ZDNet reports:
The latest in what is becoming an impressively long list of Italian cities to make the transition is the City of Udine, a town of 100,000 people in the north east of Italy. The municipality recently announced that by the end of 2014 it will start a process which, over the coming years, will make OpenOffice the default personal productivity suite on each of its 900 computers.
The move, the city says, will allow it to save roughly €400 on the cost of software licensing for each machine, a total of €360,000. The migration will start with 80 new computers that, according to the 2014 budget document, have to be bought by December.
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Another Italian City Switches to OpenOffice
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @09:55AM
I guess that means these guys will go back as soon as M$ makes a "competitive offer"...
This is why open source is weak but free software is strong.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Tanuki64 on Wednesday September 17 2014, @10:12AM
I had similar thoughts. But it is not so clear-cut since Udine apparently isn't the first city, which makes the transition. I would say "...becoming an impressively long list of Italian cities to make the transition..." is rather a hint that this is not only a short term negotiation trick.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Wednesday September 17 2014, @10:53AM
Its hard for me to think much in terms of cost, as it is to think in terms of "do I want anyone else's hand required in order for me to do my business?".
Any time someone else's stuff is required in my affairs, that someone else has the power to mess me up - big time if they want to.
I try like the dickens to keep monopolies like this out of my life, unless its some sort of public utility.
Its not a matter of paying for it - it is all about does another entity have an exercisable right to extort my co-operation to their business plan.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @12:03PM
Steve Ballmer was always ready to hop on the corporate jet for a round of negotiations, especially to a town in Italy in the fall, but the new guy might be different.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @07:54PM
A change in command structure there maybe highly related to the changes. Perhaps the suborno has stopped flowing?
Not to mention they don't want any back doors into their records, regardless of the set.
(Score: 2) by prospectacle on Wednesday September 17 2014, @11:14AM
I use libreoffice because it's free and also it's free, but I don't do very advanced things with it.
I expect most people only use the basic word processing and spreadsheet features anyway, so I can imagine 90% of people would have no problem with libre or open office.
For advanced users, are there many things left that you can (and need to) do with microsoft office which you can't do with a free one?
I see this list:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_LibreOffice_-_Microsoft_Office [documentfoundation.org]
has some features only one package does, or the other, but not both. How many of these are both necessary and can't be achieved easily using some other free program?
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday September 17 2014, @11:31AM
Not sure how this works with open office, but afaik other companies like cloud bees and jfrog (Jenkins CI and Artifactory) offer a commercial license with additional support, like having some influence on future features. Not every city needs to get commercial license for this to work out for developers and cities.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Wednesday September 17 2014, @12:24PM
Not really any functional reason, but mostly because everyone else uses it.
Most non-tech users will say "I use Microsoft Office at work, so I'll buy it for home because I know how to use it"
That is the number one reason it's used in homes.
For businesses, it will be because of legacy support for their old document formats and they don't want to change.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @08:31PM
I use Microsoft Office at work, so I'll buy for home
So many people don't realize that that statement is missing several words:
and buy it, and buy it, and buy it...
The only reason someone "needs" M$Orifice is because someone else is sending them something in M$'s undocumented proprietary format.[1]
The thing is, that file format changes with each version, so your old copy of the payware is no better than the gratis FOSS app.
I would go so far as to say your EULAware is **WORSE**.
Countless times, the solution to an M$-format document that won't open in M$Orifice is to open it in LibreOffice|OpenOffice and do a Save As.
The only puzzlement at that point is why you would then switch back to using the app that had just failed you, rather than to continue using the app that just saved your bacon.
[1] Another big hint folks: Sending something in an EDITABLE format is not the smart way to do things.
PDFs for reading; a versioning system for collaboration.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by theronb on Thursday September 18 2014, @12:59AM
Employees of corporations who have swallowed the whole MS load can often get MS Office for home really cheap. My former employer (I am now gratefully retired) offered it to us for $20 because of this MS program to keep us all hooked. I declined; money isn't the only price you pay. I've used OO/LO for a number of years now but just started experimenting with Calligra - it looks pretty sweet at first glance.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Wednesday September 17 2014, @01:03PM
I use libreoffice for complicated work. I have a latex plugin for equations. I use Zotero for citations.
I use Xmgr/Xmgrace for plots and some fourier analysis.
I use the *excellent* cairo tools to convert image formats (PNG is better than SVG for printing - at least until SVG become better supported).
In libreoffice because the file format is OPEN and DOCUMENTED, it is possible to edit the file EXTERNALLY from libreoffice. Images are stored as images. Text is text. And the formating is separate. Yes, you can import BLOATED M$ powerpoint and reformat the images...
To share, PDFs suffice. Journals that don't take them can *bite* me.
The most frustrating thing about any product is how features get added and at what rate. But fundamentally, being unable to read a previous version of a document is absolutely unacceptable for "professional" software.
Hence, no M$ Word , ever.
(Score: 1) by tadas on Wednesday September 17 2014, @02:36PM
I'm not an "advanced user", but the complete absence of outline mode from LibreOffice Writer is the dealbreaker that keeps me using MS Word. People have been bitching about this for years and years to the Open/Libre Office developers and have been ignored. The "workarounds" suggested are a bad joke.
