I love the idea of LibreOffice but it really needs to get collaborative features sorted via cloud storage providers or even network shares.
Please No.
With love and respect.
In my line of work we’re constantly changing shared documents, often at the same time. The desktop vanilla version can’t do this yet, so while I can use it happily for personal stuff I haven’t been able to get it to fit in with my job’s workflow yet.
I very much want to get off Office!
Why not? Collaborative editing is extremely useful. I’ve done it at work, with friends, and with my gf.
There’s no reason the government couldn’t own its providers via NextCloud or something.
EDIT: I guess the big, mean old collaborative editing features are out to get us and take away our freedoms and steal our puppies. Collab editing must be Satan’s work and there’s no way any moral person should find it helpful.
They could spend 1~2% of the cost of their microsoft licenses to create their own plugins/development to make the UI more usable for their applications and workers, rather than relying on Microsoft themselves or creating plugins on outdated and proprietary frameworks.
Wouldn’t it be easier to strike a support deal with the libre office developers and just give them the money to do it?
Sure. That is assuming that someone is available on the LibreOffice side to support the ministry for a particular amount, and that the policy related to government procedures can be followed under this agreement.
Pretty sure Collabora (company) offers such services.
The Document Foundation doesn’t actually employ developers. They just oversee and manage the development and direction of LibreOffice.
This is what is needed to push back on Microsoft.
It seems like they are doing this to push back on mono-culture. Probably just to save money really. Using 365 saved our small office a lot of time, but it is pretty expensive since it is a constant subscription. I already switched away from Adobe at to Wondershare for PDF editing since we can get a single purchase from Wondershare and have to pay a subscription to Adobe. I would be tempted to do the same thing with 365 but we do a lot of traveling and the integrated sharepoint files is pretty useful.
Push back against what? All of these countries’ governments moving away from MS are doing it for digital sovereignty, nothing else. They want to be in control of their data.
The dream here, in FOSS terms, is that governments see the massive potential value in using FOSS, and start actively contributing to it.
Imagine if the German or Danish government puts the people on their IT payroll (who are now maintaining Microsoft systems) to maintain FOSS systems. This would be a huge benefit for everyone, if enough big actors do it, it may be what pushes stuff like Microsoft into being a niche service.
People in government IT jobs who maintain Microsoft systems aren’t going to be contributing to FOSS codebases. They’re not developers.
They can report unusual bugs though and SHOULD be competent enough to write good bug reports
I don’t know how many government workers you’ve met, but I wouldn’t have much hope of that haha
Man… every time I use LibreOffice I curse. I’m dyed in the wool pro open source, but LibreOffice has just never cut it for me. I suppose if I had a job to do and that’s what I was given it would work.
Yeah same. I respect the huge amount of work it takes to make a suite like that, but… I’m lucky I’ve worked with Blender a lot to give me a good impression of open source software. If Libre was my first thing I experimented with in the open source world (and I think for many, many people it probably is), I would probably think “wow open source software is a joke, I guess you get what you pay for after all”. It really makes a horrible impression. I wonder why LibreOffice has so many usability pains vs Blender, despite the fact that both applications have very high demand. Maybe it’s just that LibreOffice seems really dull to contribute to?
