9 ms·

Valencia region government completes switch to LibreOffice

138 points by Tsiolkovsky 13y ago

opminion 13y ago
Note that's the 5 million population region (Valencian Community), not the 0.8 million population city.
pbjorklund 13y ago
I wish more people running fullscale installations of Microsoft Office actually evaluated what the needs of the users are. Does everyone need cloud sync to SharePoint? Shared calendars? Lync integration? Meeting room bookings? The office suite can be really good (yes, I actually think so and use it by choice for my own company) if used correctly. But sometimes all people want to do is write a 2 page paper on photosyntesis for biology, then it might be overkill.
Spearchucker 13y ago
These kind of articles are always a little lop-sided. They state, for example, that "The migration will save the government some 1.5 million euro per year on proprietary software licences." License savings. Great. What was the cost of: - Re-imaging those 120,000 desktops? - Re-training the (I assume) 100,000+ users? And what are the support costs? What were they under MS Office? It's laudable, for sure, but I don't believe that F/OSS is cheaper. I'd like to see a real cost impact analysis that covers the entire program, from inception through to on-going operational management. And something that financially compares the as-was state with the current state.
- logn 13y ago
  But re-imaging desktops and re-training can largely be internal costs. It's asking your staff to add another item to their to-do list. Whereas, keeping Microsoft licenses means actual cash being spent.
  - Spearchucker 13y ago
    Not sure what you're suggesting. A cost is a... cost. Whether it's a loss of productivity or a license cost, attributable to OPEX or CAPEX, it's still a quantifiable expenditure. If a (any) cost isn't quantifiable then I'd suggest there are bigger problems than choosing between proprietary and non-proprietary.
    - kamakazizuru 13y ago
      dont get carried away mate - these are government employees. They typically dont work beyond 3 pm anyways - 30 minutes more to learn how to use Calc isnt killing anyone. Besides - its about long terms savings. They will save this much every year. Over time it adds up. Especially considering spain is in financial trouble right now!
    - sergiosgc 13y ago
      If the cost is attributable to the use of capacity that would otherwise be left unused (idle workers), then the marginal cost is effectively zero, even if it shows up as nonzero in the books.
    - stcredzero 13y ago
      > Whether it's a loss of productivity or a license cost, attributable to OPEX or CAPEX, it's still a quantifiable expenditure. Yes, but some kinds of costs are still easier to hide.
  - Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
    The salaries for those people are real costs. If you don't add things to their to do lists, you can hire fewer people and pay less. It's all cost.
    - 6d0debc071 13y ago
      There's usually some float in people's plans - if there isn't you tend to go the other way and have projects overrun.
- valdiorn 13y ago
  Let assume that the 100.000 users all use Office for 2 hours a day on average. Now let's assume that MS Word will give you a 1% performance increase over LibreOffice... just one percent, that's 72 seconds a day. 72 seconds spent wondering "how do I make a pivot table in Calc like I do in Excel"? or "How do I make a table of contents in LibreOffice Word"? Now let's assume the average pay for these people is 15 euros/hour. those 72 seconds therefore cost 0.3 euros per employee. Now multiply that by 100.000 users * 270 working days a year and you have 8.1 million. Congratulations, you just lost 6.6 million euros. ... Sorry FOSS/Linux evangelists, but apparently none of you can do math.
  - candeira 13y ago
    Because nobody needs retraining or relearning when moving from one version of MS Office to the next.
  - harrytuttle 13y ago
    Imagine how much those tea breaks must cost them then and going for a piss. BILLIONS I tell you BILLIONS!!! Give them IV drips and buy them diapers quick!
  - vidarh 13y ago
    You are pulling numbers out of your ass and claim we can't do math? Give us some citations to document performance loss, and further citations do document that the performance loss is sufficient enough to reduce the amount of work the staff actually carries out (if they're less productive per unit time spent working, but still completes the same amount of work, then the cost is not borne by the government - it is fairly normal for workload to be quite elastic), and we can talk about your numbers. You also don't account for another factor: Even if there is a loss, it is not given that it is a net negative: License payments to Microsoft leave Valencia, and Spain. Payments to any additional training and support staff or additional assistance for LibreOffice is likely to stay in the local economy, and part of it will find its way straight back in in the form of taxes. It is perfectly possible that they've messed up the numbers, but you've not presented anything resembling a case for that. You might also note from the article that this is not Valencias first large scale migration - they claim to have saved 30 million so far from switching the regions schools to Linux, so chances are they actually have better numbers than the ones you've made up.
- reidrac 13y ago
