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That's very short term thinking. Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees as licensing fees is most

by dewey 2mo ago

That's very short term thinking. Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees as licensing fees is most likely the better use of tax payer money. What makes you think that licensing cost is much cheaper than migrating even over a short term horizon? Example from Germany (https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministerien-behoerden/I/Presse/PI/2025/cds/251204_cds_open-source https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/ministe...), that county moved to LibreOffice and previously spent 15 millionen euros on licenses, the migration was 9 million. Why do you think many countries like the US try to divest from China and even move some manufacturing back?

sajithdilshan 2mo ago
> Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees I agree, with this point, but you really have to answer, is migrating an office suite does that? Non of those office suites are developed within Germany, they are open source solutions. Also what kind of economic growth would you expect from building an army of developers to maintain and build an offie suite? At least train them for the technologies of the future, not for some outdated one of last decade. Further, after the migration who is going to fix bugs? provide support, also implement new features and keep the office suite modernized and maintain backwards compatibility throughout? All these topics would cost money, that's a reason why the MS license costs that much. People this just because everything is migrated to LibreOffice it's done and it's a one time task. Imagine this migration happened in 2010, and back then it was oracle open office. Like, then would these computers still be stuck in that outdated office version till 2026? Otherwise who is doing the auto updates? Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version?
- dewey 2mo ago
  You should probably fact check a little bit before throwing out claims like that. LibreOffice is run by a German non-profit (https://www.documentfoundation.org https://www.documentfoundation.org) and developed partially in Germany and with partial funding from the government. The beauty of spending that money on open source is that other countries can just use the exact software, contribute to it's development and don't pay license fees. I'm not sure I understand why you are arguing so much against using open source software vs. closed software from a big corporation, on HN of all places. > Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version? The same way you do version upgrades for any software. You test the fork, you roll it out to your machines. What makes you think the fork would be so different right away than existing installations can't be updated to it? That's much easier than trying to migrate off a proprietary system that you can't change at all.

by dewey 2mo ago

sajithdilshan 2mo ago

> Building up local expertise, creating jobs and spending money locally instead of sending it oversees I agree, with this point, but you really have to answer, is migrating an office suite does that? Non of those office suites are developed within Germany, they are open source solutions. Also what kind of economic growth would you expect from building an army of developers to maintain and build an offie suite? At least train them for the technologies of the future, not for some outdated one of last decade. Further, after the migration who is going to fix bugs? provide support, also implement new features and keep the office suite modernized and maintain backwards compatibility throughout? All these topics would cost money, that's a reason why the MS license costs that much. People this just because everything is migrated to LibreOffice it's done and it's a one time task. Imagine this migration happened in 2010, and back then it was oracle open office. Like, then would these computers still be stuck in that outdated office version till 2026? Otherwise who is doing the auto updates? Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version?

dewey 2mo ago
You should probably fact check a little bit before throwing out claims like that. LibreOffice is run by a German non-profit (https://www.documentfoundation.org https://www.documentfoundation.org) and developed partially in Germany and with partial funding from the government. The beauty of spending that money on open source is that other countries can just use the exact software, contribute to it's development and don't pay license fees. I'm not sure I understand why you are arguing so much against using open source software vs. closed software from a big corporation, on HN of all places. > Also for some reason imagine LibreOffice development is abandoned or stopped and the community created a new fork of it, who is going to migrate these thousands of computers again to the new version? The same way you do version upgrades for any software. You test the fork, you roll it out to your machines. What makes you think the fork would be so different right away than existing installations can't be updated to it? That's much easier than trying to migrate off a proprietary system that you can't change at all.