AFAIK they've been looking at OSS for years (I was involved in a project related to that), and the main blocker was that the BOFH tool they were using didn't support OpenOffice back then (that was before LibreOffice existed).
In fact moving from MS Office to OpenOffice was the easy part, there was a more ambitious project to migrate desktops to Linux, but the provider of the management tool was only supporting Windows.
That and other related admin such as keeping all installations in check to make sure you are within your license terms. Have you budgeted properly for the time of experienced people to fill out paper work and the potential disruption of everyone else if a full audit is requested (the license agreement says that can call one of those when-ever they like IIRC).
Sometimes using Office most definitely is the right answer (the "compatibility with our suppliers/clients" issue often can't not be ignored for a start) but when it isn't the correct answer pure licensing costs are not always the only reason.
> What was the cost of: Re-imaging those 120,000 desktops?
The costs of this change per desktop will be similar to an upgrade of Office.
If they are upgrading from an older version of office that is no longer supported and the choice is between newer office and OO/LO then this is moot. There may be a bit of extra time at the start of the project as those running it get familiar with OO/LO's installation foibles, but considered per desktop this is not going to be high.
In fact installing OO as a new package may be more risk free as it can co-exist with their current version of Office, so they have an easy fallback/rollback or slow transition option.
> Re-training the (I assume) 100,000+ users?
The differences are not that significant. If they are moving from a relatively old version of office then the retraining for the newest Office variant could easily be more significant due to the UI changes over recent years.
If they have any custom training materials then there will be a cost for updating these, but then there will be for Office too.
> And what are the support costs?
Again, I doubt these will be significantly different. There might be a little more effort needed here due to people being familiar with Office due to the copy they run at home or used at a previous employer, but again there is the "which office version" difference which may make this a moot point. If people using something at home is one of your considerations and you are relying on it to reduce your support costs then OO/LO makes sense as everyone can have an install of OO/LO at home legally for no cost.
>The costs of this change per desktop will be similar to an upgrade of Office.
Not necessarily. Depending on the version of Office you're upgrading from, you can do regression tests on a model office machine, and then just pump the upgrade out using WSUS [1].
Good points though.
[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/bb332157.as...
In my experience, the main cost to adopting F/OSS for office software is interoperability with people sending word and excel files, not support or training.
Note, LibreOffice is available in the native language of the users, Valencian, and has spell-check dictionaries for that language. Presumably, the Valencian government puts out most communication in Valencian, so there may actually be savings in not having to develop and maintain their own Valencian dictionary for Office, which Microsoft does not provide, and reduced support as the interface uses terms more familiar to the native Valencian speakers.
TIL people in Valencia speak several different versions of Spanish: http://gospain.about.com/od/learningspanishinspain/p/valenci...
"In Valencia they speak a form of Catalan (the locals call it 'Valenciano' but this is not officially recognised anywhere outside of Valencia).
Everyone in Valencia speaks Castillian Spanish, but many will speak to each other in Catalan in the street. This will be a bit of a hindrance to your learning experience."
"You will mainly hear Catalan in the streets of Valencia, not Castillian Spanish. Even road signs and advertisements are in Catalan. You will find newspapers, TV and radio in both languages."
"Valencià" (Valencian) is the catalan dialect spoken in Valencia. Catalan itself is a whole other language than spanish. They are as different as, say, spanish and portuguese or italian and french (and any combination of those).
Secondly, Valencian knowledge and use is being lost in the whole region [1]. By 2008, only 32% of the population claimed to use it as their primary language, whereas 54% said that spanish was their primary language.
Moreover, only 76% of the population _understood_ valencian, only 56% was able to speak it, and just 25% claimed to be able to write it correctly.
The numbers today are probably even worse.
BTW, road signs and advertisements are written in both languages almost everywhere (just like in Catalonia, or any spanish region where there is more than one official language).
When I was working as OSS consultant in Valencia one of the main issues was the translation of OpenOffice to Valencian language because for political reasons (mostly) the Catalan version couldn't be used. Let's say it is complicated. To cut the story short: some people in Valencia don't want to accept that Valencian is dialect of Catalan and they insist that it is a completely different language (total BS, but politics isn't about science, is it?).
Yes, some words are different, like en_US is different from en_GB; but the whole absurd thing got to the point that they didn't want to use the locale for Catalan (ie. ca_ES@valencia or similar). Again, because political reasons they wanted to use va_ES but then OpenOffice couldn't integrate the translations in their source tree because va_ES is not an accepted locale in the IANA database.
It was a total mess and it meant that they were always playing the catch up game translating again and again OpenOffice with each new version (I don't know how things are now in LibreOffice, but OpenOffice was a total nightmare).