  I have experience with the Valencian government, specially with the health system department, and in 2008 they were using a 3rd party tool for that (deployment, remote support, monitoring, etc). AFAIK they've been looking at OSS for years (I was involved in a project related to that), and the main blocker was that the BOFH tool they were using didn't support OpenOffice back then (that was before LibreOffice existed). In fact moving from MS Office to OpenOffice was the easy part, there was a more ambitious project to migrate desktops to Linux, but the provider of the management tool was only supporting Windows.
- nathan_long 13y ago
  Yep. 1.5 million euro / 120,000 computers = 12.5 euro per machine per year. That's probably negligible considering costs of installation, productivity, support, etc. (I'm still happy to hear about this, but I admit that it's more ideological for me than economic.)
- harrytuttle 13y ago
  Training is ongoing and already handled by their budget and support costs are probably the same. This is pretty much just comparing the license cost. Edit: we have a client who has 2000 users and they have two people dedicated to managing just licensing and have to operate KMS servers etc. That should be factored into the cost as well.
- tixocloud 13y ago
  Our business side uses MS Office simply because the rest of the world uses Office and we frequently get sent Excel documents. Engineers use LibreOffice and boy oh boy, it's a tremendous pain when the business side sends over Excel documents of reports that they would like to get done. Even Word documents are formatted correctly and it's been a painful experience overall. Sure, they save money from the software licences but what about the poor experience and time wasted? I agree that I don't believe that F/OSS is cheaper. There's a lot of costs that don't get quantified in the analysis.
  - at-fates-hands 13y ago
    I moved from Office and started using LibreOffice several years ago and still run into issues where people can't open the LO docs I send over - even after I've saved in the MS Docx format. I can only imagine the headaches they are about to incur with this switch.
    - username42 13y ago
      Have you reported the bug ? Can you provide such an example, or is it FUD ?
      - stcredzero 13y ago
        Sometimes "I can't open" means, I opened it, and the formatting was changed, so now I'm telling you this...
  - kilburn 13y ago
    You are missing a point though: this is the public administration side. They can (and should) demand any document sent to them to be formatted in a public open standard (such as ODF). If anyone, it's the companies interfacing them that will have to bear those "interoperability" costs. At least until they also switch to LibreOffice or something compatible enough. IMHO this is much better than them requiring Office-formatted documents.
    - 13y ago
- Ziomislaw 13y ago
  M$ fanboys spreading FUD?
- cowsandmilk 13y ago
  The re-imaging and re-training likely would've been incurred by an upgrade to a new version of office, so those may not actually be differentiators. In my experience, the main cost to adopting F/OSS for office software is interoperability with people sending word and excel files, not support or training. Note, LibreOffice is available in the native language of the users, Valencian, and has spell-check dictionaries for that language. Presumably, the Valencian government puts out most communication in Valencian, so there may actually be savings in not having to develop and maintain their own Valencian dictionary for Office, which Microsoft does not provide, and reduced support as the interface uses terms more familiar to the native Valencian speakers.
  - at-fates-hands 13y ago
    >>>Note, LibreOffice is available in the native language of the users, Valencian, and has spell-check dictionaries for that language. Presumably, the Valencian government puts out most communication in Valencian. TIL people in Valencia speak several different versions of Spanish: http://gospain.about.com/od/learningspanishinspain/p/valencia.htm http://gospain.about.com/od/learningspanishinspain/p/valenci... "In Valencia they speak a form of Catalan (the locals call it 'Valenciano' but this is not officially recognised anywhere outside of Valencia). Everyone in Valencia speaks Castillian Spanish, but many will speak to each other in Catalan in the street. This will be a bit of a hindrance to your learning experience." "You will mainly hear Catalan in the streets of Valencia, not Castillian Spanish. Even road signs and advertisements are in Catalan. You will find newspapers, TV and radio in both languages."
    - grimborg 13y ago
      indeed! Valencian (Valencià) is not a version of Spanish, but a different language. It's the same language that is spoken in Catalonia (and which there is called Catalan), and in the Balearic Islands (where it's called Balear). It's amazing the amount of languages that are everywhere...
    - kilburn 13y ago
      This website is very wrong. Firstly, there are no such thing as "different versions of Spanish" in Spain. People from different regions speak with (sometimes very) different accents, but it is the same language. Everyone can understand each other while speaking spanish. "Valencià" (Valencian) is the catalan dialect spoken in Valencia. Catalan itself is a whole other language than spanish. They are as different as, say, spanish and portuguese or italian and french (and any combination of those). Secondly, Valencian knowledge and use is being lost in the whole region [1]. By 2008, only 32% of the population claimed to use it as their primary language, whereas 54% said that spanish was their primary language. Moreover, only 76% of the population _understood_ valencian, only 56% was able to speak it, and just 25% claimed to be able to write it correctly. The numbers today are probably even worse. BTW, road signs and advertisements are written in both languages almost everywhere (just like in Catalonia, or any spanish region where there is more than one official language). [1] http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valenci%C3%A0 http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valenci%C3%A0
