't work on Linux, which is why I stopped using LibreOffice.
The good news is that most state workers probably don't need advanced features like an equation editor, so hopefully this transition won't be super painful. Seems like it would be rough on academics though.
It's the main reason my dad (who isn't an academic but does work on R&D in the aerospace industry) won't touch LibreOffice. He's constantly bothering people to see if he can use one of their Office licenses because he hates the LibreOffice equation editor.
My handwriting is completely illegible, even to myself most of the time, so ever since I was a teenager I would type out all my homework, including math homework, so I've developed pretty strong opinions on math formatting. I've gotten good enough with TeX that I don't really have anything I can't easily do, but my dad has, for reasons kind of unknown to me, has had a strong aversion to learning LaTeX, despite the fact that I have offered dozens of times to teach him, so he just sticks with MS Office.
LibreOffice may be useful for German, but not for Asian languages. This is because it was designed without regard to the typographical rules of the Asian-speaking world.
You could say that TDF is "committed to Asian languages". But text is meaningless unless it can be used according to typographic rules, not just to display characters. They do not understand that.
And the problem is that the user interface is stuck in the 2000s. They don't understand that the Ribbon UI has been around for 17 years and generations have changed.
They say, "There's the Tabbed UI," but the Tabbed UI is nothing like the Ribbon UI. They're in denial and they don't want to get out of the 2000s.
Interestingly, it might not be a cost saving decision, but the money needed for the initial setup and ongoing support ending in local companies' and worker's pockets.
> We have no influence on the operating processes of such [proprietary] solutions and the handling of data, including a possible outflow of data to third countries.
All countries should have a strategy to fork open source software and implement it for this reason. They should also share their contributions with the wider Linux community as well, although with the recent xz scandal, pull requests from nation states may be looked at with suspicion.
No, they didn't. That happened for example in Munich. But that is on the other side of Germany. And there is already a joke that MS can't move their german headquarters every time a state or big city want's to move away from MS products. (They did this when Munich changed back to MS producs - but of course this was pure coincidence.)
Microsoft started building their new Munich headquarters in 2013/2014. Their old headquarters were already immediately outside Munich. For example, the Munich airport is further away from Munch city than the old headquarters were.
The decision to revert to a Microsoft Platform was taken in November 2017.
Yes, the final decision to revert to Microsoft was taken in 2017. But in 2014, the mayor of Munich began an investigation into how to return to Microsoft products. And he was also the one who negotiated the location of the headquarters with Microsoft in 2013.
Not just "practically", but actually, factually, and legally: Yes, the state of Bavaria is indeed an entirely different state than the state of Schleswig-Holstein. That's like saying "Virginia is practically an entirely different state than California" -- WTF do you mean, "practically"?!? It IS a different state!
It was mainly in Munich and more about Linux in general and Bill Gates personally intervened. The next government rolled back to MS.
And no, data sovereignity means more than money, but it might cost more money in the end. There were quite some problems, but those could have been resolved. But not for free.
> So take all those "digital sovereignty" with a grain of salt
Actually, there's actual money flowing from Germany to open source companies as we speak to build digital sovereign solutions (like openDesk [1]), so it's more than "We want you to lower your fees".
Real concerns have more and more motivated this kind of things in recent years.
China started the process of switching from x86 to own architecture (loong-something if I recall correctly). Where Microsoft is essentially not present. I think they use Microsoft products a lot like any other governments. So we might see a big switch to libreoffice soon
Chinese started WPS Office (called Kingsoft before) in 1989. Since end of 90s it is state favored and in 2011 received major grand. My wild guess is that they have much more incentive to use this rather than some broken open source Java thingie which is generally much slower than WPS.
This package is 36 years old and very often overlooked by analysts dunno why. At time of writing there isn’t a single mention of this in the comments… very weird?!
The irony of this change, is this isn't Munich any longer, many of those services might run on Azure, depend of FOSS projects that are directly or indirectly paid by Microsoft, thus they won't care as much as in the past, see sore state of Windows versus Azure.
