

The French government deploys LibreOffice - achristoffersen
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/10/libreoffice-gaining-momentum-heading-to-android-ios-and-the-web.ars
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naner
I know LibeOffice is derided for its compatibility issues with MS Office (and
its name, and its reliance on java, etc), but this type of thing seems pretty
important to me.

Free software is very important (IMO) but has severe deficiencies because it
lacks the straightforward economic incentives of closed-source software. So
we'll probably never have fully free software consumer goods companies that
are really exciting and innovative (think Apple), it is basically just used as
a complimentary good.

Businesses only interest in free software is when it complements their
products and they don't have to give up any strategic advantage. Web browser
rendering engines are a complicated mess and nobody chooses their OS based on
web browser alone, so Apple starts with KHTML and now continues to develop
WebKit in the open. Google makes money on web advertising so they give away
Android and ChromeOS for free and contribute to many free software projects
(MySQL, Linux, ffmpeg, etc) that their products are built on top of. Web
developers frequently use free software for all the back-end stuff because it
not really a differentiating component of their business. And so on.

If governments and non-profits start focusing on supporting consumer-facing
free software (like Office, the desktop environments, and other user
applications) then that will shine a bright light on deficiencies and will
help us improve these core free software products that are important to the
largest number of people over time.

As a side note, I used to be envious of OSX and iOS and the app store and
Apple's hardware and many of the beautiful applications for OSX and wished
there was a way for similar quality products to come about in the free
software world. I don't think the incentives of free software would allow them
to exist in that world, though.

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sounds
The Linux kernel is a typical poster boy for a successful community project.

But LibreOffice demonstrates a huge win for a community-led project too: if
the current maintainers try to move the code to a closed-source pay model, the
project just forks.

I agree that LibreOffice hasn't achieved fit and finish, and I'm trying to be
patient with that. I'm just happy it has survived. I think a huge downside to
any closed-source project is when they end-of-life it. That could be simply
because a new version is a ground-up scratch rewrite. Once the code is thrown
away, all the effort to build it is lost.

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Wilya
For the record, and because it is not obvious to me from the article, this
seems to be mainly a move from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice.

A few French administrations have been using OpenOffice, since back in 2005
([0] has a few figures, which add up to at least 200,000 installations), and
USB keys with OpenOffice (and a set of other free softwares) have been
distributed to high school students since at least 2007 (the articles at the
time were planning only initially 173,000 keys, though. Edit: it's 800,000
keys on 4 years, which explain the numbers).

[0]
[http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.or...](http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments#Europe)

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ars
"They plan to distribute 800,000 USB keys with LibreOffice"

What? Why? Just to waste money? CDs are cheaper, and are not going to be
infected with a virus if the student passes it on.

But they really couldn't just do electronic delivery? The students are going
to take the USB key, erase it and "free usb key" courtesy of the gov.

Anyone who would actually install it would also do it from a paper flyer with
a url of where to download it.

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brlewis
I'm no marketing expert, but I would expect more students to pay attention to
the USB key than would pay attention to a paper flyer with a URL.

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mdda
Is it possible to correct the typo in the title?

~~~
based2
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans>

