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French Government To Use PostgreSQL, LibreOffice In Free Software Adoption Push

120 points by EdwardQ 14y ago

skrebbel 14y ago
Poor French civil servants. Being forced to use LibreOffice is a demotivating and frustrating experience. F.ex. Writer is like MS Word 1997, but shabbier. If you're paying an employee more than minimum wage, don't kill their productivity and motivation by feeding them sub-par tools.
- mahmud 14y ago
  Here comes the FUD.
- 4ad 14y ago
  I'm amazed this is getting downvoted. I didn't expect LibreOffice's lack of quality to be a controversial fact. I though it was accepted as the status quo. After all, everyone agrees that Gimp is inferior to Photoshop, although it can be used fine in certain scenarios if you are willing to fight with it. LibreOffice is absolutely dreadful, much worse in comparison to Word than Gimp in comparison with Photoshop.
  - arctangent 14y ago
    I find LibreOffice to be good enough for all my needs.
  - olalonde 14y ago
    As a long time Linux user, I have to say this is sadly true. I actually like Google Docs better than LibreOffice although it has less features.
  - nodata 14y ago
    > everyone agrees So let's see some examples then. Why is LibreOffice "absolutely dreadful"?
    - bitwize 14y ago
      So let's see some examples then. In GIMP, where are the layer groups? The nondestructive editing? These are basic tools to a professional workflow. And don't get me started on CMYK. You cannot do prepress without CMYK support; GIMP was going to get it Real Soon Now for the past ten years and it's still not there.
      - jeltz 14y ago
        The reason for why no CMYK and why no non-destructive editing is that GEGL development took way longer than expected. Now that more and more of the GIMP core is converted to GEGL I am confident GIMP will eventually get these features. GIMP is the story of what happens when you wait with new features until "the right solution" is completed. Not that I really blame them since they have very few developers.
      - vacri 14y ago
        If you're doing professional work, you should stump for a professional tool. Otherwise it's like complaining that your family car, though ideal for its purpose, is a load of crap because it can't take pallets.
    - sandGorgon 14y ago
      Excel. pivot tables and VBA sucks (you may NOT comment on what a horrible language VBA is. )
      - nodata 14y ago
        So the reason why LibreOffice sucks is: Excel? I didn't ask which of the programs in the Microsoft Office suite is better than the programs in the LibreOffice suite, I asked why LibreOffice sucks. Also LibreOffice has Python.
  - cookiecaper 14y ago
    Everyone doesn't agree that GIMP is "inferior" to Photoshop. They serve different markets. GIMP doesn't have as much manpower to put into the super high-end features, like tightly integrated RAW editing, but then people aren't paying 700 bucks per copy of GIMP either. GIMP does have features that Photoshop doesn't have (like a Python scripting interface) that makes it better for some use cases. For generic bitmap editing, either one works just fine, though GIMP is better for the casual user in most cases as it allows you to save your 700 bucks and put it toward something important. LibreOffice is much the same, but I think the gap is actually much smaller. Microsoft Office does have some niche features that are not replicated by LibreOffice, and Microsoft has made their formats for annotations and other features that should be simple sufficiently complex to make import/export difficult, but LibreOffice in my experience is faster and has more of the features that I like and use (at least more accessible; apparently someone has said Office now includes direct PDF export, so that's nice). I use LibreOffice even if I'm using a computer with Microsoft Office installed. As with GIMP, in some specific cases, Word may be required, but in most cases LibreOffice works just fine and saves you hundreds of dollars. The exception here is probably Calc v. Excel, because it seems true in my experience that Excel has many more features for power users than Calc.
  - vacri 14y ago
    Having used both Word 97 and LibreOffice Writer, the latter is definitely not 'shabbier'. It's just kicking a popular target.
- louischatriot 14y ago
  While it is true that LibreOffice still cannot compare to Microsoft Office (esp. Excel which I think is an impressive piece of software), I think LibreOffice fills the French civil servants' needs fine. It's not like they're consultants or bankers making the most out of Excel or Powerpoint, and the savings are significant. With the debt we have, these kinds of moves go in the right direction.
