Following the example of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which is moving 30,000 PCs from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice, the Danish Ministry of Digitalisation is doing the same. Caroline Stage Olsen, the country’s Digitalisation Minister, plans to move half of the employees to LibreOffice over the summer, and if all goes as expected, the entire […]
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.
That always helps. It also helps politically that M$ is based in a country that’s outraging the Danish people on a fairly regular basis…
same thing with 365 but we do a lot of traveling
Back in 1990-something, I got our office using Ami Pro - it was a vastly superior word processor to anything else available at the time. Then, a couple of years later, we started sharing documents back and forth with business partners via dial-up internet and that was the end of Ami Pro, all our partners used M$ and file format translation / import / export was nigh impossible in those days.
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.
I did this in my personal usage 20 years ago. I even was demonstrating to colleagues at work in 2005 how Open Office was better at integrating large numbers of digital photos into documents than Word was.
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.
That always helps. It also helps politically that M$ is based in a country that’s outraging the Danish people on a fairly regular basis…
Back in 1990-something, I got our office using Ami Pro - it was a vastly superior word processor to anything else available at the time. Then, a couple of years later, we started sharing documents back and forth with business partners via dial-up internet and that was the end of Ami Pro, all our partners used M$ and file format translation / import / export was nigh impossible in those days.
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.
Of course, but it sets an example, proves to people that Linux can be mainstream and usable well beyond the corners where that mindset already exists.
It’s excellent advertising and promotion.
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
I did this in my personal usage 20 years ago. I even was demonstrating to colleagues at work in 2005 how Open Office was better at integrating large numbers of digital photos into documents than Word was.