Schleswig-Holstein’s migration to LibreOffice reaches 80% completion, with a one-time €9 million investment on cards for 2026.
Schleswig-Holstein is shaking out to be such a good example of Proven Track Record ™️ for use of FOSS software in public administration, or any large organization really.
Anybody advocating for other public administrations to migrate can point loudly at Schleswig-Holstein that it’s been done before and how to do it right. No more “that would never work” from the proprietary nay-sayers
And states like bavaria are hard prone on windows because Söder has a small prick and “is not like those northeners”
More likey they are prone on it, because they get a cut from it. There is a big Microsoft office in Bavaria.
Didn’t that one just “accidentally” happen when München started building their LiMux distribution, and after Steve Ballmer went to visit them personally?
I heard about that story as well, not sure how factfull it is, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
eh söder doesn’t decide everything personally
i would be surprised if windows is actually in the backend anywhere
linux is hard to sell as frontend to the average worker tho
Considering they mainly advertise for windows admins they very likely use winserver I guess.
Minister presidents do decide such a thing. They can say which system the state administration uses. See Schleswig-Hollstein, NRW
I still remember when Bavaria was one of the first to use Linux.
Linux ecosystem is very solid, I don’t get why governments would prefer proprietary code, specially after all NSA debacle.
Support contracts aren’t always a thing for FOSS projects, and companies need support contracts to get support from the source when dealing with P1 outages and the like.
Because when something goes wrong they can know nothing, call someone and say ‘fix it now’ and they would. That support line is gone. Ideally they should have a few of these people on staff. Well see.
RHEL exists… linux isnt just for sweaty nerds in basements, it’s also for sweaty enterprise desktop end users…
If external professional support is needed they could just buy it too. One of the bigger Linux companies, SUSE, is even from Germany, and still operates out of Nürnberg (or “Nuremberg” for people who are more familiar with the anglicized name).
That’s nonsense. Just because something is open source, doesn’t mean that support doesn’t exist.
That’s not what he is saying. Quit that strawman bullshit.
It’s not exactly a secret that competence for Microsoft Solutions is far more frequent than competence of various Linux solutions, if someone built that solution at all.
At my work, If a windows user gets a windows related problem, we probably have hundreds of people that can fix it.
If a Linux user get a Linux related problem. If they can’t fix it themselves, then IT probably can’t fix it either. Not because our IT is useless, but because the Linux guys know know Linux better than IT. So we’d have to call in a contractor to help them.
And they are not cheap. Because there’s not a lot of Linux experts right now.
Have you tried calling that problem a feature and that it’s working as expected? If you do that, magically all your windows problems go away.
I guess you can call in a windows expert to issue you a certificate saying that, whatever floats your boat.
No, we don’t work for Bethesda. We just fix the problems we encounter. But that’s beside the point.
Do you know how many programs there are for Linux to manage the payroll for a large company, with various regional taxes? I do.
its as much about support as its accountability
you have somebody to blame or potentially sue
Just as an example. The state of Schlewsig Holstein has 30,000 workers using LibreOffice. If the service goes down, that means that 30,000 workers can not work any longer, but still get paid. Median hourly wage in Germany is 25€, so for every hour the serivce is down, you pay 750,000€.
That is the level of support you need for a service like this and some forum and a bunch of volunteer devs do not cut that.
So having worked in a few IT departments, I’ve noticed that ones where the general culture is “let’s buy this off the shelf product and a support contract” tend to have a lot more dealing with issues while sitting on their hands and blaming the vendor whereas the departments that are more hands-on and take the approach of “let’s find the right solution and make it work whether or not we can get the vendor support we’d like” tended to have more robust systems, but also more outages due to their own internal errors
So like most decisions in both business and IT it comes down to risk tolerance. I think in the context of your choice of Office suite that risk level is fairly low. Libre Office is an office suite which installs onto the client PC and has minimal integration with outside servers. Its extremely easy to uninstall and reinstall an earlier version if you identify a problem while rolling out an update, and it’s extremely easy to hold a version and not update (which of course comes from security risks, but again, those are not terribly significant compared to other IT contexts)
The main thing in this context that a vendor support contract would provide is the ability to deploy developer resources that are already familiar with the codebasd on a bug if you encounter a problem that’s significant enough. In the case of open source software like Libre Office you get the added benefit of being able to simply spend money on developers and maintain a fork if the upstream project is giving you enough trouble too.