To get some context on this, you have to look into the local administration of munich in bavaria. They messed up the switch to OpenOffice on the desktop by not supporting all use-cases and then it seems Microsoft used the opportunity to reverse the change by use some "convincing".
Anyhow, it would be extremely simple for all of Europe to role out OpenSource: just ban the transfer of critical user data to the US. Microsoft Windows is technically a gigantic NSA backdoor, therefore installing it on a government PC should be considered treason. So, maybe we should start to put politicians on trial for treason and see how quickly MS gets kicked out of Europe...
As much as I congratulate them for moving away from Microsoft Office as much I feel this is a step in the wrong direction. We need to move our administration away from the paper centric workflows of a world that is long gone for most people.
Exactly. Rubber Stamps belong in a museum. Along with Fax machines. And the people still insisting on using those for "security reasons". Common practice in Germany is to receive an email with a pdf, print it, sign it (or stamp) it, and then put it in the post. This both stupid and slow.
German bureaucracy is still paper driven. Having lived in other countries with more or less full digital access to all the stuff Germans still do with paper forms or in person, I know the difference. It's slow, tedious, expensive, error prone, etc.
Any paper forms should move online. The whole ritual of printing them, filling them in with a pen, and then having people manually copy information back into some ancient database is just completely backwards. People should sign stuff digitally. This is not only possible but common practice in most of the countries bordering Germany.
Past week I travelled to London by train. I tried to book this trip a couple of months in advance from Deutsche Bahn website, but only got obscure error messages when finalizing the booking(*).
So I tried the french SNCF app and the booking was done in a couple of minutes, all tickets conveniently in the app - expect for the German leg of the travel. SNCF sent me a Deutsche Bahn paper ticket via snail mail.
(*) Tried for about a week, on different computers, my mobile, from another account. Sent a complaint, received an email answer that said they could not help me, but I could send my email to another address - except the other address was the very address I sent my complaint in the first place. Went to Deutsche Bahn office eventually, train I wanted was supposedly booked out, which I know wasn't true because booked it later via SNCF. They reluctantly tried to find me an alternative, but apparently they had to go through all the combinations manually. It took forever and wasn't successful either.
Thanks, I did not know that. My point was more that German authorities and their privatized successors are so stuck in their paper based processes, that even when you book via a reseller app (line SNCF) they'll have to send paper per mail.
That’s indeed a bit weird, I book quite often and haven’t had a paper tickets in 10 years even with frequent cross border (Austria / Germany) travel. Have encountered many other issues with DB of course!
I have the opposite issue - if I want to work on a document or sheet, I open it in LibreOffice, because it is intuitive to use for me. I use office rarely, so I have no time to memorize how to use MS Office properly, while LibreOffice can be used out of box.
I'm not sure if this still current, but a few years ago I switched from LibreOffice to MS Office because Calc was unbearably slow. I wasn't doing anything crazy, but also not trivial: 6 or 7 sheets, with a bunch of formulas with never more than about 500 cells filled (10 columns, 50 lines), and on most sheets a lot less.
Excel blazes through it. I feel it was a very good decision, even though I'm a miser.
I once had a bug that wiped a handful of documents. Spent hours writing them, opened them a few months later and they were blank. In some cases, it replaces all of the characters with #s. It's something to do with the autosave feature, I believe.
A bit dated graphically, but I wouldn't say low quality... a graphic designer worked on the first three - the last two are the creation of a "webmaster".
The headline might be somewhat misleading if you do not read the article. It is not the federal state of Germany that is starting to switch to LibreOffice, but one of the member states of the federation: Schleswig-Holstein.
Shifting to LibreOffice is only one component of the the state's strategy towards a digitally sovereign IT workplace. You can read more about the other elements of this strategy here: https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/... (in German).