- dspillett 13y ago
  > License savings. Great. That and other related admin such as keeping all installations in check to make sure you are within your license terms. Have you budgeted properly for the time of experienced people to fill out paper work and the potential disruption of everyone else if a full audit is requested (the license agreement says that can call one of those when-ever they like IIRC). Sometimes using Office most definitely is the right answer (the "compatibility with our suppliers/clients" issue often can't not be ignored for a start) but when it isn't the correct answer pure licensing costs are not always the only reason. > What was the cost of: Re-imaging those 120,000 desktops? The costs of this change per desktop will be similar to an upgrade of Office. If they are upgrading from an older version of office that is no longer supported and the choice is between newer office and OO/LO then this is moot. There may be a bit of extra time at the start of the project as those running it get familiar with OO/LO's installation foibles, but considered per desktop this is not going to be high. In fact installing OO as a new package may be more risk free as it can co-exist with their current version of Office, so they have an easy fallback/rollback or slow transition option. > Re-training the (I assume) 100,000+ users? The differences are not that significant. If they are moving from a relatively old version of office then the retraining for the newest Office variant could easily be more significant due to the UI changes over recent years. If they have any custom training materials then there will be a cost for updating these, but then there will be for Office too. > And what are the support costs? Again, I doubt these will be significantly different. There might be a little more effort needed here due to people being familiar with Office due to the copy they run at home or used at a previous employer, but again there is the "which office version" difference which may make this a moot point. If people using something at home is one of your considerations and you are relying on it to reduce your support costs then OO/LO makes sense as everyone can have an install of OO/LO at home legally for no cost.
  - Spearchucker 13y ago
    >> What was the cost of: Re-imaging those 120,000 desktops? >The costs of this change per desktop will be similar to an upgrade of Office. Not necessarily. Depending on the version of Office you're upgrading from, you can do regression tests on a model office machine, and then just pump the upgrade out using WSUS [1]. Good points though. [1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/bb332157.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/bb332157.as...
- stewbrew 13y ago
  What you call "costs" actually are salaries/jobs for people living there -- unlike fees paid to MS.
  - dpina 13y ago
    This. Even if a great deal of the savings from cutting MS fees is forwarded to training the current/new tech support it's still a win.
  - frobozz 13y ago
    This is an insightful point that those who push for austerity measures and privatisation always seem to miss. A government saves money if it pays €x to employ local taxpayers instead of sending that same amount abroad. It will still break even on the decision if it employs locals for €x+n, where n is the amount they recoup in tax from those locals. Even more if those locals would otherwise be unemployed.
    - ams6110 13y ago
      Government gets its money by siphoning it out of the local economy, making that capital unavailable for private use while creating nothing of value. Government jobs are a net drain on an economy.
- username42 13y ago
  Always the same training story. What is the percentage of microsoft office users who has received a training ? I do not know any. How many trainings have been given when migrating to the latest releases of MS O that are so different than the usual interface ? The deployment of OO instead of MS O is not more complicated than an upgrade of MS O toward another version of MS O. And for the support costs, the main problems of MS O were concerning compatibilities between releases. These issues do not exist for OO. The only way OO can be more expensive than MS O is if many people ask to have MS O in addition to OO.
- devx 13y ago
  > - Re-training the (I assume) 100,000+ users? Whatever it was, it was well worth it since in the future everyone will use open source software. What's the alternative? Keep paying more for Office software every year, while risking having NSA gathering all those documents?
- claudius 13y ago
  [0] claims that the city of Munich saved about 10 million Euros by switching to their own Linux distribution ‘LiMux ’ [1]. So, yes, F/OSS is cheaper. [0] http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linux-brings-over-EUR10-million-savings-for-Munich-1755802.html http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linux-brings-over-EUR... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
  - touristtam 13y ago