The bigger risks where you will really want a support contract is on the server and network side, because those are much more critical when an issue does arise, may require restoring from backup to rollback and will often have contingency plans as expensive as maintaining warm/cold spares and separate failover regions and hot spares
My experience with microsoft is thst there custom service is terrible
LibreOffice service cant go down, it’s not always online like Microsoft 265
Yes updates break software all the time. It does not even have to be LibreOffice directly. Some OS update can do it.
You people have no idea what you are talking about. LibreOffice isn’t a service. It’s a software package.
Also https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/
Support is a service, so is deploying and maintaining software.
Also the list is a great case in point. If you want them to speak German, looking at the names, you end up with three trainers and a single migration expert. To be fair there seem to be a lot of German speaking developers, but they tend to hate working in support. Just imagine somebody is sick or on vacation.
Also LibreOffice is a large open source project. For smaller ones it is much worse.
The Document Foundation does not provide professional support services for LibreOffice. It does, however, develop and maintain a certification system for professionals of various kinds who deliver and sell services around LibreOffice.
That’s a LOT different than the support you can get from Office. Enterprise contracts usually come with guaranteed uptime, 24/7 immediate L3 support, custom hotfixes for specific workflow issues, and much more.
I get that it’s expensive, most people don’t need that, and there should be better options. Unfortunately, there quite often isn’t. The difference between Office and the second best of a huge margin.
On top of that, the integration costs can be massive as all your workflows are built for Office products. At the least, the companies need to find a way to replace all your macros, addins, and queries.
Yeah, that’s the point. Microsoft Office is a service with support and downtime guarantees.
Another European country tried that switch but found that retraining employees was too expensive and inefficient.
Which country?
You wouldn’t know them. They go to a different school.
Great, but they should donate some of the saved money to open source projects they are using to make sure they stay updated.
While the biggest state in Germany decided to make a deal with Microsoft for an estimate of 1000 Million Euros:
(Article is in German) https://www.heise.de/news/Vertrag-soll-bis-Jahresende-stehen-Bayern-will-in-die-Microsoft-Cloud-11066618.html
Bayern is a bit of a conservative shithole if you ask me. Since 1957 the CSU party has always won the leadership of the state executive. They are constantly hindering green energy production and they suck BWM-cock regarding internal combustion engine cars. It does not surprise me, that they are shit on this question too.
Edit: Ups, wahrscheinlich hätte ich dir das nicht erklären müssen, wenn du ja deutsche Heise Artikellinks postest… Ich lasse es jetzt aber für andere Leser stehen.
I was just thinking this when I first saw the title. I always see these announcements as a call for more bribes by the politicians/bureaucrats.
Then they just go back to Microsoft like nothing changed.
Ehhhh this time might be different. The shift seems to be cultural across European country’s leaderships.
They’re seeing Trump’s actions, they’re seeing the repeated failures by Microsoft and the repeated monopolistic abuses by Microsoft and Silicon Valley as a whole (which, that’s a term that’s seemed to entirely fall off now that I think of it!) they’re finally seeing what the Linux evangelists have been saying, as well as seeing the potential money to be made by nurturing their own European tech industry
I think it’s the right storm of the Trump administration coinciding with Microsoft’s sketchy Windows 11 migration (with at least half a billion devices being sent to the ewaste pile early) also coinciding with the very visible alignment of large tech platforms with Trump. Its also been a solid 30 years (give or take) of Microsoft dominating the desktop landscape and the last 15 years (give or take) of Microsoft consuming more and more of the server and cloud landscape, so individual decision makers have had plenty of time to get more and more fed up with Microsoft
The only question is if there’s enough negative sentiment and distrust towards Microsoft and other American tech companies to push through the growing pains of scaling these open source solutions to entire countries, which we may well have given we’re still in the first of 4 years of another Trump administration (especially if the Republican party remains as far out of alignment with Europe as they have been)
I’m always excited by these kinds of headlines! I hope they stick with open source and don’t switch back.
