Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s most northern state, is starting its switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, and is planning to move from Windows to Linux on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions.
Concerns over data security are also front and center in the Minister-President’s statement, especially data that may make its way to other countries. Back in 2021, when the transition plans were first being drawn up, the hardware requirements for Windows 11 were also mentioned as a reason to move away from Microsoft.
Saunders noted that “the reasons for switching to Linux and LibreOffice are different today. Back when LiMux started, it was mostly seen as a way to save money. Now the focus is far more on data protection, privacy and security. Consider that the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) recently found that the European Commission’s use of Microsoft 365 breaches data protection law for EU institutions and bodies.”
The idea that a state government is unnecessarily at the mercy of any corporation is hard to comprehend. Especially, as in this case, a foreign corporation.
Open source shouldn’t only be the standard for governments. It should be the minimum requirement.
IMO it should be further than that.
Open source software is, more often than not, used as digital infrastructure.
Governments around the world should absolutely be investing in open source software and actively contributing to it.
They do. https://code.mil/
There is a FSFE campaign that claims all publicly-funded institutions should only use Free Software.
Good, we need to stop supporting products that try to strong arm you into a perpetual subscription.
If governments actually employed most of the development teams who build their services, and cut out most of the private middlemen consultants, managers, sales staff etc they could 1) build an engineering and cybersecurity capability without surveillance capitalism, focused on data security and privacy 2) save money 4) create productivity multipliers by unifying and sharing code for common functions across governments around the world 5) return our tax dollars to us through FOSS software that benefit us, instead of enriching big tech corporations who are already richer and more powerful than most nation states.
For example, covid tracking apps — instead of every dumb cunt government paying tens/hundreds of millions for consultants to reinvent the wheel or reskin someone else’s code, they could have had in house devs coordinate common FOSS codebases and collectively saved 80% of the cost. This is the same for most services using proprietary software.
Politicians are criminally corrupt idiots though, so they’ll continue enriching big tech and surveillance capitalism at the expense of civilisation.
If governments actually employed most of the development teams who build their services, and cut out most of the private middlemen consultants, managers, sales staff etc
You mean this? They’ve been working on it for a while, this is about adopting stuff they’ve already done.
For example, covid tracking apps
Germany’s is open source. Developed by Telekom and SAP, most of the money didn’t go towards development (it’s simple enough of an app, after all) but infrastructure and end-user support. You can’t just tell random FLOSS people to deal with 80 million DAUs.
Yes. I’m aware there are a few who appear to be moving in the right direction, but I have strong doubts it’ll become more than an outlier.
You’ve got my vote
Example: https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/05/local_council_tech_struggles/
Maybe if they collectively owned a software company it would be more responsive.
Let me tell you a story about proprietary software:
The German police force have a contract with a software firm that wrote their program to file and archive emergency calls. Basically just a form that goes to a database. Now, one day, an update got pushed. The problem with that update was that the hotkey for quitting out of the current form (q) now also fired when inside an editing field. The software firm did not acknowledge that as a problem and it took months of complaints to fix and it cost the taxpayer around 300,000€ Euros in “maintenance fees”.
As someone who works with government agencies as a software developer: they are absolutely awful.
You’ll get no specification at all, those you do get will change at least three times and every stupid little decision needs at least 20 people from different states, cities or agencies to agree.
Yes, the bug is pretty bad, but I’m also very sure that what you’re describing is not the whole story.
That bug should have been a hotfix. Or a rollback.
You never worked with bureaucracy, did you?
From a technical standpoint, you are absolutely correct, but reality and bureaucracy don’t always match.
I’ve had instances, where we had glaring holes in our security, but were not allowed to fix them, because the datacenter (operated by a public agency) only does deployment in a fixed schedule.
I’ve had officials of some sort who wrote in the contract, that each and every change has to be on the staging environment for at least one week for testing and signoff.
It’s absurd and stupid, but realistically, you often can’t change it.
That’s one of the reasons why dataport (who are going to do the migration as the state’s IT consultant / dev house) was founded in the first place: So that IT can work like IT does and not be beholden to bosses who think in bridge construction terms in one place, and tax collection terms in another. Now those bosses are mere clients of an inter-state agency that does nothing but IT, and IT can speak with authority when it comes to IT matters.
That won’t change a thing, unfortunately.
My employer currently works with a bunch of agencies and I’ve been involved with some of them. I can deliver the best product ever with the best process and lightning fast deployment - if the client doesn’t get its shit together, you won’t deliver on time/in budget.