    this seems to be a trend: http://www.ubuntu.com/products/casestudies/french-national-police-force-saves-2-million-year-ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com/products/casestudies/french-national-p... Good stuff. ^_^
- Malstrond 13y ago
  What if you count the exit costs of vendor lock-in as costs associated with that vendor? Suddenly Office is a lot more expensive. "TCO should include exit costs and cost of vendor lock-in" https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/tco-should-include-exit-costs-and-cost-vendor-lock https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/tco-should-include-exit-cos...
- melling 13y ago
  Where does the money go to retrain the 100,000 users? And who gets the money to re-image the machines? It goes into the local economy. Now, where does the money end up when you buy 100,000 copies of Office? The United States. Perhaps some offshore bank account where Microsoft parks their cash next to Apple and Google's billions?
skittles 13y ago
We're getting to a point where most people use at least two distinct operating systems daily for their tech devices. I think this really opens up the possibility of ditching pervasive software for cheaper alternatives. So what if LibreOffice has a few rough edges? If a company can just deploy it and skip the training, then most people will just pick it up as part of their daily work. My wife's company does this and nobody has had any trouble getting their job done.
mariuolo 13y ago
Comparing the respective TCOs would have made more sense.
philliphaydon 13y ago
Took a look, no Ribbon UI. Pass.
- AnthonBerg 13y ago
  Hahah :)
orting 13y ago
It seems to me that Libreoffice is geeting a lot of traction. From an anecdotal viewpoint alot more people are familiar with Libreoffice/Openoffice today than a couple of years ago. Development of Libreoffice after the fork looks healthy, with a big focus on refactoring and consolidating the codebase in C++. Because of the many language bindings to UNO, developing applications in Libreoffice is easier and a lot more interesting than developing for MS Office. I have only worked with Calc/Excel but Basic is a piece of crap language in both cases, and writing in Python is a big win. It also makes it easier to use version control and external editors. Combine that with no license and support for the valencian language, then its the right thing to do.
brudgers 13y ago
1.5 million € is a rounding error.
- RobAley 13y ago
  In large corps maybe, where it's pennies for each share holder. In Government (particularly local government) that amount, while still a small slice of the pie, can do real life-changing stuff for e.g. vulnerable people in the local community.
  - brudgers 13y ago
    The Valencian Community Government serves more than 5 million citizens - a population greater than that found in more than half of the U.S. states. It's not local politics, and the budget is correspondingly in the billions. For scale, the Valencian Government had a budget surplus over 300 million in the first quarter of 2013. http://www.catalannewsagency.com/politics/item/the-catalan-government-ended-the-first-quarter-of-2013-with-a-deficit-of-021?highlight=YTo0OntpOjA7czo2OiJidWRnZXQiO2k6MTtzOjk6InZhbGVuY2lhbiI7aToyO3M6OToiY29tbXVuaXR5IjtpOjM7czoxOToidmFsZW5jaWFuIGNvbW11bml0eSI7fQ== http://www.catalannewsagency.com/politics/item/the-catalan-g... I am all in favor of government services to the less fortunate. I am not in favor of magical thinking and a lack of rigor.
    - RobAley 13y ago
      Indeed, as I stated it's still a small slice of the pie, but it doesn't change the fact that even a few hundred dollars in intervention funds, for instance, can turn someones life around, and local (or regional, if you prefer, as opposed to National) Government still struggle for every penny. To dismiss it as a rounding error is to not understand the impact of that money in public service.
  - briandear 13y ago
    Or they can cut taxes by an equal amount and therefore put more money in each taxpayer's pocket. Or drop the sales tax by a point and make life less expensive. 1.5 Europe isn't much but multiplying that by other non-painful cuts (I.e. no resultant loss of services) the operating costs for government are reduced with no loss of services. We should all strive to reduce waste and paying license fees when there is a reasonable free substitute is definitely a dead-weight loss.
jimktrains2 13y ago
I made this letter that is open to be edited, translated, &c http://jimktrains.github.io/free-software-letter-city/letter.html http://jimktrains.github.io/free-software-letter-city/letter... My hope is that others would use it and try to get their governments to switch to F/OSS.
Nux 13y ago
Open source makes a lot of sense, especially under current circumstances when you can't trust anyone anymore (I mean the USA gov etc). Even if the savings are exactly zero it's still a good move. I imagine this created new jobs for people who will install, train and debug LibreOFfice. The problems they will hit will hopefully have solutions upstream so that everyone in the world can benefit them. This is good for Valencia and good for Libreoffice and ultimately good for us, the rest of the world.
JEVLON 13y ago
It is downright citizen hostile when a government uses non-free software. Want to fill out this form? Download the doc file which only displays correctly in Microsoft Office. Have enough money for a computer but not enough for office? Too bad. Microsoft has done a lot of good, but no company/corp deserves a monopoly on virtual paper.

