Switching From Microsoft Office To LibreOffice Saves Toulouse 1 Million Euros 296
jrepin sends this EU report:
The French city of Toulouse saved 1 million euro by migrating all its desktops from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. This project was rooted in a global digital policy which positions free software as a driver of local economic development and employment. Former IT policy-maker Erwane Monthubert said, "Software licenses for productivity suites cost Toulouse 1.8 million euro every three years. Migration cost us about 800,000 euro, due partly to some developments. One million euro has actually been saved in the first three years. It is a compelling proof in the actual context of local public finance. ... France has a high value in free software at the international level. Every decision-maker should know this."
As We Speak (Score:5, Insightful)
As we speak, Microsoft is instructing its European "business partners" to give a certain French city a shitload of really cheap Office licenses.
Re: (Score:3)
As we speak, Microsoft is instructing its European "business partners" to give a certain French city a shitload of really cheap Office licenses.
Either that or members of city council wake up with severed horse heads in their beds.
Re:As We Speak (Score:5, Funny)
"Either your name is on the volume licensing agreement... or your brains."
Re: (Score:3)
Cheap is a better offer but it's hard to compete with free.
Re: (Score:3)
But LibreOffice is still giving them value as a plausible threat, even if they're not using it. Besides, who knows how much time they must waste because of incompatibilities in documents they get from the outside world. If the offer is cheap enough, it might be worth it.
Re: (Score:2)
"As we speak, Microsoft is instructing its European "business partners" to give a certain French city a shitload of really cheap Office licenses."
Cheaper than zero?
Re: (Score:3)
Cheaper than zero?
Bribes would effectively create a negative cost, at least for the peoplereceiving them.
Re:As We Speak (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we'll see more and more international organizations/companies migrating from US company products.
The problem is not using US products, the problem is having to use the expensive MS Office suite specifically.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, it would be more like "va te faire foutre". :-)
sure, works for France (Score:5, Funny)
Try installing LibreOffice in America, and the users will whine, "why it not Microsoft????" They'll complain to your boss, you'll be fired and ostracized, and you'll have to learn French and relocate to France if you ever want to work again.
Re:sure, works for France (Score:5, Insightful)
If I could get a job in France, I think I'd move. I'd have more vacation time and I can drink wine at lunch.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
You can have all the vacation time you want anywhere you live, all you do is negotiate terms of your own contract. Vacation time is not something that government can force an employer to add on top of your salary, it is your salary, it is just a different way to pay you. You can get more money or more vacation time, your call. It is the same situation with anything that is mandated by a government that must be part of your employment contract. You want to get medical insurance through your employer then
Re:sure, works for France (Score:5, Interesting)
You can have all the vacation time you want anywhere you live
Which is why every American takes 6 weeks in the summer.
In my experience, most permanent job employers don't like to negotiate on vacation time. Sometimes they'll give on a day or two, but usually they're not crazy about vacation time that deviates from whatever the position qualifies for. The only explanation ever given to me was that because salary is "secret" it's easier to compensate employees differentially; vacation is visible to other employees at the same level and differential compensation creates tension.
In a contract employment situation you can negotiate anything, but I've found in shorter term contracts there's usually some kind of deadline that's non-negotiable, making free-lance vacationing a little bit challenging.
Re: (Score:3)
In my experience, most permanent job employers don't like to negotiate on vacation time.
It takes more negotiation skill. I recently negotiated a 4-day work week. I took a 20% pay cut for it (totally worth it). Essentially, instead of framing it as an adversarial negotiation, I considered it a problem for us to solve together. "I want to work here, you want me to work here, but this is what I need. How can we solve this problem?" Most of the time was spent helping them overcome concerns. At one point, I said, "yeah, that's a managerial problem, but I'm confident the managers here are capable o
Re: (Score:3)
A negotiation in which you, presumably, had them over a barrel. You can bet your employers are kicking themselves for letting you become essential enough to be able to negotiate such a deal. I'm speaking from some experience, since I "negotiated" a 3-day workweek after mass layoffs and indescriminate outsourcing, the results of which finally proved to them that they indeed needed me there.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Vacation time is not something that government can force an employer to add on top of your salary, it is your salary, it is just a different way to pay you.