  - skrebbel 14y ago
    Frankly, I find your comment insulting. Why would a civil servant be expected to perform any less than a consultant or a banker? After all, many civil servants do the job a consultant could also do, albeit at a lower cost. I'm not talking about the people picking up the trash, I'm talking about the people designing city expansion policy, the people writing requirements for government IT systems and the people drafting laws. Admittedly civil servants in many countries have the image of doing these jobs less passionately than someone working in business would, but this does not change what is expected of them. Cutting on the productivity on an expensive workforce very seldomly leads to actual cost reduction.
    - louischatriot 14y ago
      I didn't mean to be insulting and surely didn't say civil servants "perform less" than consultants. I don't think that performance can be measured by the amount of time you spend on desktop software :) Let me clarify my point: most people (civil servants being only one example among others) don't use even 10% of MS Office capabilities (esp. on Excel, I've never seen anything but basic formulas, no array formulas, no macros and so on). For these people using a tool that performs reasonably well on these 10% is not a stupid choice. Of course, MS Office is better than LibreOffice. But LibreOffice is absolutely no shitty software and most of the time it gets the job done.
  - pierrend 14y ago
    As a French civil servant I can say it doesn't fill our needs. We have difficulties to work with documents we receive sometimes created with LibreOffice, sometimes Microsoft Office. Documents are full of errors from bad imports and exports. I know many people loosing tons of time trying to fix the documents. An average French civil servant has many documents to write every month.
- VMG 14y ago
  They could donate some of the savings to LibreOffice to improve the interface
  - jeltz 14y ago
    Which is what they plan to do. Either through donations of cash or through manpower. "He also wants them to reinvest between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save through not paying for proprietary software licenses, spending it instead on contributing to the development of the free software."
- amalcon 14y ago
  For most users, MS Word 2003 is like MS Word 1997, except that it takes a much more powerful system to run it. Most people never use any feature of Word that wasn't there in 1997. 2007 is different because of the ribbon, I'll grant, but preference for the ribbon is far from universal.
pluies 14y ago
If by "adopted" you mean "are being considered in part of a plan pitched to the Prime Minister", then yes, otherwise... Well let's just say I've worked in a French administration's IT dept and they tend to take their time.
- lloeki 14y ago
  It's actively used in various institutions. Relatives working there asked for a little help a few years ago to set up Postgres and migrate their Access stuff over.
sheff 14y ago
I remember reading about a largeish legacy French government system migrating to Postgres a couple of years ago, so maybe they've decided Postgres fits the bill for most scenarios they need a DB for. According to these slides [1] that system did about a billion SQL statements a day at the time, so pretty good going. [1] http://wiki.postgresql.org/images/1/1c/PGDayEU2010_CNAF_PostgreSQL_migration.pdf http://wiki.postgresql.org/images/1/1c/PGDayEU2010_CNAF_Post...
cygnus 14y ago
It's a nice idea, better than their mighty OpenOffice Firewall. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4LofqPCQew http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4LofqPCQew (yes, this is an ex French Ministrer of Culture talking about open source)
- RyanMcGreal 14y ago
  I don't understand what she's saying, in French or English.
  - l0nk 14y ago
    Hi, I'm french. She's saying that you can protect your computer from illegal downloading stuff form internet using a firewall, and you can get one for free. (fun) She wants to give an example, and she said that on hers gov computer she got an opensource one which is called openoffice. After that she become a meme on french websites.
    - scriptproof 14y ago
      Not exactly, she said that OpenOffice as Office has a firewall. Not that it is a firewall.
propercoil 14y ago
If i had one dollar for every time i saw a "Government X installed open source Y" post... it's started in 1999 and still haunts me
hollerith 14y ago
Part of the reason governments are interested in open-source software is their worry about the possibility of the U.S. government's inducing U.S. corporations to put back doors in popular proprietary software.