138 points by Tsiolkovsky 13y ago

Note that's the 5 million population region (Valencian Community), not the 0.8 million population city.

I wish more people running fullscale installations of Microsoft Office actually evaluated what the needs of the users are. Does everyone need cloud sync to SharePoint? Shared calendars? Lync integration? Meeting room bookings? The office suite can be really good (yes, I actually think so and use it by choice for my own company) if used correctly. But sometimes all people want to do is write a 2 page paper on photosyntesis for biology, then it might be overkill.

Spearchucker 13y ago

These kind of articles are always a little lop-sided. They state, for example, that "The migration will save the government some 1.5 million euro per year on proprietary software licences." License savings. Great. What was the cost of: - Re-imaging those 120,000 desktops? - Re-training the (I assume) 100,000+ users? And what are the support costs? What were they under MS Office? It's laudable, for sure, but I don't believe that F/OSS is cheaper. I'd like to see a real cost impact analysis that covers the entire program, from inception through to on-going operational management. And something that financially compares the as-was state with the current state.

logn 13y ago
But re-imaging desktops and re-training can largely be internal costs. It's asking your staff to add another item to their to-do list. Whereas, keeping Microsoft licenses means actual cash being spent.
- Spearchucker 13y ago
  Not sure what you're suggesting. A cost is a... cost. Whether it's a loss of productivity or a license cost, attributable to OPEX or CAPEX, it's still a quantifiable expenditure. If a (any) cost isn't quantifiable then I'd suggest there are bigger problems than choosing between proprietary and non-proprietary.
  - kamakazizuru 13y ago
    dont get carried away mate - these are government employees. They typically dont work beyond 3 pm anyways - 30 minutes more to learn how to use Calc isnt killing anyone. Besides - its about long terms savings. They will save this much every year. Over time it adds up. Especially considering spain is in financial trouble right now!
  - sergiosgc 13y ago
    If the cost is attributable to the use of capacity that would otherwise be left unused (idle workers), then the marginal cost is effectively zero, even if it shows up as nonzero in the books.
  - stcredzero 13y ago
    > Whether it's a loss of productivity or a license cost, attributable to OPEX or CAPEX, it's still a quantifiable expenditure. Yes, but some kinds of costs are still easier to hide.
- Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
  The salaries for those people are real costs. If you don't add things to their to do lists, you can hire fewer people and pay less. It's all cost.
  - 6d0debc071 13y ago
    There's usually some float in people's plans - if there isn't you tend to go the other way and have projects overrun.
valdiorn 13y ago
Let assume that the 100.000 users all use Office for 2 hours a day on average. Now let's assume that MS Word will give you a 1% performance increase over LibreOffice... just one percent, that's 72 seconds a day. 72 seconds spent wondering "how do I make a pivot table in Calc like I do in Excel"? or "How do I make a table of contents in LibreOffice Word"? Now let's assume the average pay for these people is 15 euros/hour. those 72 seconds therefore cost 0.3 euros per employee. Now multiply that by 100.000 users * 270 working days a year and you have 8.1 million. Congratulations, you just lost 6.6 million euros. ... Sorry FOSS/Linux evangelists, but apparently none of you can do math.
- candeira 13y ago
  Because nobody needs retraining or relearning when moving from one version of MS Office to the next.
- harrytuttle 13y ago
  Imagine how much those tea breaks must cost them then and going for a piss. BILLIONS I tell you BILLIONS!!! Give them IV drips and buy them diapers quick!
- vidarh 13y ago
  You are pulling numbers out of your ass and claim we can't do math? Give us some citations to document performance loss, and further citations do document that the performance loss is sufficient enough to reduce the amount of work the staff actually carries out (if they're less productive per unit time spent working, but still completes the same amount of work, then the cost is not borne by the government - it is fairly normal for workload to be quite elastic), and we can talk about your numbers. You also don't account for another factor: Even if there is a loss, it is not given that it is a net negative: License payments to Microsoft leave Valencia, and Spain. Payments to any additional training and support staff or additional assistance for LibreOffice is likely to stay in the local economy, and part of it will find its way straight back in in the form of taxes. It is perfectly possible that they've messed up the numbers, but you've not presented anything resembling a case for that. You might also note from the article that this is not Valencias first large scale migration - they claim to have saved 30 million so far from switching the regions schools to Linux, so chances are they actually have better numbers than the ones you've made up.
reidrac 13y ago
I have experience with the Valencian government, specially with the health system department, and in 2008 they were using a 3rd party tool for that (deployment, remote support, monitoring, etc). AFAIK they've been looking at OSS for years (I was involved in a project related to that), and the main blocker was that the BOFH tool they were using didn't support OpenOffice back then (that was before LibreOffice existed). In fact moving from MS Office to OpenOffice was the easy part, there was a more ambitious project to migrate desktops to Linux, but the provider of the management tool was only supporting Windows.