I don't know for sure about France but in many European countries vacation is by law on top of your salary, so you're still getting your normal paycheck when you're on vacation. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the case in France as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In The Netherlands a minimum vacation of four weeks is the law, the payment during this period is a deferred payment.
Meaning an annual salary is calculated and the first 6 months of the year 1/13th of it is kept back for payment of salary during your holidays.
The 1/13th of other 6 months are advanced.
Re: (Score:2)
in many European countries vacation is by law on top of your salary, so you're still getting your normal paycheck when you're on vacation.
That's a financially unsophisticated view. In such cases the salary always includes the vacation in so far as it's lower than it otherwise would be were the vacation not required by law to be part of the total compensation. A cost to a company is still a cost. It doesn't matter that half the cost is due to salary and half the cost is due to the otherwise salaried employee being unavailable to work because he's on vacation. It's the total cost that matters and the vacation must be a non-zero part of that. I'
Re: (Score:2)
It is, for most salaried employees, i.e. you get a set amount of paid vacation days as part of your salary.
Or put another way, the boss pays you less, but you get your time off "for free".
Since you pay tax and social charges on your salary, (and these are typically indexed to the amount you earn) it's actually a good deal, but most people don't think about it that way.
Re:sure, works for France (Score:5, Insightful)
Also the "market wage" (or "market total compensation package") is highly dependent on the laws regulating it. If every single company in the US was paying you a pittance, with some paying less or more of a pittance, you would technically be "forced" to work for close to nothing because you won't have the choice to do otherwise. That's exactly what's happening with the minimum wage and people with no education. They can't work for themselves because they lack that capacity, and are stuck accepting $7/h because that's the only thing they can have (that, or crime, I guess). It would take extraordinary courage to pay your employees more than "you have to", even if sometimes that's the right thing to do for the company and the country (notice how Seattle isn't dying off right now, and how Ford helped bring a middle-class to America).
Re: (Score:2)
In a theoretical world you would be correct, but in practice you're wrong. It's very hard to negotiate something out of the norm, which in the US, is vacation time.
Wrong. You have been fooled by HR drones if you think this way. Negotiating something out of the norm is done ALL THE TIME. That's why it is called "negotiating" your compensation (every part of it is open to negotiation), and not just "haggling" over the price (only).
For example, try negotiating a role as an associate in investment banking while saying "hey cut down 5 weeks of my salary I'll take extra time off." It can't work, because the culture doesn't allow it. You either accept the role with no vacation and high pay, or you don't get hired. I can easily negotiate a couple grands on a salary, but getting an extra week off? Rough.
That means you failed to sell yourself as a valuable money maker with a unique combination of skills and abilities during your interview. If the hiring manager thinks you are unique and you can help the company's bottom line that no other
Re: (Score:2)
Without laws and regulations it is up to you to negotiate. With the laws and regulations it is already negotiated for you, you have no choice but to accept part of your compensation in vacation/sick days rather than in hourly wage.
And without the laws and regulations I have no choice but to accept sod all holiday time because employers won't budge on the issue. The average person's negotiating power is minuscule compared to a big company.
Before health and safety laws workers got killed on the job all the time, and the attitude was largely "there's lots of desperate workers, they can be easily replaced". If a safe working environment was beyond the power of the little people to negotiate, what chance a less serious matter like holiday
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Of course, in reality it's a race to the bottom. If a minimum vacation time wasn't set by law, then there'd be NO vacation time at all in a sho
Re: (Score:2)
Your total compensation is just it. You can negotiate to be compensated in dollars, pieces of silver, gallons of milk, condoms or paid vacation days, but all of these are part of total price of your labour and where you get something, you lose something somewhere else.
I would not say that it's part of your compensation if there was a law that said that everyone should have at least x number of paid days off.
Re: (Score:2)
I understand your point but I can't see how vacation could even be a factor when negotiating salaries. Salaries are primarily negotiated based on supply and demand, and when no one can be denied their paid vacation that factor doesn't matter anymore.
