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It seems likely that everyone here has heard the old saw "No one ever got fired for buying|using Microsoft". Well, times change.
The government of the Italian province of South Tyrol wants to save money and, noting Munich's savings of over 10 million euros, it sees Free Software as a solution. (The freedom thing isn't lost on them either.)
Governor Arno Kompatscher says "We've started to review our license costs. If there are free and open source alternatives, and where the costs and risks of changing are justified, we will switch to these." The new policy is meant to reduce IT costs. Should this fail, the region must resort to reduce its workforce, in order to balance the region's budget.
Did you catch the nuance? If you are a gov't employee and they can't change software because you aren't adaptable enough to use something other than Windows, you can plan on being the first one out the door. Hat tip to Robert Pogson for just the right spin on this story.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Monday April 21 2014, @05:15AM
We routinely expect people to go from one car to another and figure it out as they go. Same for appliances and various utensils. Why not for practically identical software. Honestly, just how different are two word processors these days? MS Office and LibreOffice are NOT all that different.
If all else fails, 'Help' does the same thing in proprietary or free applications.
All the same, since they mention costs of switching, it is likely that they consider some form of increased support for a time to be par for the course.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Monday April 21 2014, @05:52AM
Really? Help in open source software is generally a joke.
And unfortunately for the bean counters, lots and lots of people don't really understand how computers want us to use them. They remember going to specific places, finding specific things there, then doing something [clicking, right clicking, typing] and the right thing happens. Then they move on to the next thing they are working on.
You need a different perspective on using computers from what most people have, to be able to sit down at a new Linux box, with little or no training, and be at all productive using it when you have only used say, Windows XP, Word and Excel for the past 10-15 years.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday April 21 2014, @06:20AM
LibreOffice seems to have pretty good help and is no more different from MS Office than one version of MS Office is from another. Throw in Thunderbird (which is not that different from Outlook Express) and Firefox or Chrome (which many use on Windows already) and you've covered most of what those people stuck on XP used daily.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Monday April 21 2014, @04:50PM
Try putting an Excel or Access jockey, who is used to being able to cook up VBA on the fly to make it do pretty much anything, onto the bad joke that is BASE script and get back to me.
As someone who has been working in the trenches for damned near 30 years I hate to burst the FOSS fans bubble but....LO is piss poor, it really is. With Sun Office ALL the work went into Writer, the rest pretty much got scraps, which is why their versions of Access and Excel (and to a lesser degree Powerpoint) are frankly back at Office 97 levels in 2014, the money just wasn't spent there. Now will the ODF fix this? Who knows but even if they dedicate themselves to this you are still looking at several years simply because of how little the previous company spent, it would be like being brought in to revive a car company whose truck line is top notch but whose cars are so far behind the times they are at the level of a 74 Pacer in 2014, there is a HELL of a lot of work to be done. Sure having the truck is nice but not everybody needs a truck and in fact many have different needs that the truck just don't fill.
Does this mean LO doesn't have its place? nope because home users spend a good 90% of their time writing docs so for that demographic its just perfect, but home users and business users? Two different beasts completely and I have a feeling that they are gonna take a pretty severe hit in productivity when they have to start hiring to have all these custom programs made that were previously done in Excel and Access, because those tools in LO simply aren't up to the task.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Monday April 21 2014, @05:49PM
Other local governments and businesses have already made the transition and haven't seen those big hits at all. It seems they aren't actually a problem in practice.
I have actually used both.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21 2014, @07:44PM
Other local governments and businesses have already made the transition
Partial list:
Burlington Coat Factory (since last century)
City of Largo, Florida (since last century)
Ernie Ball, Inc. (since last century)
City of Garden Grove, CA (partial; started last century)
Autonomous region of Extremadura, Spain (80,000 seats switched to Linux in one weekend)
Public school system of Brazil (500,000 seats)
Panasonic, Inc. (300,000 seats)
Munich (over 95 percent FOSS and still converting stuff)
All it takes is leadership and a competent IT staff; everything else follows.
and haven't seen those big hits at all
98 percent of people can use FOSS do 100 percent of the tasks they previously did with EULAware.
Now, if you have locked yourself into specific single-platform apps, expect to wear chains for eternity like Jacob Marley.