The best thing about this is that eventually these organizations are going to want features and fixes that don’t exist yet in the open source software they’re using, at which point they’ll have to invest in development. If this becomes a trend I think it will mean more stability and more functionality in open software in general.
They actually seem to run into it pretty quickly. The 20% have not switched, because LibreOffice seems to lack features.
Not just that, it’s also beneficial to the organization because that can just… implement it themselves, and then do a pull request, instead of being reliant upon a corporation to care about your desires. Literally a win-win. I hope state actors come to realize that sooner rather than later, it only makes sense
I look forward to EU Linux.
You can help here: https://eu-os.eu/
SUSE, Manjaro, Alpine Linux, CRUX, and NixOS are all technically European (as are many others).
Mint is also european (based on Ireland), even though it’s based on Ubuntu and Debian,
both of which are American (but Debian is FOSS)Edit: Ubuntu is based on London and was founded by South Africans, but has propietary snaps (disabled on Mint). Debian was founded by an American but is FOSS so it operates worldwide.
All FOSS operates worldwide; the point of FOSS is that it provides a paradigm that directly counters the false-scarcity that (often capitalist) systems induce.
(not directed at you, of course)
And Mint has heavily invested in a version that goes to Debian skipping Ubuntu, I think it should have reached stable status by now.
Isn’t Ubuntu South African?
The word yes
The company no, it’s British or something
Guix, btw.
Sure, but I mean a distro developed/maintained/curated officially by the EU or one of its member governments.
I’m all for it, but I am not sure any more wath the political trend on surveillance.
I’m not overly concerned with an organization trying to build surveillance functions into an open source operating system.
I’m not sure a government can have the agility necessary for keeping a good track of good decisions over a reasonable amount of time.
I’d bet it would take a planification similar to building a nuclear reactor or an airport: over budget, blown over scheduled time, fulfilling specs on paper but not in spirit, and used only when people have no other option ( goes without saying all governments are a monopoly, you can’t have 2 bodies having powers over a particular geographic place).
On the other hand, a government organization might do a better job of keeping track of development goals over time. It might be slower than independent open source projects, but it would probably also be more stable than most Linux distros. Enterprise-level software has different requirements and different development cycles from consumer-level software. Having a competing option for Red Hat could only be a good thing.
I’d bet it would take a planification similar to building a nuclear reactor or an airport: over budget, blown over scheduled time, fulfilling specs on paper but not in spirit, and used only when people have no other option
It’s not as if they’d be starting from scratch, it would most likely still be Linux. But they might bring more focus to long-term stability and especially cybersecurity implementations to meet government security requirements.
Hard pass. I’m not interested in any software curated by a western government.
Or eastern for that matters
ah, well then, RedStar OS is for you!
Hungary has vetoed that USB stick.
Which is always a concern … but at the same time, the more often organizations switch, the more people realize the benefits and eventually, the switch will stick permanently.
I perceive that the ground is prepared well enough for many of those to just stay. And contribute a bit.
if this were a socialist country, libreoffice would’ve been used a lot more than microsoft office. seriously!
oh and this is my 250th comment here on this lemmy instance. seriously!
Many more governed could and should inspire!
Bravo Deutschland!!!
Fantastic news, the more of these we have the easier it becomes
I saw you can run old versions of Microsoft office via wine for free, is that technically legal such that they can do that?
Depends on the license and version. I do know some old office versions are “forever” use since it was before madness became standard practice. Now how useful old office versions would be? No idea, however Libreoffice is up to date, useful and open.
It’s not one that you previously bought, it just appears as an option in the software manager.
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I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about, as it is way off topic and I couldn’t find anything on it in this article.
But if you’re referring to the Tesla gigafactory in Brandenburg, that’s a different state, different state government making the decisions.
All in all: non-sequitur.
