Comment by kube-system
4 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.
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.
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.
> Certainly the people buying software know best what their requirements are.
I doubt it. The people who are going to use the software are the ones who know what the requirements are. The people buying it should be asking the users, but rarely do.
4 replies →
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...