timc3 14y ago
Using PostgreSQL is just a damn good idea. LibreOffice, well I would say not so much.
debacle 14y ago
Why are people shitting so much over LibreOffice? I have both on my machine in the office, and I've set LibreOffice to the default and use it almost exclusively. It's faster than Office, has a better UI, more features I see as essential (save to PDF is nice), and the leap from Office to LibreOffice these days is tiny.
- sold 14y ago
  Office also has save to PDF, at least the 2010 version.
  - polshaw 14y ago
    As do recent libreoffice versions.
- mootothemax 14y ago
  Why are people shitting so much over LibreOffice? Possibly from past experience; I can't be the only one who's had a red face after emailing a document, only to find out that in Word, the formatting's off just slightly enough to make the entire thing look unprofessional. This was a good many years ago, and I accept that things may have changed, but Word and Excel work for me right now, and have the added bonus that I can trust what I'm sending to clients. Just for the avoidance of doubt, I realise that this entire situation could be avoided by using tools meant for the job. Sadly, that wouldn't go down as well with a lot of clients who aren't as technically-savvy as the average HN user.
  - polshaw 14y ago
    send as pdf if you need exact formatting (and not editing), surely?
    - mootothemax 14y ago
      That's why I wrote: I realise that this entire situation could be avoided by using tools meant for the job. Sadly, that wouldn't go down as well with a lot of clients who aren't as technically-savvy as the average HN users. Edit: Being more helpful, have you ever had to try and explain to a client who would much rather be doing other things, why they can't edit the document you've sent them?
cs702 14y ago
The upfront costs of migration (including retraining, coping with missing features, and solving a wide variety of little compatibility issues as they arise) will surely exceed what it would have cost the French Government to stay on Microsoft Office for one or two more waves of upgrades. The important question is: will the upfront cost and disruption be worth it? The data presented by the city of Munich six months ago provides compelling evidence that the answer is a resounding YES: the recurring savings from migration will exceed its upfront costs.[1] The city of Munich identified three types of cost savings: (1) it no longer has to pay for license upgrades, eliminating a significant recurring cost forever; (2) its desktop software and hardware no longer have to be updated as frequently, reducing another significant recurring cost forever; and (3) surprisingly, Munich claims its IT department is fielding fewer user complaints with free software, reducing another major cost forever. -- Edit: There's an additional benefit from migration not mentioned by Munich which I think will become very important over time. According to this article, the French government intends to reinvest "between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save" on contributing to the development of the applications they use, so they will have direct, hands-on input into which features get added to such applications and even how such features are implemented. The French government, in other words, will become a 'co-owner' of these Free Software applications, giving them more control over their own IT future. How much is that worth? -- [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3787539 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3787539
- vacri 14y ago
  If you don't reinvest at least some of the money you save, then 'forever' will turn into 'until the project dies', so well done to the French.
- r00fus 14y ago
  Wasn't a huge benefit of the libre-software push by Munich the fact that local jobs would be created by the extension, maintenance and customization of the government systems? ie, instead of paying Microsoft/Oracle/HP/IBM US dollars for upgrades/features, they pay Müncheners some DM/euros for the same.
- pgeorgi 14y ago
  They also might preferably invest part of those 5-10% to french developers, keeping money in their own economy ("creating jobs!!!11") instead of sending it elsewhere.
luriel 14y ago
This is a good move, any government using Oracle is wasting taxpayers money and being irresponsible and negligent with its citizen's data. One could talk of NSA backdoors, but there is no need, the security of Oracle products is laughable at best, there is no need for backdoors.
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120 points by EdwardQ 14y ago