Re: (Score:3)
1 Luxembourg $4,089
2 Norway $3,678
3 Austria $3,437
4 United States $3,263
5 United Kingdom $3,065
6 Belgium $3,035
7 Sweden $3,023
8 Ireland $2,997
9 Finland $2,925
10 South Korea $2,903
11 France $2,886
So basically, you get better, less expensive, more effective* mostly free national health care, better social security, better standards of living, shorter working days (8-4/9-5 vs 8-5/9-6), and 6 weeks vacation.
For th
Re: (Score:3)
In ireland, you get 20 days vacation and 9 paid holidays a year.
The average Irish working week is 39 hours and the legal maximum 48.
I was forced to work 83 hours at my last employers. On salary.
Then a year later, they laid all of us off and replaced us with indians.
Then we found out through leaks they had been PLANNING to lay us off when they ordered us to work those hours.
People had heart attacks, divorces.
It's evil and society shouldn't tolerate it.
Re: (Score:2)
CIA world factbook:
Exports:
$113.6 billion (2013 est.)
country comparison to the world: 35
$119.3 billion (2012 est.)
Exports - commodities:
machinery and equipment, computers, chemicals, medical devices, pharmaceuticals; food products, animal products
It's 25th in the world for per capita income.
The united states is 14th.
Re: (Score:2)
Woo hoo! Mr. Libertarian! You are so right.
Folks had a "choice" of quitting into the highest unemployment in a decade, losing their houses, forcing their kids out of college, and giving up any shot at retirement.
Free choice! America! Fuck yea!
Unlike so many other countries in the world, many of which have higher living standards and higher per capita income than the united states and where labor laws protect the ordinary citizens from such abuse.
In my case, I did exercise my "choice" as soon as I made m
Re: (Score:2)
It's getting increasingly fucked up for healthy people in the bottom 80% as well.
Essentially the top 20% has taken almost every bit of wealth and income produced by increased productivity since 1980. And a lot of that is focused in the top 1.67%.
Re: (Score:3)
Well, we can say that we should not tolerate it and then make legal changes to prevent it.
For example, we could fix the abuse of exempt status and require pay for hours over 50 per week for people who are not actively managing at least a few other people or who are owners of more than 10% of the business or whose income is at least triple the average income (currently about $150,000).
The united states is somewhat unique among the top 25 countries with high hours, low protections, low services but yet only
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, to live in a libertarian paradise where everything on earth is explainable within the first week of Econ 101.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You are really quite mistaken. The attitude you are displaying is actually quite recent- it developed after 1980. "Business" is purely a social construct. If you look into the history of corporations, the legal constructs were explicitly created for the benefit of society in general in mind.
If all businesses had no employees- then no one could buy any products.
Money is just how we agree to swap things around in society to prevent violence.
Whenever things get too unbalanced, the violence is waiting ar
Re: (Score:2)
No, I am running my own business, I am creating value out of nothing by building stuff that didn't exist before I decided to build it. It's not a zero sum game, that's how businesses make money by making new products.
However this is not the subject under discussion here, while the economy is not a zero sum game your total value to me as an employee has a minimum and a maximum levels on it, so your total compensation will be within certain boundaries, thus if government dictates a minimum number of paid vaca
Re: (Score:2)
Back in the '50s my father voted in favor of a proposal by his union to accept medical benefits instead of a raise in the hourly rate. Years later, he told me he considered it one of the best decisions he ever made.
Re: (Score:2)
Well of-course you should be able to negotiate how you want to get your compensation, but that's the point. What if government came out with a law telling you that you absolutely cannot negotiate the terms, you cannot be paid in medical insurance but instead you have to always be compensated in government bonds?
The reason that it was a good deal for your father was because the part of the total compensation that was the medical insurance was not taxed the same way as money. Income taxes didn't apply to th
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. However, the whole point of my post was not just to show that there's more to your compensation than just what you see on your paycheck but to give an example of how such alternate forms of payment can be worth much more than most people think.