What is very interesting is the political background: Schleswig-Holstein is governed by a coalition of the Converservative party (CDU) and the Greens. In past decades it had been the Greens who where among the most driving forces for the adaption of open-source software and open standards in the public sphere, while the Conservativs primarily sided with big business. Now the latter seems to change gradually. Interesting times ...
That's a great news but does not surprise me. In the University where I studied in Germany, almost all Library computers had Ubuntu (and also LibreOffice). The Windows machines were limited to use only 2 hours a day and they were almost always occupied, so I had to start learning linux. Years later and I work half of time at my current job as Linux admin.
Why is this constantly happening and nothing comes out of it? I've been reading same headline for past 20 years, I thought even if it was a single town, most of Germany would be running Libre/Open Office by now.
Also OnlyOffice is a much better candidate, it's very usable and OSS as well.
The licensing costs associated with MS products is stupid high. In analyzing the budget for a county, across all departments the line item for MS was ~$322K for just a 3 month span (o365??).
It was the top line item for the quarter, beating out health insurance line related line items.
Russia had the same story when about 15 years ago they tried to move their postal service away from Microsoft. They spent a lot of money to teach personal, and I believe it was a disaster at the end. Microsoft just gave them a discount later and they stayed on Microsoft products.
B2B is expensive, but so many companies just don’t understand how much money they will have to spend on education and support. Not sure what is the story with LibreOffice, if they are getting it with support or not.
This is the best thing to happen to Linux desktop, ever. Linux has dominated the server OS market since a long time. This is likely be the butterfly’s wing, the trigger to make Linux desktop break into consumer market. Libreoffice will likely get much more investment after this, likely triggering a cascade of investments to the desktop Linux ecosystem.
Nice! I think in general, public services should not have to depend on for-profit organisations for their operations. Especially when such are tax-funded.
Maybe this will help spurn some necessary and long-overdue problem fixes with LibreOffice, which have gone ignored after being reported seemingly because just not enough people are making a stink about them. I've tried to get Microsoft Office workers to switch but they won't because of these things. If only the LibreOffice devs would take these problems and inadequacies more seriously. Please I hope the German workers report problems and make suggestions and stick to them to improve the product so we have a good free or non-profit office suite to compete with the billionaire companies.
Libre office excel replacement doesn’t handle vba well and many programs break.
Idk how many macros they are utilizing with vba but would find out quickly switching to libre.
Then there is Microsoft project which has no libre office clone. Those are just two examples and I’m sure there are more nuanced ones.
I get it, Microsoft is slowly getting away from local copies but this is the same news every contract cycle of going to Linux or whatever bullshit they say they will do but IT knows it will turn into a tire fire.
Hopefully they will move 30,000 wonkdows PC's to linux once Microsoft imposes the £61 annual extended security updates fee.
let me open my terminal and start up python:
30000*61
1830000
£1,830,000 for the first year extended security updates and will double in consequitive years. A tad greedy! for a few old rotten wonkdows 10 machines.
They first collected our data for free, then had the audacity to charge us for it too.
The English summary focuses on the move from MS Office to LibreOffice (it's a post on the Document Foundation blog, so it makes sense that this is their focus), but the original German press release (1) lists 6 pillars:
- Switching from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice
- Switching the operating system from Microsoft Windows to Linux
- Collaboration within the state administration and with external parties: Use of the open source products Nextcloud, Open Xchange/Thunderbird in conjunction with the Univention AD connector to replace Microsoft Sharepoint and Microsoft Exchange/Outlook
- Conception of an open source based directory service to replace Microsoft Active Directory
- Inventory of specialist procedures regarding compatibility and interoperability with LibreOffice and Linux
- Development of an open source based telephony solution to replace Telekom-Flexport
So it's a good bit more ambitious than replacing MS Office.
Ok now do the cost for moving all other applications from Entra/Active Directory SSO running on Windows to LDAP or some non MS Oauth implementation on Linux.
I'm sure replacing all the legacy applications and retraining the government employees on their FOSS alternatives can be done but it's going to take years and burn many many millions in fees for IT suppliers and investigating alternatives.
