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Comment by welshwelsh

3 days ago

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.

15 comments

welshwelsh

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bigstrat2003  3 days ago

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

  • louiskottmann  3 days ago

    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  3 days ago

      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.

      8 replies →

  • mistrial9  3 days ago

    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  3 days ago

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  3 days ago

    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.