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Another Italian City Switches to OpenOffice

posted by n1 on Wednesday September 17 2014, @08:29AM   
from the premium-licensing dept.

francois.barbier writes:

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.

• The treadmill business model(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @08:31PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @08:31PM (#94676)

  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_

  Parent