Going Off The Rails: Finnish city of Tampere to Begin Pilot with OpenOffice.org at Robert Pogson

Going Off The Rails: Finnish city of Tampere to Begin Pilot with OpenOffice.org

Published by Robert Pogson July 13th, 2012 in technology. 9 Comments

There is a right way and a wrong way to pilot FLOSS. Installing FLOSS applications on that other OS in parallel with IE and M$’s office suite is OK but it’s walking a tightrope. Using both office suites at once greatly increases the complexity of sharing documents:

Joe: “What do you mean the document was scrambled?”
Jill: “The contents of the table spill off the page…”
Joe: “I guess I will have to stick with M$’s office suite.”
Jill: “Yes. We know it works.”

Of course OpenOffice.org works, too, but both parties are better off using it.

Why not select a target-group who mostly communicate amongst themselves and use PDF for exports? Put them on GNU/Linux while you’re at it. That’s pretty well guaranteed to work. Why would it not?

Oh well. I told you so… Expect the trial to “fail” due to interoperability problems that no one anticipated… or did they? This could be the plan, that the M$-lovers are setting up OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice to fail.

The right way to do this is to identify the inventory of documents and their formats, automate the conversion to ODF, and study the cost of converting the inventory. It is sure to be far less than the cost of relicensing that other OS and its office suite forever. Any small cost X forever is greater than a modest cost once. It’s maths, folks, not magic. Folks who have migrated report that cost of IT per annum per seat are much lower. In a year, the IT department should have been able to come up with an estimate of the cost and laid it on the table for study. As it is, they have merely delayed migration making it ever more difficult to migrate. How many incompatible documents will M$’s office suite crank out in the next year?

see Finnish city of Tampere to begin pilot with open source office suite | Joinup.

- Robert Pogson

9 Responses to “Going Off The Rails: Finnish city of Tampere to Begin Pilot with OpenOffice.org”

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1 Phenom Jul 16th, 2012 at 5:08 am

“Folks who have migrated report that cost of IT per annum per seat are much lower.”
Really? Would you please give a reference?

Anyway, another major issue surfaces here. The fragmentation that OO and LO cause. Instead of joining forces against the competition, resources are wasted to support two separate projects. Then you wonder why both packages are 10 years behing MS Office in terms of features, usability, and integration.
2 Phenom Jul 16th, 2012 at 5:09 am

Spam filters on the loose.
3 Robert Pogson Jul 16th, 2012 at 6:20 am
Phenom wrote, ““Folks who have migrated report that cost of IT per annum per seat are much lower.”
Really? Would you please give a reference?”

Too many to list here but here are a few:
- Largo, FL: “Largo’s IT budget is less than half of what similarly-sized municipalities typically spend for similar (and often less reliable) computing power.”
- French national police: “Since 2004, he says that the Gendarmerie has saved up to €50 million on licensing and maintenance costs as a result of the migration strategy. He believes that the move from Windows to Ubuntu posed fewer challenges than the organization would have faced if it had updated to Windows Vista.”
- Munich: “Ude claims that Munich’s IT department saved about a third of their total budget last year by dumping Windows and Microsoft Office in favor of Linux and OpenOffice. Buying new Windows software and upgrading systems so they could actually run it would have cost over €15m, with another €2.8m due in 3 to 4 years of license renewal, according to official figures.”
- Chemawawin School: “That other OS was not in the running when the costs were examined in detail. We have twice as many seats as that other OS would allow.”
- An individual teacher got better performance/dollar: “Compared to the iPad, a netbook running Ubermix could be half the price with a keyboard and a fully functional web browser that could easily handle editing complex web apps like Moodle or Google Docs”
So, there you have it. You cannot beat $0 and software freedom.
4 Robert Pogson Jul 16th, 2012 at 6:23 am

Phenom wrote, “Spam filters on the loose.”

Stop writing spam and you’ll have no problem.
5 Robert Pogson Jul 16th, 2012 at 6:29 am

Phenom wrote, of LO and OO, “Instead of joining forces against the competition, resources are wasted to support two separate projects. “

Diversity is good. People like multiple sources to increase reliability of supply. I would think LibreOffice is attracting much more support than OpenOffice.org. Developers and users don’t like the way Apache does things. Forking code makes sense. Forking the licence? Sheesh! With so many distros supporting LibreOffice, I don’t see much future for OpenOffice.org except with businesses and computer geeks. OEMs supplying GNU/Linux on their machines are more likely to crank out LibreOffice. Few OEMs yet ship OpenOffice.org. I don’t know why.
6 oiaohm Jul 16th, 2012 at 8:22 am

Phenom
“The fragmentation that OO and LO cause.”
Also you are a uninformed person here.

Due to SUN and Oracle being complete pains on copyright assignment. There were between 2001 to 2011 18 different versions of OpenOffice. This include http://go-oo.org/ and others. Yes fragmented nightmare is not now it was before LO formed and Oracle handed OO to Apache.

OO and LO have basically sorted this out. The 18 existing branches have mostly either joined OO or joined LO or joined both. Now that both don’t need copyright assignment to submit code just accept license. LO is compatible with some companies requirements for code submit OO is compatible with others the for some other company LO and OO are compatible with both.

OO and LO most likely will never join is like BSD vs GPL it not going to happen due to different companies having different requirements on what there developers are or are not allowed to submit code to. One might die but that it about the only hope of result-ion.

Yes LO accelerated feature growth is the fact 12 branches of the 18 merged into it. OO has really got the short end of the stick. But 8 is more than enough to stay alive. Yes 2 has placed a foot in each camp.

Phenom if you are lucky Apache open office will die so sorting out the last of the fragmentation problem.
7 Phenom Jul 16th, 2012 at 9:10 am

Diversity is good. People like multiple sources to increase reliability of supply.

Only if every diversified option has its own, unique set of features. That why in real-life vendors advertise.

Here, we have two rather similar products, and no one can tell the real production difference between the two. The only real differences are ideological, and normal people give a deaf bat’s ass for ideologies.

We have only confusion here. Now I give you three guesses who is the happiest of them all.
8 oiaohm Jul 16th, 2012 at 9:47 am

Phenom
“Here, we have two rather similar products, and no one can tell the real production difference between the two.”

Really source material is different between the two products.

lotus symphony source base is in OpenOffice but not in LibreOffice. http://www.hostcult.com/2012/05/apache-openoffice-34-vs-libreoffice-353.html

There is a massive speed boost pulling in symphony.

Interesting is Libreoffice has a lower memory foot print.

http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2012-04-26-ooo-comparison.html

Then libreoffice out of both of them have the most features.

Phenom so yes there is a bit of a hard argument here. At this stage there is not a absolute winner.

Sorry the differences are more than ideological Phenom. As OO and LO mature they will become more there own application.
9 kozmcrae Jul 16th, 2012 at 11:42 am

Phenom is only postulating that the two similar office suites are a drag on development. He has no basis for that allegation. There is really no need to postulate or, pontificate as the Cult of Microsoft often does. Time will tell the true story. From my personal experience I place my bets on Libre Office. But the mechanics of FLOSS will determine the winner not a board of directors with an agenda.

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My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

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