[ngrilly]

LibreOffice is great, but not supporting multiple users simultaneously editing the same document is a serious limitation compared to proprietary solutions such as MS Office and Google Workspace.

Also, replacing Windows by Linux and MS Office by LibreOffice is only the surface of the problem. What about replacing Entra (identity and access management), Intune (endpoint management), file sharing (OneDrive), email and calendar (Exchange Online)?

Russia, China, and India have invested a lot in developing their equivalent of 365 and Google Workspace (mainly via Yandex, Alibaba, and Zoho). Europe needs to accelerate on this.

Edit: There is some progress on LibreOffice real-time collaboration:

https://zetaoffice.net/

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/13/libreoffice_wasm_zeta...

[zevon]

Live collaboration is not an MS Office native functionality either (needs OneDrive / SharePoint as a backend). If your org uses traditional file shares or some cloud storage/sync tool that is not MS, you're out of luck.

There are tools like Collabora (built on LibreOffice) that work very similar to what you would get from MS. Collabora, for example, can also be integraded with Nextcloud and Owncloud.

[dismalaf]

Is simultaneous editing really that important? Especially in a government context? My experience with older office workers is that all of them use ancient, offline versions of Word anyway...

[ngrilly]

Not all office workers are old. Some are young and want to use modern collaboration tools. Even government workers. I think real-time collaborative editing is a chicken-and-egg. You don't know you need it until you start using it. I'm using this often in meetings where the participants all work on the same document, usually some notes/memo or spreadsheet. But I agree that for the note taking use case, a full-blown word processor is not necessary.

[welshwelsh]

Lack of features is not an excuse for a government to adopt proprietary software.

Surely, the Danish government can figure out how to support real-time collaboration in LibreOffice.

[bigstrat2003]

It doesn't need an excuse; it's a fully valid reason. Using proprietary software is a perfectly valid choice to make.

[louiskottmann]

Chosing to pay millions when it is not necessary is definitely not a valid choice. It is at best stupidity, at worse corruption.

In my experience in the public sector in France, I have seen these decisions taken to advance someone's career.

For example, a first year free means a purchase person will get their promotion on incredible YoY progress.

[kube-system]

Deploying a free tool that doesn't solve an organizations problems isn't a valid choice. I'm tired of open source advocates hand-waving away the reasons people choose other software. For most organizations, software is not a big cost, labor is. It often makes sense to throw a million dollars at a piece of software to make people's job easier, because that can translate to tens of millions in labor.

[louiskottmann]

That is stretching the subject beyond reasonable. Proprietary software as a general endeavor is not an invalid business and nobody is saying that here.

LibreOffice is close enough to Microsoft's offering that surely it makes sense accross the many EU states to stop spending millions on it, and spend a few to close the gap, saving even more millions in the future.

[kube-system]

Respectfully, I think it's a bit of a Dunning–Kruger effect for random internet commenters to presume they know what is "close enough" to meet the requirements for the many thousands of different day jobs that people have across the different governments of dozens of different countries.

Certainly the people buying software know best what their requirements are.

[dismalaf]

Let's be real... Tons of governments employ people just to boost employment numbers. Government staff are almost always simply a cost, governments don't need to be profitable. They extract taxes and then spend it. And I think a lot of countries would prefer to spend more on salaries than on software licenses going to a different country...

[mistrial9]

In English the word "free" is apparently another difficulty. The technical Four Freedoms are not at all about the money. Money can be exchanged between willing partners of course. That includes government. The means and methods of closed source, and the means and methods of "corruption" are real.

[toomuchtodo]

I believe the Danish gov is roughly spending 50M EUR/year to MS, certainly you can get the features needed paying for dev time for an open source project with some of that spend.

[kube-system]

Not that it is insurmountable -- but the difficulty with adopting open source more broadly often isn't a financial issue, but organizational. A successful enterprise software deployment consists of a lot more than simply paying developers. You need the correct management in place to ensure the developers are building the right features, to ensure they meet your organizations needs in terms of compliance, deployment, support, ensure your users understand how to use the product, etc. Organizations that are familiar with software development can often do this, but these types of projects are sometimes beyond the reach of the expertise of other organizations.

[toomuchtodo]

Absolutely, management and maturity are key to success in this regard.

[wizzwizz4]

Collabora Office is a (somewhat-proprietary) LibreOffice fork/patchset with that functionality. If you want multiuser support, it exists.

[trelane]

That are also a, if not the, major contributor to LibreOffice.

[fakedang]

Can we talk about the LibreOffice UI/UX? It's shit. It doesn't feel like MS Office, but like some Frankenstein's version of it. I would much rather prefer if OnlyOffice were pushed as the open source standard for office apps instead of Libre. OnlyOffice mirrors everything that MS Office offers, the only difference being the lack of VBA coding (instead replaced by JS coding).

[marci]

> What about replacing Entra (identity and access management), Intune (endpoint management), file sharing (OneDrive), email and calendar (Exchange Online)?

Simple, switch when they find something that fits their need. They don't have to switch everything at the same time. And it's not just about switching technologies, it's probably also about fighting against pushbacks ("lobbying", etc), dealing with training, and other unforseen (at least to the layman) things that happens when a huge entity starts pulling away from microsoft. I don't think there are degooglify/demicrosoftify-yourself manuals at the state level.