nathan_long 13y ago
Yep. 1.5 million euro / 120,000 computers = 12.5 euro per machine per year. That's probably negligible considering costs of installation, productivity, support, etc. (I'm still happy to hear about this, but I admit that it's more ideological for me than economic.)
harrytuttle 13y ago
Training is ongoing and already handled by their budget and support costs are probably the same. This is pretty much just comparing the license cost. Edit: we have a client who has 2000 users and they have two people dedicated to managing just licensing and have to operate KMS servers etc. That should be factored into the cost as well.
tixocloud 13y ago
Our business side uses MS Office simply because the rest of the world uses Office and we frequently get sent Excel documents. Engineers use LibreOffice and boy oh boy, it's a tremendous pain when the business side sends over Excel documents of reports that they would like to get done. Even Word documents are formatted correctly and it's been a painful experience overall. Sure, they save money from the software licences but what about the poor experience and time wasted? I agree that I don't believe that F/OSS is cheaper. There's a lot of costs that don't get quantified in the analysis.
- at-fates-hands 13y ago
  I moved from Office and started using LibreOffice several years ago and still run into issues where people can't open the LO docs I send over - even after I've saved in the MS Docx format. I can only imagine the headaches they are about to incur with this switch.
  - username42 13y ago
    Have you reported the bug ? Can you provide such an example, or is it FUD ?
    - stcredzero 13y ago
      Sometimes "I can't open" means, I opened it, and the formatting was changed, so now I'm telling you this...
- kilburn 13y ago
  You are missing a point though: this is the public administration side. They can (and should) demand any document sent to them to be formatted in a public open standard (such as ODF). If anyone, it's the companies interfacing them that will have to bear those "interoperability" costs. At least until they also switch to LibreOffice or something compatible enough. IMHO this is much better than them requiring Office-formatted documents.
  - 13y ago
Ziomislaw 13y ago
M$ fanboys spreading FUD?
cowsandmilk 13y ago
The re-imaging and re-training likely would've been incurred by an upgrade to a new version of office, so those may not actually be differentiators. In my experience, the main cost to adopting F/OSS for office software is interoperability with people sending word and excel files, not support or training. Note, LibreOffice is available in the native language of the users, Valencian, and has spell-check dictionaries for that language. Presumably, the Valencian government puts out most communication in Valencian, so there may actually be savings in not having to develop and maintain their own Valencian dictionary for Office, which Microsoft does not provide, and reduced support as the interface uses terms more familiar to the native Valencian speakers.
- at-fates-hands 13y ago
  >>>Note, LibreOffice is available in the native language of the users, Valencian, and has spell-check dictionaries for that language. Presumably, the Valencian government puts out most communication in Valencian. TIL people in Valencia speak several different versions of Spanish: http://gospain.about.com/od/learningspanishinspain/p/valencia.htm http://gospain.about.com/od/learningspanishinspain/p/valenci... "In Valencia they speak a form of Catalan (the locals call it 'Valenciano' but this is not officially recognised anywhere outside of Valencia). Everyone in Valencia speaks Castillian Spanish, but many will speak to each other in Catalan in the street. This will be a bit of a hindrance to your learning experience." "You will mainly hear Catalan in the streets of Valencia, not Castillian Spanish. Even road signs and advertisements are in Catalan. You will find newspapers, TV and radio in both languages."
  - grimborg 13y ago
    indeed! Valencian (Valencià) is not a version of Spanish, but a different language. It's the same language that is spoken in Catalonia (and which there is called Catalan), and in the Balearic Islands (where it's called Balear). It's amazing the amount of languages that are everywhere...
  - kilburn 13y ago
    This website is very wrong. Firstly, there are no such thing as "different versions of Spanish" in Spain. People from different regions speak with (sometimes very) different accents, but it is the same language. Everyone can understand each other while speaking spanish. "Valencià" (Valencian) is the catalan dialect spoken in Valencia. Catalan itself is a whole other language than spanish. They are as different as, say, spanish and portuguese or italian and french (and any combination of those). Secondly, Valencian knowledge and use is being lost in the whole region [1]. By 2008, only 32% of the population claimed to use it as their primary language, whereas 54% said that spanish was their primary language. Moreover, only 76% of the population _understood_ valencian, only 56% was able to speak it, and just 25% claimed to be able to write it correctly. The numbers today are probably even worse. BTW, road signs and advertisements are written in both languages almost everywhere (just like in Catalonia, or any spanish region where there is more than one official language). [1] http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valenci%C3%A0 http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valenci%C3%A0
dspillett 13y ago