Anecdote I’m currently part of: an agency bought a new app, we’re 98% done, we could go live on Tuesday. But there’s one agency/department/guy (I seriously don’t know) who has to confirm that the data of our staging system reached their system and was processed correctly. This agency however doesn’t react. At all. And because it’s something like 5mm outside of the jurisdiction of the agency that is our direct client, there’s nothing we can do. So the system is just sitting there waiting.
I could go on and on. Dataport is a good idea, but if all their clients are overworked, understaffed or straight up incompetent, there’s not much they could do.
But there’s one agency/department/guy (I seriously don’t know) who has to confirm that the data of our staging system reached their system and was processed correctly.
There’s no “their system”: The boxes under the desks of civil servants are managed by dataport, talking to backend infrastructure managed by dataport.
If there’s some new administrative procedure agencies or ministries want their civil servants to do and it can’t be implemented because it’s under-specced or just incoherent then dataport gets to send that spec back saying “fix your shit”, if it’s implemented as specced and people complain and want a rework then dataport can say “well it’s your budget, not ours”. If they do that all the time at some point the court of accounts will take them aside for a polite conversation. Just thing one thing, making IT external to whatever it is that the agency is doing, provides accountability.
That is: The solution isn’t so much to eradicate bullshit but to make sure that it stays where it’s generated.
but if all their clients are overworked, understaffed or straight up incompetent
I think you don’t understand. It’s not about “physically reached the machine under the desk” it’s “was processed correctly by a system”. Operations can only tell if a technical error occurred, they have no idea what the data is supposed to look like. So dataport can do jack shit.
IT de facto already is outsourced, there’s hardly any internal IT left, simply because the pay is shit. I’d get at least 1k less after taxes if I’d do the same work for the agency, not a contractor.
And if you think his joke is funny in this context, it’s not. I work with these agencies everyday. They are structurally broken, but most people there are really passionate about what they’re doing.
This isn’t going to happen.
This headline comes up every year that it’s time for the government to negotiate contracts with Microsoft. Once they get the best price they think they can, they will accept it and issue a news release that “we’re staying in Windows after all”.
It’s lame, but it’s what is going to happen.
I remember some city in Germany actually doing it some years back and then eventually giving up and switching back.
googles
It’s a little unclear exactly what software was and wasn’t switched, but sounds like it’s Munich, and now they’re back on LibreOffice again.
By 2006, the city had started a concerted effort to move away from Microsoft products and onto Linux. Fast forward to 2013 and 80% of all workstations in the government and related organizations were running LiMux. However, Microsoft’s Windows and Office services were still used.
As we reported back in 2017, the government made a controversial decision to abandon open source and return to Windows.
A newly elected government in Munich, Germany has said it will aim to use open source solutions in its offices. In doing so, the government is moving away from Windows and Microsoft Office despite committing to the products several years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
LiMux was a project launched by the city of Munich in 2004 in order to replace the software on its desktop computers, migrating from Microsoft Windows to free software based on Linux.[citation needed] By 2012, the city had migrated 12,600 of its 15,500 desktops to LiMux. In November 2017 Munich City Council resolved to reverse the migration and return to Microsoft Windows-based software by 2020.[1][2][3] In May 2020, it was reported that the newly elected politicians in Munich, while not going back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux wholesale, will prefer Free Software for future endeavours.[4]
EDIT: I guess I should have just read the other comment responding to the parent, which mentioned Munich.
Amd just after Munich announced it will go back to Windows, Microsoft decided to move its German central to Munich. What a coincidence.
Munich did exactly that in 2017, so let’s see how far Sleswig-Holstein is willing to go, hopefully they won’t be falling for Microsofts sweet talk.
The reason Munich switched back to Windows, when users were just fine working with Limux, was a corrupt politician who ordered the return to windows, probably pocketing a hefty bribe in the process.
Source?
https://www.zdnet.de/88202452/stadt-muenchen-erwaegt-abkehr-von-linux/
The article from 2014 explains how this was mostly a political quarrel, with a former administration transitioning away from Microsoft (which as a US corporation has no business in any government administration of another country), and the conservatives pushing (under a “social democrat” mayor, admittedly) to go back to MS against technological advice.
Im Stadtrat hingegen steht den Berichten zufolge eine fraktionsübergreifende Mehrheit hinter LiMux. Bettina Messinger, Sprecherin der SPD-Fraktion für Personal, Verwaltung und IT, sagte Heise Online, dass man keine neue Haltung zu dem Thema habe. Sie bezeichnete die Umstellung auf Linux als „mutige Entscheidung“. Kritische Stimmen und Beschwerden seien im EDV-Bereich nichts Ungewöhnliches. Man müsse LiMux und das Umfeld nun stetig verbessern und nutzerfreundlicher gestalten. Unter anderem sei dafür mehr IT-Personal in der Verwaltung nötig.