Re: (Score:2)
all you do is negotiate terms of your own contract.
oh ffs,
even if everyone on the planet had the best posible education and skills training that their brains and bodies could attain, the enormous majority would still be 'wage slaves' unable to negotiate the terms of a contract because the jobs where that would be possible would be so few compared to the number of job seekers, capitalism requires that there are winners, and winners are defined by the prescence of 'losers', and there need to be many more of t
Re: (Score:2)
There is a phrase that covers you "I'm alright jack" http://www.urbandictionary.com... [urbandictionary.com]!. I can assure you by far the majority of American workers get to negotiate fuck all and are lucky to get reasonable health coverage let alone anything else. So for them moving to any other modern democracy with universal health care, set protective employment conditions etc would make them far better off even when by far the majority of them are to ignorant to realise this. As for the minority, well, "I'm alright jack".
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
You can do that in the US too. Just in the other order.
Drink Wine at lunch => More "vacation" time :)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Don't forget to mention something about healthcare.
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly, the long lunch, with good cheap food (and wine) has long disappeared from the French business culture.
Sandwiches at the desk are more the norm.
Luckily, the women are still (mostly) slim and elegant :)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That was true until MS brought the ribbon then it was "Why is IT forcing me to upgrade?"
Now it's happening again with the latest Office with their Metro-ized GUI.
First thing I did when I got a new shiny laptop with Office 2013 was install LibreOffice so I can focus on working, and not relearning how to do my usual tasks with a new UI.
Actually what I really did first was install VMWare and get Xubuntu installed but you get my point.
Good to hear (Score:3, Informative)
The French police seem to have had a good amount of success as well: http://www.zdnet.com/french-po... [zdnet.com]
There are probably always going to be use cases for the majority of users to be fine with Open or Libre office. Some specialized functionality in finance might merit excel. There is nothing I've found on Linux that easily replaces Visio or Project ( libre-project is fine for reading, but I've had many issues with creating them). It's what I use at home (lubuntu). At work, I do have to say I prefer Outlook/Exchange for integrated mail and calendar, but I could probably live without Word/Excel/PPT.
Here's to hoping Libreoffice and the other forks can continue to expand and refine their software.
Re:Good to hear (Score:4, Informative)
Most of what I've ever had to use it for was pretty simple so genuinely asking here; is Dia [sourceforge.net] not a good Visio replacement? Are there features in Visio that make it more attractive for even simple stuff or is it that Visio has advanced features that haven't been replicated elsewhere?
Re: (Score:2)
It's native objects can look rather childish, look at the cloud object that looks like something from ms paint for an example. But the big issue for me is it's missing the tools built around visio. Network discovery being the big one. Sure could I hack something together to use an existing tool and get the objects into Dia. I may be wrong as it's been awhile since I looked at it.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, if Dia is fine functionality-wise, but the art assets are not good enough, when you look at the involved budget for a big city ($1.8 million in that example), paying a graphical design studio or a couple of freelancer to make more adequate art asset wouldn't cost as much as the MS licenses.
Re: (Score:2)
From your first link, with emphasis addd:
Five years and at least $600,000 on, with unhappy staff complaining of interoperability problems with Microsoft Office documents, city administrators called in a consultant from a Microsoft partner to support the city council in fixing the problem. The solution proposed: a complete reversal of course, switching back to Microsoft Office for a sum of at least $500,000, with a $360-per-seat cost for licensing Microsoft Office and no firm estimates for undoing the earlier migration.
There are no details on what the "interoperability" problems were. Was it features lacking in LibreOffice? Was it bugs in LibreOffice? The article doesn't say.
If businesses actually pooled their resources they could actually get LibreOffice "fixed" -- but they would rather piss money away on licensing costs.
Re: (Score:2)
Visio... ugh. I have a love-hate relationship with Visio, and got off the train at Visio 2010 -- which is ok, because it runs acceptably under Wine.
Some detail: At work I have a major publication based on about 50 complex diagrams in Visio, now in its 5th edition over the past 5 years. Originally drafted using 2003, the move to 2010 was annoying but acceptable, as it brought no discernible benefit but took away no features I needed. I was also ok with 2010 because it runs acceptably under Wine, which me
Re: (Score:2)
I still prefer the way Visio worked before Microsoft bought them.
