

City of Helsinki Wants To Keep Software Costs Secret  - MRonney
http://fsfe.org/news/2012/news-20120711-01.html

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veeti
A bit off-topic, but I really don't think that LibreOffice is a good
alternative for MS Office. Every single time I try to do something in
LibreOffice I find out that it's missing some incredibly basic feature that I
need. Last time it was rotating images in Writer: I had to edit the image in
another app.

MS products get a lot of hate but I think that Office (at least the newest
verions) really has nailed it. Shame it's not on Linux.

~~~
jmduke
Agreed. I tried using the Libre suite for a while to save on costs, but the
time I spent grappling with Libre was worth much more to me than the $120 cost
of Office.

You can rightfully accuse Office of feature creep, but I'd still rather use it
over any of its competitors.

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bergie
Everybody in the Finnish software business knows that much of the public
procurement happens over various "old boys club" arrangements, and
"surprisingly" usually ends in the hands of the same two or three big IT
providers.

Finland used to be regarded as one of the least corrupted countries, but that
has crumbled as more and more of these situations surface.

No wonder they want to keep their costs secret.

~~~
tommi
Please don't spread those kind of rumors as they are not true. Public
procurement happens through an open process in which I have been also
participating. Everybody involved can get their competitors RFQ replies and
get the verdict with comments for each RFQ section.

True, most big acquirements go for two or three big IT providers, but let's
face it - how many big IT companies Finland can hold which have the men power
available to provide big systems and long term support? And for the record, I
do not work for any of those three.

The official reply for requesting the details of the Open Office report was
denied due to the fact that city of Helsinki has made a deal with Gartner
Ireland Ltd which denies them giving out the figures for two years. Perhaps a
bad contract, but hopefully they'll learn from it.

~~~
bergie
I admit, I probably used a bit stronger words than warranted, but this is
entirely due to the frustration on the constant state of public IT procurement
failure in the country.

Anyway, I'm quite well aware how the RFQ process works. The problem is that
even though the idea works well, it is still very easy to write your
requirements so that your preferred vendor gets the deal.

This is sort of in line with the classic Stalin quote: _I consider it
completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is
extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how._

Also, I find it curious that the city is even allowed to get into deals that
deny them public accountability.

This might be a great strategy for a politician: if you screw up, lock the
details behind a similar deal, only to be opened after the next elections.

------
Jacobi
The migration from MS Office to LibreOffice is not straightforward, especially
if you have millions of documents. In my experience, any complex document will
almost always fail to render correctly ...

------
jpkeisala
I don't think public sector and enterprises should try to find alternative
software for Microsoft Office. Instead, they should move everything to browser
and kill software by implementing great document/content management systems
support that.

------
Juha
They say that their 21000 pc pilot project with LibreOffice shows that using
LibreOffice over their proprietary office tools increases the cost by 70%.
This seems very difficult to believe without proper arguments.

~~~
anigbrowl
The fact is that LibreOffice is just not that great. Sorry.

~~~
excuse-me
Does your city council's housing dept really need any WP functionality that
wasn't in Wordpad or Windows 3.1 Write?

~~~
anigbrowl
You know, it probably does. When they produce reports, they need to be able to
do things like footnotes, tables of contents, indices; incorporate maps and
graphics, and scale or otherwise make them print-ready; use a variety of
different layouts and templates to make information accessible to the public;
expand or modify historical reports and datasheets (ie, load files that were
produced at least within the last 10 years, if not 20); and possibly produce
these documents in a variety of different languages and/or formats.

In terms of single documents used for correspondence, they likely need things
like mail merge, change tracking, multiple authorship (housing departments
deal with a lot of legal issues, from evictions to liability to real estate
transfer) and so on.

You're falling into a classic developer trap of not being interested in other
people's jobs, and thus assuming that the jobs don't need uch int he way of
technology. It's the same mindset that leads people to suggest using emacs for
everything -because that's what the developer uses all day; or doing
everything at a shell prompt - despite the obvious market preference for GUIs;
or that everybody should learn to code - though most people clearly prefer not
to. One might as well suggest that developers should just stop piddling about
with software and learn to build their own hardware instead of pursuing the
massively wasteful path of general-purpose computing.

~~~
excuse-me
Not a developer - I'm a project manager in a high tech industry.

A lot of my time is dealing with reports and projects where somebody decided
that they didn't quite like how a title of a table was formatted and so made
their own "fixes" which looked ok on their machine. Or they couldn't
understand some remote object linking functionality so they converted the
spreadsheet into an image and embedded that.

I suspect a lot of companies, and certainly most goverment offices, would be
more efficient if the people who write pretty much standard letters to
customers/claimants didn't have the same MS-office install as somebody editing
10,000 page technical reports for an Airbus A380.

You can (or at least we used to) customize the menus/toolbars for Word to make
a simplified version for secretaries that were really happier with
typewriters.

~~~
keithpeter
Yup, I daily have to deal with Office documents that have 'pointless'
formatting. A good set of templates _with formatting protected_ could save so
much time. That goes for Open/Libre Office as much as MS Office.

LibreOffice has mathematical formula editing that I find much more congenial
than that currently provided in MS Office 2010. (Yes I know LaTex but I'm
talking casual use of simple formulas here).

------
fleitz
It's not difficult to see how LibreOffice costs more than Microsoft office.

Lets imagine that the average city worker gets paid $60,000 per year and works
1500 hours per year, (35 hour work week, 4 weeks paid vacation) or $40 per
hour.

A copy of Office on newegg costs $349 which is pretty much the highest price
anyone will ever pay for MS Office. A city probably pays closer to $50 to
$100.

Lets imagine a day of training for LibreOffice, and a day of downtime over a
year due to incompatibilities (lets assume that there are no bugs in Libre
Office and the incompatibilities are purely due to MS's monopolistic
practices), 14 hours times $40 is $560 and we haven't even paid for the
instructor for the training or the IT guy to fix the problems.

~~~
dmethvin
Perhaps if you assume that the person is already proficient in Microsoft
Office, that might be true. But if you've ever watched someone go through the
MS Office 2003 ==> 2007/2010 transition ("You do not like _the ribbon?_ You
must bear the ribbon!") it is not a productive sight either. They're still
using Office 2003 on Windows XP at my wife's job.