You really need to do it because of ideological considerations because i doubt you'll save a dime the first decade.
> once Microsoft imposes the £61 annual [...] 30000*61 1830000 £1,830,000 for the first
What makes you think Microsoft would invoice their customers in Germany in British pounds? Weird unit to use when commenting on an article about Germany on an international site.
Probably lower then people think once the applications are identical across the two platform. and if Linux turns too complex there is always macos.
The big push is going to be getting rid of old excel and word macro's and replace sharepoint/onedrive with something else as data migrations are newer as simple in reality as they look in theory.
>and if Linux turns too complex there is always macos
I have witnessed in person people switching from Windows to macOS have issues adapting to a different operating system and its concepts, like the fact that pressing the X button in the top-left corner doesn't close the application. Therefore I am rather skeptical that you can just throw some Linux distro at a bunch of novice computer users without large amounts of friction.
> Therefore I am rather skeptical that you can just throw some Linux distro at a bunch of novice computer users without large amounts of friction.
Not your main point, but: If they really were novice computer users it would be a snap; the problem is that they aren't -- can't be, if they're already conditioned to Windows being "the standard".
Then again, I think that this is often exaggerated, even for long-time Windows users. What's so hard about switching -- "Oh, but people are so used to all their handy Windows shortcuts!"? Bah -- they don't even know they exist!
Linux Mint is practically identical to Windows 7/10 in terms of basic interaction. Most people learn only a few workflows and software and do not tinker with the OS. When my SO moved to MacOS, the only thing she asked about was how to launch apps and do things like copy-paste. Everything else is still how I configured it when the computer came. Just like you don’t tinker with container images, people will be fine with Linux GUI if everything they need is there.
Your example feels like shots fired because the programs running without windows concept still confuses me. It just doesn't compute.
I'm a sysadmin and have been using Macs on and off since System 7, Windows since 95, and probably 10000 Linux distros/DE combos. Just as a point of reference.
> programs running without windows concept still confuses me
> I'm a sysadmin and have been using ... probably 10000 Linux distros/DE combos
Most of the things I run on Unix systems do not have windows. This doesn't confuse me at all! :)
I know what you mean of course. A GUI application without windows is superficially confusing, but you can certainly imagine something daemon-like that runs all the time and only occasionally requires interaction in the form of configuration or control.
What you're really talking about is document-based applications, which can continue running when no documents (windows) are open. This may be less intuitive if you think about things in a document-centric way, vs an application-centric way. There are advantages and conveniences to both.
Try using Microsoft Office some time. Sure, Word and Excel go away when you close the last document or workbook -- but Outlook and Teams don't. For outlook, there's a separate menu (Uh, "ribbon"?) item "Quit" under "File"; for Teams, not even that; you have to right-click the icon in the task bar. Close all their windows, and AFAICR they'll still pop up notifications.
Train once and never pay fees for the lifetime of the worker. Or still have to train on windows and pay fees ontop of standard user training for the lifetime of the user. Remember just because it's windows doesn't mean it doesn't require training. All business computer use takes training.
The cost to show one person "this is the browser icon and these are the excel/word icons; click them when you need to", multiplied by number of people who need to be trained.
If they manage to do the training and onboarding within 4 hours then that may worth it (considering minimal hourly rate 12.41 euro per hour). That doesn't look realistic.
In that case their question can be answered thus: Because that proprietary, closed software from a single vendor is the industry standard and you will get laughed out of the room for deviating.
It's a stupid question and virtue signal statement no matter which way it goes. Either it falls down on itself from hypocrisy, or it falls down on itself from defying reality.
It's probably not as popular as Office365, but Google Workspace is also a common office suite used by agencies/businesses. It's not a complete monopoly (which MS probably wouldn't want anyway, since it would introduce heightened scrutiny).
Honestly I think the decades long tech bubble is winding down, once people move away from Teams, what is the need to pay OS maintainers? It will take a few years but we are heading towards an economy more balanced amongst sectors.