And... (Score:2, Insightful)
And how much time was lost from (1) employees needing to learn a new system, (2) reintegrating email onto a new client platform, and (3) finding a new way to conduct patching. (Microsoft, for all their deficiencies, is better than its competitors at keeping patches up-to-date. I'm looking at you, Apple.)
I'm not saying that the move may not be correct in terms of dollars and sense, but please answer these questions before blowing sunshine up my ass.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Regarding point 1, I think users are relieved that there is no fscking ribbons in LibreOffice which makes it much easier to transition...
Re:And... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, if you read TFA (no, I'm not new here) they have a sidebar call out that answers your question...
"Software licenses for productivity suites cost Toulouse 1.8 million euro every three years. Migration cost us about 800,000 euro, due partly to some developments. One million euro has actually been saved in the first three years. It is a compelling proof in the actual context of local public finance," says Monthubert.
So about 8K in migration costs vs. 18K in licensing. Assuming another 2-3K of unforeseen support over training issues or missing features that haven't been caught yet it should be a significant savings. And if you factor in the migration cost as a one time payment and assume support costs go down over time as people get used to the new system than the savings become very large indeed after the three years cited in the article.
Re:And... (Score:5, Interesting)
In my small company, we all use Linux on the desktop. Here are our answers:
Time to learn a new system: It took my employees maybe a day to learn LibreOffice (they already new MS Office). Anyone who needs more than a day to come up to speed with casual use of LibreOffice is too stupid to be employable, IMO.
Reintegrating mail onto a new client platform: Well, I just said "Here's your email program" and gave them Claws Mail. They were up and running in about 30 minutes. Again, anyone who cannot learn a simple graphical mail client in a day or so is too stupid to be employable.
Keeping patches up-to-date: One word for you: apt-get
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
In my small company, we all use Linux on the desktop.
I really see no reason for using MS Office if you're a small company.
However, for large companies, collaboration tools, internationalization of documents, corporate-wide style hints, advanced spreadsheet macros, shareable diagram objects, integrated calendars, meeting room tracking, distribution policy enforcement, etc. are important, and just aren't quite there on most of the alternatives. Google Docs does a reasonable job at some of that, but not all.
Re: (Score:2)
However, for large companies, collaboration tools, internationalization of documents, corporate-wide style hints, advanced spreadsheet macros, shareable diagram objects, integrated calendars, meeting room tracking, distribution policy enforcement, etc. are important, and just aren't quite there on most of the alternatives. Google Docs does a reasonable job at some of that, but not all.
LibreOffice supports styles just fine and by that I mean it's just as bad as word, because you can't force people not to fuc
Re: (Score:3)
LibreOffice can do most of that, with the exception of integrated calendars. Claws Mail has a plugin that can generate and accept Outlook invitations. Also, our CRM tool, (SugarCRM) has a usable shared calendar; it was pretty easy to hack to to generate Outlook-compatible invitations for our external partners.
We use Subversion for revision control and collaboration. My first choice would have been git but I realize there are limits to what you can expect non-technical people to learn. :)
I don't bel
Re: (Score:2)
Thats cute, you think Outlook is an email client. (...) Hint: Email is about 1/10th of what Outlook is and does.
He did say small company. which makes it fairly plausible. Many pay a lot for Outlook/Office and use it only for email, meeting scheduling and simple documents/spreadsheets because it's the de facto corporate standard.
Re: (Score:2)
Thats cute, you think Outlook is an email client.
It's not of course. It's a binary forged of pure evil of which email is one necrotic outgrowth.
It's integration with Lync makes the email part of it look almost good.
Put some of the money back in... (Score:5, Interesting)
The exemptions were given because some Word macros and sophisticated Excel files could not be reproduced in LibreOffice or other open source productivity suites. These are examples of what Serp calls “some less mature features” in free software: “When it comes to making some kinds of presentations, for example, there is often a little extra to do [compared to the same process in PowerPoint]. So for some people the process is not so clear, and this can cause adaptability problems in everyday work.”
