3 ms·

To be fair in certain cases the cost might be very high and considerably higher than whatever the license/subscription fees paid to MS are. e.g. Libre Office do

To be fair in certain cases the cost might be very high and considerably higher than whatever the license/subscription fees paid to MS are. e.g. Libre Office doesn’t really have a drop-in replacement for Excel (for non trivial use cases. To be fair it still might be sufficient for the majority of users, but that would mean that some proportion of your workforce has to stay on Excel/Office which kind of beats the whole purpose).

rightbyte 3y ago
Vendor lockin is no excuse leaking PI to MS though. You could buy some Office 2003 CD and use Excel locally.
- alemanek 3y ago
  Uh using an out of date and unsupported Excel version is a really bad idea. Lots of security vulnerabilities around VB scripting/macros which gives you the very real risk of being compromised by a malicious spreadsheet. Better to just switch where you can and invest resources into improving FOSS offerings to handle the use cases it currently can’t.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Executing malicious code on your computer is a problem, ye. If you want to give the users a nice programming environment you can't also prevent them from doing arbitrary computations. You can run Excel in a VM if you want.
- type0 3y ago
  Medical researchers in many places leak non-anonymized sensitive patient data to MS, even when they know better and that's one of the reasons Office LTSC exists
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  > Vendor lockin That, but also lack of feature parity. Unfortunately Libre Office is just not very good
pydry 3y ago
To be equally fair, in certain cases the non-licensing costs of Microsoft software are higher than the FOSS equivalent. In fact, I'd argue that in some cases these are higher. A good example of this is that piece of shit that is Microsoft Teams - both the horrid security flaws and the ways it keeps breaking. I've used FOSS equivalents and they have a smaller attack surface and are more reliable. They also play all sorts of user-hostile tricks that make vendor lock in possible, and this often has an underappreciated impact on delivery.

rightbyte 3y ago

Vendor lockin is no excuse leaking PI to MS though. You could buy some Office 2003 CD and use Excel locally.

alemanek 3y ago
Uh using an out of date and unsupported Excel version is a really bad idea. Lots of security vulnerabilities around VB scripting/macros which gives you the very real risk of being compromised by a malicious spreadsheet. Better to just switch where you can and invest resources into improving FOSS offerings to handle the use cases it currently can’t.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Executing malicious code on your computer is a problem, ye. If you want to give the users a nice programming environment you can't also prevent them from doing arbitrary computations. You can run Excel in a VM if you want.
type0 3y ago
Medical researchers in many places leak non-anonymized sensitive patient data to MS, even when they know better and that's one of the reasons Office LTSC exists
ffgjgf1 3y ago
> Vendor lockin That, but also lack of feature parity. Unfortunately Libre Office is just not very good

pydry 3y ago

To be equally fair, in certain cases the non-licensing costs of Microsoft software are higher than the FOSS equivalent. In fact, I'd argue that in some cases these are higher. A good example of this is that piece of shit that is Microsoft Teams - both the horrid security flaws and the ways it keeps breaking. I've used FOSS equivalents and they have a smaller attack surface and are more reliable. They also play all sorts of user-hostile tricks that make vendor lock in possible, and this often has an underappreciated impact on delivery.