Poor French civil servants. Being forced to use LibreOffice is a demotivating and frustrating experience. F.ex. Writer is like MS Word 1997, but shabbier. If you're paying an employee more than minimum wage, don't kill their productivity and motivation by feeding them sub-par tools.

mahmud 14y ago
Here comes the FUD.
4ad 14y ago
I'm amazed this is getting downvoted. I didn't expect LibreOffice's lack of quality to be a controversial fact. I though it was accepted as the status quo. After all, everyone agrees that Gimp is inferior to Photoshop, although it can be used fine in certain scenarios if you are willing to fight with it. LibreOffice is absolutely dreadful, much worse in comparison to Word than Gimp in comparison with Photoshop.
- arctangent 14y ago
  I find LibreOffice to be good enough for all my needs.
- olalonde 14y ago
  As a long time Linux user, I have to say this is sadly true. I actually like Google Docs better than LibreOffice although it has less features.
- nodata 14y ago
  > everyone agrees So let's see some examples then. Why is LibreOffice "absolutely dreadful"?
  - bitwize 14y ago
    So let's see some examples then. In GIMP, where are the layer groups? The nondestructive editing? These are basic tools to a professional workflow. And don't get me started on CMYK. You cannot do prepress without CMYK support; GIMP was going to get it Real Soon Now for the past ten years and it's still not there.
    - jeltz 14y ago
      The reason for why no CMYK and why no non-destructive editing is that GEGL development took way longer than expected. Now that more and more of the GIMP core is converted to GEGL I am confident GIMP will eventually get these features. GIMP is the story of what happens when you wait with new features until "the right solution" is completed. Not that I really blame them since they have very few developers.
    - vacri 14y ago
      If you're doing professional work, you should stump for a professional tool. Otherwise it's like complaining that your family car, though ideal for its purpose, is a load of crap because it can't take pallets.
  - sandGorgon 14y ago
    Excel. pivot tables and VBA sucks (you may NOT comment on what a horrible language VBA is. )
    - nodata 14y ago
      So the reason why LibreOffice sucks is: Excel? I didn't ask which of the programs in the Microsoft Office suite is better than the programs in the LibreOffice suite, I asked why LibreOffice sucks. Also LibreOffice has Python.
- cookiecaper 14y ago
  Everyone doesn't agree that GIMP is "inferior" to Photoshop. They serve different markets. GIMP doesn't have as much manpower to put into the super high-end features, like tightly integrated RAW editing, but then people aren't paying 700 bucks per copy of GIMP either. GIMP does have features that Photoshop doesn't have (like a Python scripting interface) that makes it better for some use cases. For generic bitmap editing, either one works just fine, though GIMP is better for the casual user in most cases as it allows you to save your 700 bucks and put it toward something important. LibreOffice is much the same, but I think the gap is actually much smaller. Microsoft Office does have some niche features that are not replicated by LibreOffice, and Microsoft has made their formats for annotations and other features that should be simple sufficiently complex to make import/export difficult, but LibreOffice in my experience is faster and has more of the features that I like and use (at least more accessible; apparently someone has said Office now includes direct PDF export, so that's nice). I use LibreOffice even if I'm using a computer with Microsoft Office installed. As with GIMP, in some specific cases, Word may be required, but in most cases LibreOffice works just fine and saves you hundreds of dollars. The exception here is probably Calc v. Excel, because it seems true in my experience that Excel has many more features for power users than Calc.
- vacri 14y ago
  Having used both Word 97 and LibreOffice Writer, the latter is definitely not 'shabbier'. It's just kicking a popular target.
louischatriot 14y ago
While it is true that LibreOffice still cannot compare to Microsoft Office (esp. Excel which I think is an impressive piece of software), I think LibreOffice fills the French civil servants' needs fine. It's not like they're consultants or bankers making the most out of Excel or Powerpoint, and the savings are significant. With the debt we have, these kinds of moves go in the right direction.
- skrebbel 14y ago
  Frankly, I find your comment insulting. Why would a civil servant be expected to perform any less than a consultant or a banker? After all, many civil servants do the job a consultant could also do, albeit at a lower cost. I'm not talking about the people picking up the trash, I'm talking about the people designing city expansion policy, the people writing requirements for government IT systems and the people drafting laws. Admittedly civil servants in many countries have the image of doing these jobs less passionately than someone working in business would, but this does not change what is expected of them. Cutting on the productivity on an expensive workforce very seldomly leads to actual cost reduction.
  - louischatriot 14y ago
    I didn't mean to be insulting and surely didn't say civil servants "perform less" than consultants. I don't think that performance can be measured by the amount of time you spend on desktop software :) Let me clarify my point: most people (civil servants being only one example among others) don't use even 10% of MS Office capabilities (esp. on Excel, I've never seen anything but basic formulas, no array formulas, no macros and so on). For these people using a tool that performs reasonably well on these 10% is not a stupid choice. Of course, MS Office is better than LibreOffice. But LibreOffice is absolutely no shitty software and most of the time it gets the job done.
- pierrend 14y ago
  As a French civil servant I can say it doesn't fill our needs. We have difficulties to work with documents we receive sometimes created with LibreOffice, sometimes Microsoft Office. Documents are full of errors from bad imports and exports. I know many people loosing tons of time trying to fix the documents. An average French civil servant has many documents to write every month.
VMG 14y ago
They could donate some of the savings to LibreOffice to improve the interface
- jeltz 14y ago
  Which is what they plan to do. Either through donations of cash or through manpower. "He also wants them to reinvest between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save through not paying for proprietary software licenses, spending it instead on contributing to the development of the free software."
amalcon 14y ago
For most users, MS Word 2003 is like MS Word 1997, except that it takes a much more powerful system to run it. Most people never use any feature of Word that wasn't there in 1997. 2007 is different because of the ribbon, I'll grant, but preference for the ribbon is far from universal.

pluies 14y ago

If by "adopted" you mean "are being considered in part of a plan pitched to the Prime Minister", then yes, otherwise... Well let's just say I've worked in a French administration's IT dept and they tend to take their time.

lloeki 14y ago
It's actively used in various institutions. Relatives working there asked for a little help a few years ago to set up Postgres and migrate their Access stuff over.

sheff 14y ago

I remember reading about a largeish legacy French government system migrating to Postgres a couple of years ago, so maybe they've decided Postgres fits the bill for most scenarios they need a DB for. According to these slides [1] that system did about a billion SQL statements a day at the time, so pretty good going. [1] http://wiki.postgresql.org/images/1/1c/PGDayEU2010_CNAF_PostgreSQL_migration.pdf http://wiki.postgresql.org/images/1/1c/PGDayEU2010_CNAF_Post...