How about they use some of the saved money to either donate or contribute code to make the software work better?
Instead we have companies and other organizations making and saving tens of billions of dollars off Open Source(like Google, Yahoo, Red Hat, Facebook, Twitter, Apple etc.) and then we end up with catastrophic security nightmares like HeartBleed because no one could be bothered to send a couple of bucks over to the overburdened couple of folks that everyone relies on for security. And then we have asshats on message boards like this one who likely never contributed to OpenSSL or looked at the code for bugs but feel entitled to call the coders stupid for the bugs after the fact.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
No, the point is that the users should have the source, so they can fix it if it's broken. Everything else is optional.
Re:Put some of the money back in... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, FOSS is about freedom, not being free of charge.
The Free Software movement was started when Richard Stallman got annoyed because he couldn't make his own modifications to a printer driver.
Re: (Score:2)
Google, Yahoo, Red Hat, Facebook, Twitter, Apple etc
euh....
Actually, Google, Yahoo, Red Hat, Facebook, Twitter, Apple all have open source projects of their own or collaborate on existing projects.
Heartbleed happened, because it wasn't coordinated.
Now the Linux Foundation has a budget for that, to search for important projects and fund them.
Re:Put some of the money back in... (Score:4, Funny)
"Conan, what is good?"
"To see your enemies driven before you, to have their libraries forked and to hear the lamentation of their wizards"
Re: (Score:2)
Points!
The real question (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The real question is, what is the long term impact to productivity and work flow? Sure you can save money up front by switching to a different software suite but that doesn't matter if it disrupts your business in a significant way.
And what is the long term impact of MS Office changing their UI every couple versions?
Not to say open sourced software don't have this problem *cough* Firefox *cough*, but the point is these things happen all the time, and cannot be avoided just by sticking to MS Office. You just plan the migration at the right time in the cycle then it won't become an additional cost.
Re: (Score:2)
Translation: "I am butthurt that I've been whipped in the productivity game. By a municipality. In France."
Munich did it already (Score:4, Interesting)
Munich decided to move completely to Linux [wikipedia.org] (so not only from MS Office on MS Windows to LibreOffice on MS Windows) 10 years ago and managed to complete the move last year. One of the main complaints of users seems to be lack of compatibility when exchanging documents with the MS world.
Now if more cities move to Open/LibreOffice, companies trading with them might have to produce more compatible documents and MS might finally loose its compatibility "strangle" on its user.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Bullshit.
RTF is entirely undocumented, even within Microsoft. Every app has its own flavor.
If you've never had a problem with RTF than you've never actually used it for anything more than basic plan text.
RTF's lack of compatibility and documentation is FAR worse than the standard .doc format
French dialog boxes (Score:2)
Do you want to save the changes to your document before surrendering?
Re: (Score:3)
i wonder if members of the french resistance would get angry over hearing that tired goddamn joke time and time again? Anger in the
Buzz Aldrin punching a dude in the face for saying the moon landing was a fraud.. that type of anger.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't worry: someday they'll have another decades-long African occupation, or nuke somebody, and then Droolin' Joe Sixpack will be making the opposite joke for the next half-century.
administrative operations (Score:3)
For local government purposes the city is part of Toulouse Métropole (“Greater Toulouse”), which includes 37 neighbouring communities and has a total population of around 714,000. Toulouse Métropole employs some 10,000 staff to manage its administrative operations.
I don't know much about local government in the US or France. But that seems like a heck of a lot of administrators for that number of people.
Re: (Score:2)
"Administrative operations" is everything a governemnt does.
Hidden Cost and Bias. (Score:2)
I have heard of a few municipalities doing this now, perhaps some sort of coalition to exchange knowledge and coordinate development funding is warranted?
I usually have LibreOffice installed on m
Can't fix limited functionality in MS. $1M / year (Score:5, Interesting)
> or you're functionality is limited, or the feature plain sucks
Our experience is the cost of limited functionality in off-the-shelf software is a significantly higher cost than the license cost.