If anyone knows of a free software outliner that can export documents in something Libre/Open Office can read in, I'd love to know about it - Windows, Mac or Linux.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday September 17 2014, @11:32PM
Ah now, be fair, all those asking for this were only ignored (or referred back to navigator - and, no, it isn't) for about 5 years or so, then we got the enlightened developer comments as, for example, quoted here: http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2007/02/02/openoffice-development-team-takes-first-step-toward-writers-outline-mode [ruwenzori.net]
I agree with everybody here that this is an important feature and so does the whole team. This is one of the bigger features that we will try to implement as soon as some resources will be available
Which was only about 7.5yrs ago... give em time, it's not like we need the tools now to write stuff for a living is it...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @01:49AM
as soon as some resources will be available
Resources == money
If that feature is so important to you, it seems that you would have demonstrated your interest.
Open-source bounty [wikipedia.org]
.
7.5yrs ago
So, tell us about all the development work that -you- have done pro bono.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday September 17 2014, @06:32PM
OpenOffice used to have a pretty decent migration guide which actually did cover real technical issues, as far as I have used it it seemed to be open and honest too, but it is almost a decade out of date (covers only office 2003 it appears) and LibreOffice has no equivalent. Now all we have to go on are the marketing-style feature comparisons, which are not that helpful. Knowing whether or not a feature exists (either way) is not the same (and not anywhere near as useful) as knowing whether the features that you use in MS Office (a) exist at all in LO / OO (b) are the same or similar in user experience and (c) are import/export compatible for your existing docs - and where any of those aren't true, having a description of the LO alternative and/or workarounds.
The biggest issue for all levels of users is probably always going to be "can I open my old MS Office documents and MS Office documents from others". I have seen a migration fail because of problems with rendering relatively short and simple Word documents - but that was >10 years ago, it probably works ok now. Excel -> Calc though still looks like formulas are going to cause problems, and even if they are only slightly incompatible, it still means you have to fully check _every_ spreadsheet coming into LO for errors and issues. For spreadsheets, formulas are really basic usage not "advanced users". Macros (which I would say are "advanced") are going to need re-writing every time.
Even for new documents, there are (I think) still major missing features. E.g. no pivot tables / charts would be a show stopper for me, and I suspect that no accounting number format would be one for others. It doesn't matter that I only use them in maybe 5% of my spreadsheets - if I have to have MS Office for those ones, why not use it for all of them ?
The biggest gaps though are completely missing from the list you quoted - at least three entire applications that I can think of. OO / LO has no Outlook, Publisher or OneNote. You might be able to find free replacements for some of these, but then you need to be comparing Office with (LO + some email client + some calendaring solution + integrating them together). I have seen a lot of people who almost live in Outlook at work, not just email but calendaring, scheduling, meeting management, resource bookings, task management, voting and approval processes, and it all integrates straight into Office - and that is just the standard basic Outlook stuff before you even start on various Outlook plugin solutions and "the sales team interface to CRM runs in Outlook".
For personal use, I could probably replace Outlook with another email client and calendaring solution, and I don't care about publisher, but I have never ever seen _anything_ FOSS that comes close to OneNote. It's probably _the_ major thing that currently keeps me (mostly) on Windows+Office, because I see no credible replacement and I use it a lot. It's also IMO one of the best things MS has produced, but the world seems divided into many who have never heard of it (apparently including the authors of the feature comparison you linked to), and those who use it and wouldn't be without it.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday September 18 2014, @05:33AM
Wow!!! That is totally amazing!!! This is the same reason that keeps me away from Windows! There is no credible replacement for Free Software! Nothing I have ever tried comes close to emacs!! And have you tried gcc, in the latest iteration! Totally rocks! And it's funny, I have never heard of "OneNote", is that a derivative of Lotus Notes? And what is this "Outlook" of which you speak? I have never felt a need for it, so it must not exist. And besides, I thought it was renamed as Orifice360, or 365, or something. Don't know, since this Microsoft software is really not ready for an actual production environment.
Well, thanks for your views, good talking to you, and I wish you the best when Minecraft takes over.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday September 18 2014, @11:03PM
Not the same reason at all - fallacy of exclusivity. I say I can't go vegetarian because I can't find a good substitute for steak, and you say it's just the same for you - you can't eat meat because you can't find a good substitute for tofu burgers.
Newsflash: you can eat meat _and_ tofu burgers. You don't have to replace software just to use some other software. I can, and do, use free software _as well as_ MS Office.
I've used Emacs for decades, on various platforms, but use it rarely these days - so something or some combination of things has replaced it, or maybe what I need to do has changed, but _nothing_ ever forced me to stop using it and replace it. I can still fire it up any time I want to feel like I'm back in the 80s.
(Score: 2, Funny) by francois.barbier on Wednesday September 17 2014, @12:52PM
I also heard Microsoft response to this move was to upload -- to everybody's My Documents folder -- a free .docx file explaining why they were better sticking to Microsoft Office ;-)
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Wednesday September 17 2014, @05:17PM
If you delete it, it will download again, until you install a specific tool to stop it.
They put the word "Bono" in the docx properties, but they will tell you that's totally coincidental.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday September 18 2014, @04:14AM
Why am I having so much of a problem moderating this either "informative" or "funny"?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday September 17 2014, @01:36PM
Account abandoned.