All together is a little bit sad to see how resources are wasted.
While you're quick to conclude that valencian is getting extinct, don't forget about all the areas in Valencia where valencian was never, ever spoken, but it was forced into schools, and laws that require an official degree in valencia to work as a government official were set up.
Especially for those who don't speak either:
Spanish: "Hay muchas cosas", "Tenemos una vez" French: "Il y a beaucoup des choses", "Nous avons une fois" Catalan: "N'hi ha moltes coses", "Tenim una vegada" Italian: "Ci sono molte cose", "Abbiamo una volta"
I think it's a quite representative example of the kind of differences & similarities.
Catalan is a close enough language that I can understand its written form, but it is not as close to Spanish as Spanish is to Portuguese.
Sources? Being a lazy guy, I turned to wikipedia [1], where it explicitly says:
> Despite being mostly situated in the Iberian Peninsula, the Catalan vocabulary exhibits marked lexical differences with Ibero-Romance (Spanish and Portuguese), instead showing general affinity towards the Gallo-Romance group.
The Gallo-Romance group includes French and Italian.
About regions where valencian was never spoken and forced into schools, what is your point exactly? I just said that valencian usage is becoming less frequent lately, and the numbers support this affirmation. Are you trying to say that, with the current laws, the language can not become extinct? Then I may agree with you, but laws can be (and have been) changed...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language (lexical comparison section)
Edit: missing link.
My point is that you're complaining that it's being used less, while it's actually being forced onto places where it simply has never been used.
The claim in wikipedia says that it has more general affinity to the gallo-romance group than to the ibero-romance group. I may be wrong, but I read that as "it is more similar to french/italian than to spanish/portuguese".
Also, I'm not complaining about anything (and I couldn't care less about wheter valencian becomes extinct or not). I was just refuting the op affirmation statement that "You will mainly hear Catalan in the streets of Valencia, not Castillian Spanish".
There might be a terminology mismatch here and you are talking about different things.
Perhaps the core language (syntactic structure, regular verb conjugation patterns, core words) is very like Spanish and that comment on Wikipedia is referring many non-core words in the common vocabulary being pulled from languages common in other neighbouring areas.
Caveat: I am no linguist nor do I speak anything much other than Correct English and American English.
What?
Valencian (Valencià) is not a version of Spanish, but a different language. It's the same language that is spoken in Catalonia (and which there is called Catalan), and in the Balearic Islands (where it's called Balear).
It's amazing the amount of languages that are everywhere...
Couldn't this be handled with WINE or a virtualizer to run Word and Excel?
> Note, LibreOffice is available in the native language of the users, Valencian, and has spell-check dictionaries for that language. Presumably, the Valencian government puts out most communication in Valencian, so there may actually be savings in not having to develop and maintain their own Valencian dictionary for Office, which Microsoft does not provide, and reduced support as the interface uses terms more familiar to the native Valencian speakers.
If they're already in the position of having specialists do translation, or having an entire office that's somewhat bilingual on the computer, running Word and Excel virtualized might not be such a burden comparatively speaking.
A government saves money if it pays €x to employ local taxpayers instead of sending that same amount abroad. It will still break even on the decision if it employs locals for €x+n, where n is the amount they recoup in tax from those locals. Even more if those locals would otherwise be unemployed.
This is pretty much just comparing the license cost.
Edit: we have a client who has 2000 users and they have two people dedicated to managing just licensing and have to operate KMS servers etc. That should be factored into the cost as well.
That's probably negligible considering costs of installation, productivity, support, etc.
(I'm still happy to hear about this, but I admit that it's more ideological for me than economic.)
Yes, but some kinds of costs are still easier to hide.
It's all cost.
Now, where does the money end up when you buy 100,000 copies of Office? The United States. Perhaps some offshore bank account where Microsoft parks their cash next to Apple and Google's billions?
Whatever it was, it was well worth it since in the future everyone will use open source software.
What's the alternative? Keep paying more for Office software every year, while risking having NSA gathering all those documents?
If anyone, it's the companies interfacing them that will have to bear those "interoperability" costs. At least until they also switch to LibreOffice or something compatible enough. IMHO this is much better than them requiring Office-formatted documents.
Letting the administration be the pioneer in this front is sensible both morally and practically. Morally because the administration should be pushing for the greater good for all citizens, and practically because people/companies can not just "choose another provider and sidestep the issue".
Once nearly everyone is forced to have processes in place to interface with the administration using open standard formats, small companies looking to do business will have a much easier time asking for these formats too.