I’d quit my job if I was forced to a Linux desktop and non office365 tools. The loss of productivity in this change is going to be massively disruptive.
It’s not going to go as smoothly as they think it will. I highly doubt their pilot program sniffed out all the complexities.
I have nothing against Linux or libreoffice. I just think forcing thousands of workers to drastically alter their work environment is going to be traumatic and I’ll lay odds that in 12 months they switch back or to a hybrid model.
Or what’s just as likely, workers will use personal Windows computers to do their work and shuffle things onto their work computers as needed. People don’t like change.
Having to bring your own equipment to work seems to be such a big thing in America that Americans assume it works the same everywhere. I'm pretty sure German workers wouldn't even dream of using their own computers for work. Not that they even could, because German employers would never let those computers onto their network in the first place.
I haven't seen a particular productivity boost anywhere from regular office + sharepoint and office365.
I also haven't noted a productivity difference between sharepoint (which office 365 really is) and other content management platforms.
Ironically the only place where office 365 offered a boost is in the linux world really. You don't even need a local suite office to open msoffice documents.
Most non-technical people have a pattern of work. They know how to do their job because it’s been repeated over years. This change will alter many of those patterns.
Even the simplest things like text editor or using a command line will be disruptive.
and yet thats only ever brought up when defending windows despite the fact that MS is cauing this kind o issues every 3-5 years.
So how is it that people can go from XP->vista->10->11 and not break the bank on retraining or from windows to MacOS but somehow anything else is impossible.
This is not an logically coherent argument against linux it's basically admins being scared of having their decades of investment into wintel ecosystem devalued.
The problem is that because your applications is windows specific your not comparing windows to linux your comparing whatever legacy mess of custom applications that people use to get their job done to whatever your replacing you win32/winforms legacy stuff with(which is something you have to do anyway as that platform is dying).
the fee will no longer be that small considering microsoft's intention to charge a lot for extended windows support, it's not like the price is constant
Only if you stay on a outdated version. If you're a company/government you have a M365 subscription that includes the latest windows and you're replacing your computers every 5-7 years so Win11 not supporting some computers from 2017 might cost you 1 year of support for a small part of your total fleet.
A question mark before open source productivity tools find mass adoption is their ability to integrate ML/AI tools.
The current hype notwithstanding, it is likely that the next generation productivity suite (from spreadsheets to document editors etc) will support important algorithmically augmented workflows and non-technical users will expect them to be available. Libreoffice and friends must have a forward looking narrative to remain relevant.
Proprietary cloud based solutions are already rolling in this direction but will always face the extra hurdles that sensitive data are accessible by third parties and essential functionality for business continuity relies on external actors.
But, so far at least, neither libreoffice (nor the linux desktop for that matter) seem to be particularly keen on moving to that next phase. Even while cutting edge open source machine learning and even competend LLM models are getting available in record time, the integration story is still non-existent.
The pendulum of client/server balance and thin versus thick clients is always swinging. With mobile and cloud it seems to have reached an extremum. Who knows where it lands next, maybe the "AI PC" that some hardware vendors already pitch will become a thing.
This is insular attitude that will not serve well the open source desktop (and libreoffice in particular). Reasons to be annoyed by the "AI" emperor certainly abound, but one might get too distracted by distasteful mass hysteria phenomena and miss important developments and trends that are here to stay.
The point is that there is an entire universe of popular and very useful data science tools and models (built around Python, R etc.) of which the current AI/ML/LLM's algorithms are just a tiny and rather extreme use case. At some point libreoffice must move beyond VBA if it wants to remain relevant.
If this is a start of an actual migration away from cloud dependence, it's a matter of time before windows(which is as cloud dependent as office those days for enterprise management features) itself is targeted, and the entire federation of germany changing from ms office formats to odf in practice could set some interesting balls in motions.
But as we have seen this before where a product is started and then sabotaged or delayed by lobbying and inertia from people who dont want to change how theyve always done things, it could be another one-off that dont set a trend.