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by mrwyz 698 days ago
Excellent, good for them! I don't understand why other governments don't follow suit, or why people are opposed to it. There might be some valid cons about requiring the use of FOSS (e.g. LibreOffice vs MS Office), but the part about requiring government sponsored code to be released as open source is clearly good for governments. Having the code freely open is good leverage against greed and good insurance for vendor failures.
2 comments

There’s no workable Excel alternative, FOSS, OSS or paid. You can deal with the word processor and presentation software, but Excel is alone in a class for itself.

Also not sure how you deal with LDAP/Kerberos - is samba good enough for large deployments?

FreeOffice PlanMaker is an Excel clone for Linux and Mac. Not sure what corner cases it doesn't cover though.
Hem... I fail to see a single reasons to use a spreadsheet or create slides in PowerPoint alike software actually...

We can compute easily in R, Python, Clojure, also with some wrappers from Jupyter to R-Studio to Clerk for those who want it, personally I present in org-mode (dslide) with easy and no extra overhead. Maybe it's about time to teach administrative people how to use a computer...

Probably makes it harder to outsource inflated projects to contractors and makes them more publicly liable because now the public can audit them.