
Government Open Source Office deal set to provide major savings - buovjaga
https://www.collaboraoffice.com/government-open-source-office-deal-set-to-provide-major-savings.php
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vidarh
Let's be clear on what this release says, and what it doesn't:

1\. Collabora Office's solutions will be available via G-Cloud Digital
Marketplace. That's a big win for them as it makes it easy for government
agencies to chose them.

2\. There's _no_ mention of displacing Microsoft Office, other than to the
extent Collabora manages to convince individual government organizations to
make the switch.

3\. There's the vague claim that Collabra will work together with the Crown
Commercial Service to raise awareness about ODF and their solution. Notably
absent is any kind of comment from the Crown Commercial Service or any
government agency. This may mean a quite big push (but if so, where are the
bigwigs making statements?) or it could mean they get to be included in a
newsletter or something, or anything in between...

If there had been some deal to do a massive conversion away from MS Office,
you can bet that would been made very, very clear.

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douche
I honestly wonder if there is actually going to be any cost savings, once
training and the friction of converting existing work-flows over from MS
Office to LibreOffice are taken into account.

Unless OpenOffice/LibreOffice has gotten markedly better in the last couple of
years since I got access to an MSDN subscription, it's still a second-tier
product behind Office. I hate to say that, because I'm no great fan of desktop
Word and Excel (I still think the 2003 editions were the best), but MS has
really picked up the ball with their cloud versions integrated into Office365,
which IMO, are better than Google Docs at this point.

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vincentkriek
I agree with you that they probably will not save money and I also agree with
you that Word and Excel are the better products. However, I do like that there
is money going from government to Open Source software. I know a lot will get
stuck in consulting firms but this is bound to improve LibreOffice and I
believe it's better to use public money to improve open source projects than
it is to pay Microsoft and keep getting sucked into their ecosystem.

Public money should be spent on open (source) software. File formats should be
exchangeable and switching providers shouldn't be intentionally difficult.

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moonchrome
>Public money should be spent on open (source) software

I agree but only if the costs are reasonably comparable. For example if
there's a commercial product that would cost 10x to replace then I don't think
that's appropriate use of public money.

But if the costs are similar then OSS should always be prefered because it
creates new value for other users and while a commercial entity can't
necessarily capitalize on that value governments don't need to.

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jimktrains2
What's the cost of having fixing critical bugs 20 years from now when that
company's folded?

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moonchrome
Meh, most software isn't going to be used 20 years from now and the one that
will can be licensed with source code - doesn't have to be OSS.

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jimktrains2
Software lasts a good long while in some organizations, even 10 years would
have worked in my example (or 5!).

You can only have a license with source if you think about it ahead of time.

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lifeisstillgood
Do we still care about anything other than excel? And we care about excel
because it is far and away the best fastest and most robust spreadsheet out
there.

This focus on office applications as the way in for Open Source software seems
to me like transforming 19th Century transport by building faster horses.

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vidarh
Who are "we"?

It's been a decade since I've worked anywhere were anyone cared about Excel. I
realize that I'm working in a "bubble" given the type of companies I tend to
work with, but it does clearly illustrate that, yes, there are certainly
people and companies that care about spreadsheets other than Excel.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Excel is cared about a lot in some industries - finance it is still running
huge amounts of the workflow (from hedge funds to major banks whose auditors
pull their hair out)

The main point I'm making is that of the troika of office applications, only
the spreadsheet still has value. I suspect I could teach everyone Markdown far
faster and with better outcomes than teach Word users to move to (open office
equivalent)

It's something about software literacy - you just don't need Word anymore.

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Asbostos
It'll be great if Collabora is going to fix some of the notorious bugs that
workers will inevitably come across like having the pictures deleted from
their documents or their page layout silently changed.

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keithpeter
I'd be very interested in bug numbers for those.

Not challenging, I use [open|libre] a lot for writing course guides and
presentations and I'm sending other people stacks of .odt/.odp stuff and they
are getting interested in being able to edit the material.

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kylex
Interesting, but I question the how much this will cost to change over
considering training and current workflows on Microsoft Platforms.

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a3n
The way to actually save money, if that's the goal, is to try not to want
full-fledged word processors and office suites.

For most internal communication, plain text or something like RTF at most is
more than sufficient.

Trying to replace Word and Office with cheaper or open is doomed, because
Office is far ahead of everything else, and everything else will be judged for
not being Office.

Open source's best contribution could be a standardized simple text format.

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Doctor_Fegg
For most communication, full stop. I edited a news-stand magazine with
TextEdit on the Mac for several years (Apple's bundled text editor, speaks
RTF). I found that the complexities of Word just got in the way, and the
InDesign guys liked receiving consistently, minimally marked-up text.