I can only imagine the headaches they are about to incur with this switch.
[0] http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linux-brings-over-EUR...
Good stuff. ^_^
"TCO should include exit costs and cost of vendor lock-in" https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/tco-should-include-exit-cos...
Now let's assume that MS Word will give you a 1% performance increase over LibreOffice... just one percent, that's 72 seconds a day. 72 seconds spent wondering "how do I make a pivot table in Calc like I do in Excel"? or "How do I make a table of contents in LibreOffice Word"?
Now let's assume the average pay for these people is 15 euros/hour. those 72 seconds therefore cost 0.3 euros per employee.
Now multiply that by 100.000 users * 270 working days a year and you have 8.1 million.
Congratulations, you just lost 6.6 million euros.
... Sorry FOSS/Linux evangelists, but apparently none of you can do math.
Give us some citations to document performance loss, and further citations do document that the performance loss is sufficient enough to reduce the amount of work the staff actually carries out (if they're less productive per unit time spent working, but still completes the same amount of work, then the cost is not borne by the government - it is fairly normal for workload to be quite elastic), and we can talk about your numbers.
You also don't account for another factor: Even if there is a loss, it is not given that it is a net negative: License payments to Microsoft leave Valencia, and Spain. Payments to any additional training and support staff or additional assistance for LibreOffice is likely to stay in the local economy, and part of it will find its way straight back in in the form of taxes.
It is perfectly possible that they've messed up the numbers, but you've not presented anything resembling a case for that.
You might also note from the article that this is not Valencias first large scale migration - they claim to have saved 30 million so far from switching the regions schools to Linux, so chances are they actually have better numbers than the ones you've made up.
I just wanted to point out, people forget these things when they do a cost/benefit estimate.
That's a pretty big assumption.
I've used both products. I didn't notice any noteworthy differences when it came to regular usage. I actually think the new-ish Ribbon UI is extremely confusing and slow to navigate.
This certainly isn't like Gimp vs Photoshop.
On top of that, I guess most of the 100.000 users at the government -doctors, teachers, judges, clerks...- have never used a pivot table, and won't get those extra 72 seconds per day. This ain't Henry Ford's factory and there are much bigger externalities to take care of before this kind of imaginary optimizations.
BILLIONS I tell you BILLIONS!!!
Give them IV drips and buy them diapers quick!
If we would assume that the new ribbon-UI of Word is unfamiliar to people, then it actually could be that LibreOffice is easier, more performant, for people accustomed to (old) Word, than Word itself.
Most people have no idea what the toolbar buttons do. To find out you have to play mystery meat with tooltips for ages.
But one doesn't need to use the toolbar buttons, one can still select things from the menus in the old fashioned way.
Or, you know, learn/set up keyboard shortcuts if you're going to be working with the software regularly.
1. Regarding productivity tools, people tend to do roughly the same thing at work each day. What they type in might be different, but what they want the software to do doesn't differ that much.
2. People tend to be able to remember things from one day to the next. If I start using a new IDE, I don't have to spend an extra minute every single day for a year looking for the "build" button or shortcut. A user who works out how to format a line as a heading in LibreOffice won't sit around the next day, confused about how to format a line as a heading.
3. Regarding most commonly used functionality, the UI of LibreOffice is pretty intuitive for someone who has used any kind of office productivity software.
4. Regarding rarer functionality (e.g. Pivot tables) I would be surprised if anywhere near 100000 of those 120000 users ever use them. Most people just use a spreadsheet as a place to put tabular data, many don't even do simple calculations like summing with it. Most people just type big globs of text into word processors and do some simple formatting. Those who do use less common functionality tend to have the ability to work it out pretty quickly and either remember it or write it down.
As many have already said. The unfamiliarity problem you describe is the same with a new version of MS Office. When I got a new version of MS Office, I spent some time trying to find features that I used a lot before, but once I found them, I was back up to speed. If the timing of the change corresponds to the need to upgrade MS Office (e.g. existing version going out of support), then the disruption would be pretty much the same.
People will need help adapting to the new software whether it's FOSS or expensively licensed. Unless your suggestion is that they stay on Office 97 indefinitely, those types of training costs will always come up.
It's an investment. The question is not how much you save this year, it's when will you actually save money.
License savings. Great. What was the cost of:
- Re-imaging those 120,000 desktops?
- Re-training the (I assume) 100,000+ users?
And what are the support costs?
What were they under MS Office? It's laudable, for sure, but I don't believe that F/OSS is cheaper. I'd like to see a real cost impact analysis that covers the entire program, from inception through to on-going operational management. And something that financially compares the as-was state with the current state.