4 ms·

I'm French and while I'm generally in favor of usage of open-source by our public offices, I'm not sure moving to LibreOffice is an achievement to be proud of.

by athrun 11y ago

I'm French and while I'm generally in favor of usage of open-source by our public offices, I'm not sure moving to LibreOffice is an achievement to be proud of. In 2016, can an office suite claim to increase "productivity" without any Cloud-based collaboration features built-in? It seems so old school, the rest of the world is moving on and once again, our public sector is left stuck in the past. I understand the advantages of using an open format but AFAIK both Office or Google Docs can export to ODF for long term archival if needed.

pgeorgi 11y ago
Moving from Microsoft Office to Office 365 (or Google Docs) means shifting _more_ control towards the vendor - they not only control the application life cycle (and through that, licensing costs), they also control the document storage. An open source office suite moves control away from office suite vendors to the public administration, and Libreoffice works pretty well with various document management systems. As for live collaboration features: I'm not sure they're actually a high priority for the public administration, but even if so, that seems to be on the roadmap for https://www.collaboraoffice.com/solutions/collabora-cloudsuite/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/solutions/collabora-cloudsui... that will probably interoperate well with LibreOffice. I guess that could also be supported by the native LibreOffice application in a future version - and if France needs that feature, it could pay french/EU developers to implement it, investing tax money locally.
buovjaga 11y ago
LibreOffice Online is being worked on. A fairly recent presentation about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0AiIfeQCx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0AiIfeQCx4
agumonkey 11y ago
LibreOffice dev team is impressively cleaning and extending the suite. Let's hope that more users will give them more motivation / resources to keep doing so and catch up on important features.
jmnicolas 11y ago
So you propose that French public sector data be sent on American servers ?
- arethuza 11y ago
  Microsoft has quite a few hosting locations in Europe - Ireland, Netherlands, Finland, Austria: https://www.microsoft.com/online/legal/v2/?docid=25 https://www.microsoft.com/online/legal/v2/?docid=25
  - vetinari 11y ago
    Microsoft is still subject of US jurisdiction, having few hosting locations outside US will not change that. It would be reckless for any non-US government to use any non-local services. (For exactly this reason, governments usually build their own datacentres).
grive 11y ago
Moving an administration to "the Cloud" seems like an extrardinary bad idea to me. Administrations do not move quickly for a reason. Their processes are bound to the law and they have to respect things most offices have no idea about. Them doing it "old school" is a good thing. Old school is not bad, it's stable and reliable. It's everything you want from an administration. And among the open source alternatives, LibreOffice is order of magnitudes ahead of other suites (except OpenOffice, is there any one actually?). Moreover, having public documents written and stored in an open format is simply going back to sanity. Really, criticizing this move because it's not "hip" enough seems reckless to me. I'm very happy that the process and procurement procedures exists in my government (I'm french too) to allow administration to switch if they want to.
- gtk40 11y ago
  Only other FOSS option I know of that's comparable is Calligra Suite. Then just smaller, not trying to be feature complete programs like Abiword and Gnumeric. There's other good free as in beer options and cheaper alternatives to Microsoft Office though.
rtpg 11y ago
Well, you can have shared network drives. Dropbox. Or... google docs. I don't really know too much about the gov't's network policies but people tend to use the tools they know

by athrun 11y ago

pgeorgi 11y ago

Moving from Microsoft Office to Office 365 (or Google Docs) means shifting _more_ control towards the vendor - they not only control the application life cycle (and through that, licensing costs), they also control the document storage. An open source office suite moves control away from office suite vendors to the public administration, and Libreoffice works pretty well with various document management systems. As for live collaboration features: I'm not sure they're actually a high priority for the public administration, but even if so, that seems to be on the roadmap for https://www.collaboraoffice.com/solutions/collabora-cloudsuite/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/solutions/collabora-cloudsui... that will probably interoperate well with LibreOffice. I guess that could also be supported by the native LibreOffice application in a future version - and if France needs that feature, it could pay french/EU developers to implement it, investing tax money locally.

buovjaga 11y ago

LibreOffice Online is being worked on. A fairly recent presentation about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0AiIfeQCx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0AiIfeQCx4

agumonkey 11y ago

LibreOffice dev team is impressively cleaning and extending the suite. Let's hope that more users will give them more motivation / resources to keep doing so and catch up on important features.

jmnicolas 11y ago

So you propose that French public sector data be sent on American servers ?

arethuza 11y ago
Microsoft has quite a few hosting locations in Europe - Ireland, Netherlands, Finland, Austria: https://www.microsoft.com/online/legal/v2/?docid=25 https://www.microsoft.com/online/legal/v2/?docid=25
- vetinari 11y ago
  Microsoft is still subject of US jurisdiction, having few hosting locations outside US will not change that. It would be reckless for any non-US government to use any non-local services. (For exactly this reason, governments usually build their own datacentres).

grive 11y ago

Moving an administration to "the Cloud" seems like an extrardinary bad idea to me. Administrations do not move quickly for a reason. Their processes are bound to the law and they have to respect things most offices have no idea about. Them doing it "old school" is a good thing. Old school is not bad, it's stable and reliable. It's everything you want from an administration. And among the open source alternatives, LibreOffice is order of magnitudes ahead of other suites (except OpenOffice, is there any one actually?). Moreover, having public documents written and stored in an open format is simply going back to sanity. Really, criticizing this move because it's not "hip" enough seems reckless to me. I'm very happy that the process and procurement procedures exists in my government (I'm french too) to allow administration to switch if they want to.

gtk40 11y ago
Only other FOSS option I know of that's comparable is Calligra Suite. Then just smaller, not trying to be feature complete programs like Abiword and Gnumeric. There's other good free as in beer options and cheaper alternatives to Microsoft Office though.

rtpg 11y ago

Well, you can have shared network drives. Dropbox. Or... google docs. I don't really know too much about the gov't's network policies but people tend to use the tools they know