Not having to defrag, reboot for no good reason, install/update/run anti-whatever apps (then decrypt what those say--and repair brokenness when they misbehave) leaves you time to become familiar with your software by using it to do USEFUL things.
-- gewg_
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tibman on Monday April 21 2014, @01:47PM
Help in closed source software is a joke. Pressing F1 always results in facepalm. It is far better/faster to just google the thing you want to do. If F1 is a reference manual then it is probably okay. But most of the time it is a thick tomb of fluff that someone wrote to justify their job (no offense to any technical writers out there). I stopped using the built-in help right around the early-2000's. Help in the form of a howto is usually what you need. IMO of course : )
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by kebes on Monday April 21 2014, @03:38PM
But I think crappy help documentation is only part of the problem. Maybe only a symptom. I think our current paradigm of software-help is wrong. Consider what often happens when you are trying to figure out how to do something with a piece of software. Whether you use the built-in help or the web, you end up doing something like:
1. Type some search terms
2. Scan through the search results
3. Click into some entries, read through them quickly
4. Identify a candidate solution
5. Follow the steps described in the solution (click this Menu item, look for this option, etc.)
6. If it didn't work, go back to a previous step and try some more...
This seems silly. In particular, it seems rather ridiculous to have a web-page open, and then to be searching through your GUI app for the button/item that the document is referring to; especially when one considers possible version or setup inconsistencies. (This is of course better with commandline tools, where you can copy-paste something from the web.) It would be better if you could simply activate the presented solution. I'm not suggesting giving your web-browser complete access to your computer... Consider instead if every button/item in the GUI were (behind the scenes) intelligently tagged, and linked to various help-topics. So, you use some kind of built-in search, type what you're trying to do... and you see various entries pop-up. Importantly, those entries don't explain what button to press, they actually perform the task. In other words, the help system is more like a way to search and activate all the functionality that is available inside the application.
The only downside I can think of (besides implementation effort) is that this prevents users from learning where a given option is located. However, I think that a user who wanted to use a function repeatedly would put in the effort to find out where the option is located (the search-activate function could also highlight the button it's activating on your behalf). Moreover, the search-activate system could itself become a viable way to access functionality. You could learn what words to type (maybe just a couple characters required) to activate the functionality you wanted. This is potentially much more efficient than searching through dozens of GUI panels, even for common tasks.
There have been occasional forays into such ideas (such as the the Enso software, the Firefox Ubiquity [mozilla.org] plug-in, or Unity's searchable menubar), but I've never seen an application that fully developed this idea: where every single GUI element is tagged and thus can be activated using a (pseudo-natural-language) search interface. One difficulty is the developer effort required to make it all work. On the other hand, I believe the right solution is to have an online database of help-entries. Users can then submit entries for fixing common problems or performing particular sequences of steps, essentially providing a way to share simple user macros. (Obviously some vetting process is necessary.) So when you search, you're searching through everyone else's problems/solutions, and you're able to activate/try a particular solution with a single click.
(Score: 1) by paddym on Monday April 21 2014, @06:36PM
Have to agree with how ridiculous F1 is. It's like they decided to fire up old netscape on some modem-network to find the answer. You can pull the real help from some server in Japan faster than to grep a file somewhere on your computer. And the best part is how the help never is useful because all the stuff in there is how things should work, not what to do when they don't work the way they should.
It's right up there with that "search the web to find a program to open this file". 1 extra mouse button every time I open an unidentifiable file. I often thought of starting a Microsoft Power magazine to have back stories for all these weird things that happen in windows that are still there. "And woe to ye who actually searches the web for a program to open a new file. Ye shall find nothing but misery as a constant reminder of why the gods wanted to integrate Internet Explorer into the operating system yet were banned to do so by the anti-Trust."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21 2014, @06:39AM
they consider some form of increased support for a time to be par for the course
Munich did a lot of hand-holding with each and every user, making sure that e.g. macros and templates were converted. [google.com]
When calculating OS licensing, app licensing, CALs, etc, etc, etc, it quickly became a wash on costs.
Now, (don't) repeat those costs every few years; using $0 FOSS actually becomes cheaper.
Munich is still ~4 percent Windoze.
(When they started, their goal was 80 percent FOSS; they zipped right by that mark.)
They have some legacy crap like SAP that they haven't yet replaced with FOSS apps.
If they got their ultimate wish, they would have control of 100 percent of the code they run.
-- gewg_