[jcelerier]

Idk here in France there are cities and state-wide administrations with free/libre stacks based on Linux, LibreOffice, Zimbra and others and things seem to JustWork™. For instance the french Gendarmerie, the cities of Rennes and Arles...

[pyrale]

Arles is getting suckered by Microsoft, sadly [1]. Unfortunately all it takes is one idiot to get in office once to kill this kind of successful initiative that has been running for almost two decades.

[1]: https://larlesienne.info/2022/02/22/la-municipalite-de-carol...

[spoonjim]

Are there any high functioning large companies that use Linux/LibreOffice/Zimbra? I suppose governments rarely aspire to be high functioning.

[quadrifoliate]

Using Libre Office rather than Office 365 is unlikely to be the limiting factor in how fast anything in a government office is going to run.

In fact, I bet you that a major part of the delays in Government are because Tom from IT needs a sign off from three separate people to get a new Office 365 license for Brenda in accounting.

With Libre Office you make that a thing of the past.

[zhte415]

> Tom from IT needs a sign off from three separate people to get a new Office 365 license for Brenda in accounting

That's unlikely, and if so I doubt Libre Office would liberate Brenda. It may be the reverse. On-boarding or moving Brenda between functions would mean provisioning her for internal ID, identity, email/communication, security, network/group access and permissioning, physical device(s), etc. Various parts of Microsoft 365 would just be part of the checklist and deployment, an integral part.

Microsoft make the above very smooth. I don't think someone slapping Libre Office on a PC makes any of that a thing of the past. Any realistic alternative needs to be all the way down the stack.

[hutzlibu]

"Using Libre Office rather than Office 365 is unlikely to be the limiting factor in how fast anything in a government office is going to run."

Depends. When odf would be the standard maybe, but it isn't. Standard is microsoft office, and libre office is not 100% compatible. But you will still have to deal with lots of microsoft documents, from all the other agencies, ordinary people, companies, ..

Meaning, when Munichs government tried to switch to oss a few years ago, they did indeed lost a lot of time with broken documents, templates, layouts etc. so they ultimately switched back (direct microsoft lobbying with even Bill Gates getting personally involved might have played a role, too).

So I am all for an open standard, but this easier said, than done.

[PontifexMinimus]

> Standard is microsoft office

Then change it. By law if need be, and have all government departments go over to Libre Office at the same time.

[eggsome]

They tried that, but the question is how do you write the law? In the end they settled on requiring that govt. departments use ISO standards to store docs (which at the time was only ODF).

Microsoft then tried to get their format ratified as an ISO standard. But everyone complained that their spec did not actually specify how to implement, instead it said things like "In accordance with output from Word 2007". So after a bit of back and forth MS realized that they did not want to _actually_ document what they were doing. The solution? Pack the committee with MS shills to vote yes on every proposal by MS. Urgh.

One of the negative flow on effects was that these new committee members only cared about voting for things that MS had instructed them to vote on - so other standards and issues stalled due to a lack of a quorum. It was super disappointing looking at this from the sidelines at the time.

Here is a link that explains a small part of the history: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2618153/how-microsoft-was-...

[PontifexMinimus]

> but the question is how do you write the law?

I would have defined Libre Office as the reference implementation. Other software is allowed to the extent it reads/writes those files formats correctly.

I would also have mandated open source.

[hutzlibu]

Well, that is one solution, but I would not want to have a urgent problem at that specific time.

[Melatonic]

I haven't had any issues with Libre Office in years. They even have a paid corporate version with (supposedly) good support.

What I have had more incompatibility issues with is Gsuite (or whatever Google is calling it these days) which a LOT of medium sized businesses and school are using now as an office alternative.