> License savings. Great. That and other related admin such as keeping all installations in check to make sure you are within your license terms. Have you budgeted properly for the time of experienced people to fill out paper work and the potential disruption of everyone else if a full audit is requested (the license agreement says that can call one of those when-ever they like IIRC). Sometimes using Office most definitely is the right answer (the "compatibility with our suppliers/clients" issue often can't not be ignored for a start) but when it isn't the correct answer pure licensing costs are not always the only reason. > What was the cost of: Re-imaging those 120,000 desktops? The costs of this change per desktop will be similar to an upgrade of Office. If they are upgrading from an older version of office that is no longer supported and the choice is between newer office and OO/LO then this is moot. There may be a bit of extra time at the start of the project as those running it get familiar with OO/LO's installation foibles, but considered per desktop this is not going to be high. In fact installing OO as a new package may be more risk free as it can co-exist with their current version of Office, so they have an easy fallback/rollback or slow transition option. > Re-training the (I assume) 100,000+ users? The differences are not that significant. If they are moving from a relatively old version of office then the retraining for the newest Office variant could easily be more significant due to the UI changes over recent years. If they have any custom training materials then there will be a cost for updating these, but then there will be for Office too. > And what are the support costs? Again, I doubt these will be significantly different. There might be a little more effort needed here due to people being familiar with Office due to the copy they run at home or used at a previous employer, but again there is the "which office version" difference which may make this a moot point. If people using something at home is one of your considerations and you are relying on it to reduce your support costs then OO/LO makes sense as everyone can have an install of OO/LO at home legally for no cost.
- Spearchucker 13y ago
  >> What was the cost of: Re-imaging those 120,000 desktops? >The costs of this change per desktop will be similar to an upgrade of Office. Not necessarily. Depending on the version of Office you're upgrading from, you can do regression tests on a model office machine, and then just pump the upgrade out using WSUS [1]. Good points though. [1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/bb332157.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/bb332157.as...
stewbrew 13y ago
What you call "costs" actually are salaries/jobs for people living there -- unlike fees paid to MS.
- dpina 13y ago
  This. Even if a great deal of the savings from cutting MS fees is forwarded to training the current/new tech support it's still a win.
- frobozz 13y ago
  This is an insightful point that those who push for austerity measures and privatisation always seem to miss. A government saves money if it pays €x to employ local taxpayers instead of sending that same amount abroad. It will still break even on the decision if it employs locals for €x+n, where n is the amount they recoup in tax from those locals. Even more if those locals would otherwise be unemployed.
  - ams6110 13y ago
    Government gets its money by siphoning it out of the local economy, making that capital unavailable for private use while creating nothing of value. Government jobs are a net drain on an economy.
username42 13y ago
Always the same training story. What is the percentage of microsoft office users who has received a training ? I do not know any. How many trainings have been given when migrating to the latest releases of MS O that are so different than the usual interface ? The deployment of OO instead of MS O is not more complicated than an upgrade of MS O toward another version of MS O. And for the support costs, the main problems of MS O were concerning compatibilities between releases. These issues do not exist for OO. The only way OO can be more expensive than MS O is if many people ask to have MS O in addition to OO.
devx 13y ago
> - Re-training the (I assume) 100,000+ users? Whatever it was, it was well worth it since in the future everyone will use open source software. What's the alternative? Keep paying more for Office software every year, while risking having NSA gathering all those documents?
claudius 13y ago
[0] claims that the city of Munich saved about 10 million Euros by switching to their own Linux distribution ‘LiMux ’ [1]. So, yes, F/OSS is cheaper. [0] http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linux-brings-over-EUR10-million-savings-for-Munich-1755802.html http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linux-brings-over-EUR... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
- touristtam 13y ago
  this seems to be a trend: http://www.ubuntu.com/products/casestudies/french-national-police-force-saves-2-million-year-ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com/products/casestudies/french-national-p... Good stuff. ^_^
Malstrond 13y ago
What if you count the exit costs of vendor lock-in as costs associated with that vendor? Suddenly Office is a lot more expensive. "TCO should include exit costs and cost of vendor lock-in" https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/tco-should-include-exit-costs-and-cost-vendor-lock https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/tco-should-include-exit-cos...
melling 13y ago
Where does the money go to retrain the 100,000 users? And who gets the money to re-image the machines? It goes into the local economy. Now, where does the money end up when you buy 100,000 copies of Office? The United States. Perhaps some offshore bank account where Microsoft parks their cash next to Apple and Google's billions?

