French Government To Use PostgreSQL, LibreOffice In Free Software Adoption Push

Re:French Government To Use PostgreSQL, LibreOffice In Free ... by skrebbel on Wednesday September 26, 2012 @10:52AM (#4575921)

Frankly, I find your comment insulting. Why would a civil servant be expected to perform any less than a consultant or a banker? After all, many civil servants do the job a consultant could also do, albeit at a lower cost. I'm not talking about the people picking up the trash, I'm talking about the people designing city expansion policy, the people writing requirements for government IT systems and the people drafting laws.

Admittedly civil servants in many countries have the image of doing these jobs less passionately than someone working in business would, but this does not change what is expected of them.

Cutting on the productivity on an expensive workforce very seldomly leads to actual cost reduction.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:French Government To Use PostgreSQL, LibreOffice In Free ... by louischatriot on Wednesday September 26, 2012 @02:21PM (#4577131)

I didn't mean to be insulting and surely didn't say civil servants "perform less" than consultants. I don't think that performance can be measured by the amount of time you spend on desktop software :)

Let me clarify my point: most people (civil servants being only one example among others) don't use even 10% of MS Office capabilities (esp. on Excel, I've never seen anything but basic formulas, no array formulas, no macros and so on). For these people using a tool that performs reasonably well on these 10% is not a stupid choice.

Of course, MS Office is better than LibreOffice. But LibreOffice is absolutely no shitty software and most of the time it gets the job done.

[ Parent | on HN ]