
City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software - anw
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/public-money-public-code
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snvzz
I'm Catalan. Catalonia has always been big on open source, and if anything I'm
surprised this took so long to happen. The mindshare in universities and such
is particularly high, and this isn't limited to computer science (my
background). Even my high school did at the very least run a Linux server
(running at least samba and squid) and had a few Linux workstations. This was
20 years ago. Back when I lived there, I worked in many companies, all of
which had near 100% of workstations running Linux, something I now realize is
not the case elsewhere.

A strong argument nobody's mentioned in the thread yet is that free software
support for our language (Catalan) is very good, whereas Windows/OSX support
for it is terrible when it exists at all. There's the fact that we do still
remember a previous effort where Microsoft released some version of windows in
Catalan, I'm not sure if it was 98 or XP era, which was very broken; Microsoft
never handled the issues back then, or released any more versions in Catalan,
and it left a very bad taste in our mouths.

We do care massively about our language, so it'll be very hard to sway anybody
in here unless this fact radically changes.

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nofilter
Well, I'm Estonian living in Barcelona. A lot of things never bother to add
Estonian support because we're such a tiny nation (like iOS, for example)
which means our English is rather good. Good English is not something I've
encountered much in Catalonia, so while yes I agree that having your country's
technology work in your language is a must, it's also in my opinion a double-
edged sword making more and more local people not speak English.

~~~
snvzz
I understand what you're saying but keep in mind that when Catalan is not
available, the language that tends to be used isn't English, but Spanish.

Knowledge of Spanish in Catalonia is not by any metric bad.

~~~
nofilter
Yes, fallback is Spanish indeed. But I'm a young guy, I got to clubs a lot and
most people I meet there are between 20 and 30 and having very hard time
speaking in English. Which makes me amazed, especially in Barcelona, which is
a very international city. The same problem is in France. It might be due the
fact that most of the media never displays any English. Movies are over-voiced
in Spanish and so forth. I have no sources to back this claim, it's just my
theory.

~~~
JBlue42
Yeah, it's interesting how just having subtitled media can help. When
traveling, I came across an older guy in Viljandi who had learned his basic
English from watching Melrose Place reruns.

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adwhit
I kind of amazed that Microsoft are still successfully charging SO MUCH for
their absolutely run-of-the-mill OS and Office products.

Office, in particular, brings in something like $25bn/year revenue with
presumably very healthy margins. For a product that has hardly changed in 20
years. It's a good product, sure. But a clean-room reimplementation of the
bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more than $1bn.

The power of monopoly capitalism.

~~~
blowski
You wouldn’t believe the number of workflows hardcoded to Excel and Outlook.
Those two products alone guarantee that Office is here to stay for years.

~~~
adwhit
For sure. I've seen complete trading systems written in Excel macros.

MS have played their hand very astutely and have managed to capture a large
fraction of the enormous gap between cost-to-producer and value-to-user.
Keeping things that way is worth $100bn market cap to them, and challenging
them is worth relative peanuts to anyone else. Of course they're going to win
every time.

Our best hope is that someone like Google pours money into a fully-compatible
fully-featured desktop replacement out of sheer spite.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Not even MS products from the Office are fully compatible with each other -
I've seen issues with documents produced by older Offices being mangled in
newer ones (compounded by locale differences).

DOC/DOCX compatibility across different products is a tire fire, there is no
solution on the horizon.

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robert_foss
It's nice to see the FSFE being active, and making an actual difference. Our
donations are not in vain.

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dogma1138
Hopefully it would work out better than in Munich.

~~~
EspadaV9
Munich was pretty good. It's been deployed for 4+ years and won't be replaced
until the end of 2020 (assuming everything goes to plan) so that will be at
least 7 years of use. It seems that the reasons to move back to Windows
weren't completely technical either.

~~~
dogma1138
Munich effectively had a parallel program for anyone that had to work with any
external entities, and many used it also internally.

Munich never switched off Windows and MSFT Office at best it just abstracted
or added additional layers of complexity.

The moment you need to digitally sign some stupid PDF with some “proprietary”
signature scheme or open some excel spread sheet it’s pretty much back to
Windows.

~~~
cies
So much for a sovereign govt. I'd say that a gov't should be able to dictate
what format is used, especially when replacing a patent-encumbered private
format with an open one.

But heay, who still believes that gov'ts are on top of corps is living a
fantasy I guess.

~~~
dogma1138
Ironically many of the tools that the German government and public sector
created didn’t work.

So when you have some docusign like scheme that doesn’t run on Linux or on non
Adobe PDF clients well....

~~~
deknos
you mean like masterpdfeditor? :)

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mkstowegnv
I once believed in open formats and the practicality of switching between
closed and open source, but years of experience has convinced me that no two
complex applications will ever really be interoperable for the long tail of
complex documents that use a larger than average number of the applications'
features. I waste too many hours trying to fix MS Word tables and embedded
grapics so that they will render correctly in LibreOffice, too many nightmare
experiences jumping between video editors, and vector graphics apps, etc.
Programs like MS Office are so complex that only a Singularity-level AI will
ever fix them.

~~~
snvzz
Or legislation. Such as, say, requiring the use of OASIS standards within the
administration, and for communication with the administration.

"But we don't use libreoffice" is not a valid excuse when libreoffice is free
software and available in Catalan for all the major OS platforms.

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Findeton
Which is great but as soon this government is replaced by a new one, this
policy will be replaced by the old one.

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unmango
So what will be the cost of deploying Linux, retraining on Linux, and then
going back to Windows?

These people can afford to make stupid decisions because it's not their own
money they are wasting.

The only reason this is happening is crony capitalism: they want to do a
favour to the local open source businesses (there are a few of them) which are
friendly to the local government. They will get lots of support contracts.
It's blatant corruption.

~~~
tankenmate
Actually a sizeable percentage of the public do support it because it has much
better support for their native tongue.

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Rjevski
This is gonna end in a disaster. Linux usability is bad to begin with,
managing Linux desktops at scale is even worse and interoperability is meh.

~~~
Blaiz0r
FUD

~~~
dgsb
Indeed !