With the old proprietary system, an employee would spend 4 hours each Friday copying and pasting from one program to another.
With the new modular open source software, I spent an hour authoring a module to completely automate the data transfer, and have it happen in real time.
For just that one little function alone, this year we saved 4 hours X 52 weeks X ~$40/hr = $8,320 per year.
I do one of those every week. A little change to the software for a big change in the process. I'd be surprised if we haven't saved at least $1 million / year total, from all the little tweaks, correction, and additions we've done to the open source software to make our process better, faster, more efficient, and more accurate. I know the P/L from the from the program using the open source stuff sure has improved, but it's hard to quantify how much of that is due to the software. I could easily prove it's saved at least as much as my salary though, and my salary was being paid when we had the proprietary software too, for a specialist who was paid to admin the system and figure out hacks to get the proprietary system to almost meet our needs using duct tape and bubble gum.
Re: (Score:2)
And this wasn't possible in Office because of your incompetence? So its hard to argue that you're saving massive amounts of money when you clearly don't know how to work with the technology your users are using. Instead you forced everyone else to change because you were incapable of doing something.
Thats pretty stupid, certainly not something you should be bragging about.
Every Office app has had scriptable i/o since before LibreOffice was a thought in someones mind.
God I hate when you clueless fucks say
$1000 if you can get Word to read Word documents (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll give you a thousand dollars if you can get a current copy of MS Word to read old MS Word documents, like OpenOffice can. Since Microsoft can't pull that off, I'm guessing you won't either. I suppose you could shellExecute(OpenOffice.exe) from a Word macro. :)
So yeah, you COULD throw out all your company's documents in order to avoid having two "power users" of Word learn different menu locations for a few things. That would make sense, if you had Balmer's dick in your mouth.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong- I've been primarily on Libreoffice and then Openoffice for several years now.
But I see no reason that you couldn't have automated the data transfer in the microsoft environment too. I've written programs both in VBA and in Openoffice Basic which implement that kind of functionality.
The significant challenge to the openoffice side is better integration with email an the calendar. It provides microsoft with a lot of lockin.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
or the feature plain sucks (track changes in Office > Libre)
Huh? Have you used a recent version of LOffice? The track-changes feature in LO is considerably more elegant than MSOffice, both visually (in page view you still see the tagged and ordered comments/changes while displaying an accurate representation of the print view), and logically (I can reply by comment on a comment in LO, and record the justification for edits as the comments are ordered in a threaded conversation. And you don't lose
Re: (Score:3)
Of course, the employees probably already spend 2-3 hours/year dealing with the piece of shit that is Microsoft Office. They probably also devote some amount of IT time and resources to dealing with licensing and activation issues, additional troubleshooting associated with imaging and installation procedures, etc.
Actually, really, I'm not being fair. MS Office is not a piece of shit. It's a really good application, though the whole installation/licensing/activation thing can be a bit of a nightmare at
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You know, very few people can claim to have actually met the guy that invented Get off my lawn!
Re: (Score:2)
But hey, it's Friday night and I'm happy for a good week, including the use of LibreOffice AND MS Office.
Yes MS Office is more polished, and yes hardly anyone uses the stuff LibreOffice doesn't have.
So below the line, for 99% of papers LibreOffice is a fine application.
Re: (Score:2)
Not a troll. I actually do use Libreoffice, both on Mac and on a Linux. However even for my very simple jobs, I often find Libreoffice has some bug I can't work around and I have to load up my pirated copy of MS Office, which actually works.
I keep using the open sores software based on some weird principle. It's fine (but not quite as good) for editing basic text documents.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's easier to install LibreOffice than it is to uninstall MS Office.
Re: (Score:2)
As for IT costs - I have worked in several companies over the years with both UNIX and Windows server rooms. Being a UNIX person, I may be a bit biased, but my personal impression is that supporting Windows servers is a lot more painfil than supporting UNIX/Linux - at one point I supported some 50 UNIXes alone, while the roughly similar number of Windows systems had a team of 5; I had a pretty relaxed daily routine, but they were always overstretched. Not because they incompetent, I learned a lot of general