skittles 13y ago

We're getting to a point where most people use at least two distinct operating systems daily for their tech devices. I think this really opens up the possibility of ditching pervasive software for cheaper alternatives. So what if LibreOffice has a few rough edges? If a company can just deploy it and skip the training, then most people will just pick it up as part of their daily work. My wife's company does this and nobody has had any trouble getting their job done.

mariuolo 13y ago

Comparing the respective TCOs would have made more sense.

philliphaydon 13y ago

Took a look, no Ribbon UI. Pass.

AnthonBerg 13y ago
Hahah :)

orting 13y ago

It seems to me that Libreoffice is geeting a lot of traction. From an anecdotal viewpoint alot more people are familiar with Libreoffice/Openoffice today than a couple of years ago. Development of Libreoffice after the fork looks healthy, with a big focus on refactoring and consolidating the codebase in C++. Because of the many language bindings to UNO, developing applications in Libreoffice is easier and a lot more interesting than developing for MS Office. I have only worked with Calc/Excel but Basic is a piece of crap language in both cases, and writing in Python is a big win. It also makes it easier to use version control and external editors. Combine that with no license and support for the valencian language, then its the right thing to do.

brudgers 13y ago

1.5 million € is a rounding error.

RobAley 13y ago
In large corps maybe, where it's pennies for each share holder. In Government (particularly local government) that amount, while still a small slice of the pie, can do real life-changing stuff for e.g. vulnerable people in the local community.
- brudgers 13y ago
  The Valencian Community Government serves more than 5 million citizens - a population greater than that found in more than half of the U.S. states. It's not local politics, and the budget is correspondingly in the billions. For scale, the Valencian Government had a budget surplus over 300 million in the first quarter of 2013. http://www.catalannewsagency.com/politics/item/the-catalan-government-ended-the-first-quarter-of-2013-with-a-deficit-of-021?highlight=YTo0OntpOjA7czo2OiJidWRnZXQiO2k6MTtzOjk6InZhbGVuY2lhbiI7aToyO3M6OToiY29tbXVuaXR5IjtpOjM7czoxOToidmFsZW5jaWFuIGNvbW11bml0eSI7fQ== http://www.catalannewsagency.com/politics/item/the-catalan-g... I am all in favor of government services to the less fortunate. I am not in favor of magical thinking and a lack of rigor.
  - RobAley 13y ago
    Indeed, as I stated it's still a small slice of the pie, but it doesn't change the fact that even a few hundred dollars in intervention funds, for instance, can turn someones life around, and local (or regional, if you prefer, as opposed to National) Government still struggle for every penny. To dismiss it as a rounding error is to not understand the impact of that money in public service.
- briandear 13y ago
  Or they can cut taxes by an equal amount and therefore put more money in each taxpayer's pocket. Or drop the sales tax by a point and make life less expensive. 1.5 Europe isn't much but multiplying that by other non-painful cuts (I.e. no resultant loss of services) the operating costs for government are reduced with no loss of services. We should all strive to reduce waste and paying license fees when there is a reasonable free substitute is definitely a dead-weight loss.

jimktrains2 13y ago

I made this letter that is open to be edited, translated, &c http://jimktrains.github.io/free-software-letter-city/letter.html http://jimktrains.github.io/free-software-letter-city/letter... My hope is that others would use it and try to get their governments to switch to F/OSS.

Nux 13y ago

Open source makes a lot of sense, especially under current circumstances when you can't trust anyone anymore (I mean the USA gov etc). Even if the savings are exactly zero it's still a good move. I imagine this created new jobs for people who will install, train and debug LibreOFfice. The problems they will hit will hopefully have solutions upstream so that everyone in the world can benefit them. This is good for Valencia and good for Libreoffice and ultimately good for us, the rest of the world.

JEVLON 13y ago

It is downright citizen hostile when a government uses non-free software. Want to fill out this form? Download the doc file which only displays correctly in Microsoft Office. Have enough money for a computer but not enough for office? Too bad. Microsoft has done a lot of good, but no company/corp deserves a monopoly on virtual paper.