cygnus 14y ago

It's a nice idea, better than their mighty OpenOffice Firewall. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4LofqPCQew http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4LofqPCQew (yes, this is an ex French Ministrer of Culture talking about open source)

RyanMcGreal 14y ago
I don't understand what she's saying, in French or English.
- l0nk 14y ago
  Hi, I'm french. She's saying that you can protect your computer from illegal downloading stuff form internet using a firewall, and you can get one for free. (fun) She wants to give an example, and she said that on hers gov computer she got an opensource one which is called openoffice. After that she become a meme on french websites.
  - scriptproof 14y ago
    Not exactly, she said that OpenOffice as Office has a firewall. Not that it is a firewall.

propercoil 14y ago

If i had one dollar for every time i saw a "Government X installed open source Y" post... it's started in 1999 and still haunts me

hollerith 14y ago

Part of the reason governments are interested in open-source software is their worry about the possibility of the U.S. government's inducing U.S. corporations to put back doors in popular proprietary software.

timc3 14y ago

Using PostgreSQL is just a damn good idea. LibreOffice, well I would say not so much.

debacle 14y ago

Why are people shitting so much over LibreOffice? I have both on my machine in the office, and I've set LibreOffice to the default and use it almost exclusively. It's faster than Office, has a better UI, more features I see as essential (save to PDF is nice), and the leap from Office to LibreOffice these days is tiny.

sold 14y ago
Office also has save to PDF, at least the 2010 version.
- polshaw 14y ago
  As do recent libreoffice versions.
mootothemax 14y ago
Why are people shitting so much over LibreOffice? Possibly from past experience; I can't be the only one who's had a red face after emailing a document, only to find out that in Word, the formatting's off just slightly enough to make the entire thing look unprofessional. This was a good many years ago, and I accept that things may have changed, but Word and Excel work for me right now, and have the added bonus that I can trust what I'm sending to clients. Just for the avoidance of doubt, I realise that this entire situation could be avoided by using tools meant for the job. Sadly, that wouldn't go down as well with a lot of clients who aren't as technically-savvy as the average HN user.
- polshaw 14y ago
  send as pdf if you need exact formatting (and not editing), surely?
  - mootothemax 14y ago
    That's why I wrote: I realise that this entire situation could be avoided by using tools meant for the job. Sadly, that wouldn't go down as well with a lot of clients who aren't as technically-savvy as the average HN users. Edit: Being more helpful, have you ever had to try and explain to a client who would much rather be doing other things, why they can't edit the document you've sent them?

cs702 14y ago

The upfront costs of migration (including retraining, coping with missing features, and solving a wide variety of little compatibility issues as they arise) will surely exceed what it would have cost the French Government to stay on Microsoft Office for one or two more waves of upgrades. The important question is: will the upfront cost and disruption be worth it? The data presented by the city of Munich six months ago provides compelling evidence that the answer is a resounding YES: the recurring savings from migration will exceed its upfront costs.[1] The city of Munich identified three types of cost savings: (1) it no longer has to pay for license upgrades, eliminating a significant recurring cost forever; (2) its desktop software and hardware no longer have to be updated as frequently, reducing another significant recurring cost forever; and (3) surprisingly, Munich claims its IT department is fielding fewer user complaints with free software, reducing another major cost forever. -- Edit: There's an additional benefit from migration not mentioned by Munich which I think will become very important over time. According to this article, the French government intends to reinvest "between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save" on contributing to the development of the applications they use, so they will have direct, hands-on input into which features get added to such applications and even how such features are implemented. The French government, in other words, will become a 'co-owner' of these Free Software applications, giving them more control over their own IT future. How much is that worth? -- [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3787539 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3787539

vacri 14y ago
If you don't reinvest at least some of the money you save, then 'forever' will turn into 'until the project dies', so well done to the French.
r00fus 14y ago
Wasn't a huge benefit of the libre-software push by Munich the fact that local jobs would be created by the extension, maintenance and customization of the government systems? ie, instead of paying Microsoft/Oracle/HP/IBM US dollars for upgrades/features, they pay Müncheners some DM/euros for the same.
pgeorgi 14y ago
They also might preferably invest part of those 5-10% to french developers, keeping money in their own economy ("creating jobs!!!11") instead of sending it elsewhere.

luriel 14y ago

This is a good move, any government using Oracle is wasting taxpayers money and being irresponsible and negligent with its citizen's data. One could talk of NSA backdoors, but there is no need, the security of Oracle products is laughable at best, there is no need for backdoors.

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