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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: 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_