Auch die CSU-Fraktion unterstützt LiMux weiter. Deren IT-Experte Otto Seidl nannte Schmidts Kritik „eine sachfremde Einzelmeinung eines Juristen“. Die Grünen warnen Heise zufolge vor einem „teuren Schildbürgerstreich“, sollte die Stadt zu Microsoft zurückkehren. Demnach wollen die Abgeordneten in einer Ausschusssitzung klären, woher die Beschwerden stammen.
In other words: the “manyfold complaints” were an “ad populum” argument without sources and were most likely made up.
!remindme 1 fiscal quarter
This is the sexiest thing Germany has done since that German couple that drives the Porsche in Super Troopers.
Good!!! I hope other governments follow.
I genuinely hate AI art
This one is terrible because it’s like a montage of a penguin colony over a generic historic painting of a port city. Very little creativity and quality control. I’d just combine some actual photo of the Kiel port and penguins jumping out of water. (Not necessarily these two)
What you actually want is a nice picture of either a market place or seafront promenade and a fat and content (as usual) Tux munching a Fischbrötchen
Cool but that would require some cultural awareness, and the reporters cannot be bothered.
Cool but that would require some cultural awareness, and the reporters cannot be bothered.
You mean collage? I agree. I think your suggestion would work best if it was also made to look like an obvious collage. If it was accurately photoshopped to look like the penguins were actually there it would look silly.
Damn I didn’t even notice. Guess I don’t really look at the pictures.
Right? The rash of AI images used in journalism is genuinely troubling. It seems like at least 50% of news article thumbnails I see are AI these days.
And, like…are those penguins in the back cheering with human arms? Is that an orca jumping out of the water? What the fuck is going on.
It’s the most sophisticated thing about the whole article, unfortunately.
Good. Now, you want to make a bigger impact? Do the schools.
This might actually happen in Germany
Wasn’t it Munich who did that a few years back, only to backtrack sometime later?
Yes, it was Munich. And all things considered it worked quite well for a while.
After a while AFAIK the then new mayor called himself a “Microsoft fan” and tried to get Microsoft to build their new German HQ in Munich. So I am pretty sure there is no connection whatsoever between canceling Limux and switching back to Windows and Microsoft building a huge campus in Munich Freimann…
I fully expect this to get backtracked almost immediately. From my experience most government employees can barely handle a browser upgrade with a UI change, and they will 100% throw a collective fit if their Word and/or Outlook goes away.
It’s not just office, SH and many other parts of the German government have been slowly replacing the entire O365 suite with OpenDesk, which is an open source product based on Matrix, Jitsi, LibreOffice, and a few other tools.
The goal is to have a fully integrated solution for calender, chat, calls, documents, cloud storage, etc.
My employer is developing parts of that solution and we recently switched our internal communication over to it, and tbh, it’s working really well.
Now is the perfect point in time to do it, with the GDPR ruling regarding O365 and Microsoft fumbling the migration between old teams and new teams.
Which is good, since M$ Office is still one of (if not the) biggest security holes in all of software due to its macros and how no one uses them securely.
Also also doing things the OS way will lead to less changes in the long run since Microsoft can and will change their layouts as they please, but a well maintained FOSS-fork can stay one way indefinitely.
You are right. But what epic dunces.
Employer could pass the savings onto the staff with a payrise though.
“Staff who learn to use these new Linux applications will receive a bonus/payrise. Staff who do not will go to corner and wear the special hat”
Eh, it’s civil servants. They’ll be sent to training, if it turns out they can’t be trained they’ll have choice between quitting or working where their qualifications suffice. Have them walk dikes to find rabbit burrows if need be.
I think trying to sell a switch to opensource as a saving is wrong on two counts…
Firstly it just sets the platform up for hatred. “We know you guys like expensive wine at the Christmas party, but this year we decided to get cheap-but-still-ok wine! Yaay, go team!”.
Secondly, any savings should be poured straight back into training and support. Users should be able to ask dumb questions like “how do I create a new word document” and get a more or less instant response.
Unrelated to the question but on the picture:
The AI nicely drew a german city but … put the naziflag on the ships Rather than the current german flag.
Why is that image even there? It’s not in the original article unless my adblocker is removing it for some reason.
EDIT: before anyone states the obvious, yes, I know how OG metatags work. What I’m asking is why would they chose that particular image, with the penguins and all, to accompany an article like that, and not, say, just a regular stock image of a German city?
Even stranger, the filename in the URL implies that this was potentially even intended: https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/04/04/shutterstock_kiel.jpg Almost makes me wonder if some intern put an AI image there for shits and giggles to see if anyone notices.
Finally, where exactly do you see any Nazi flags? All I can see is a red, white, and black livery, which ARE the colors that the Nazis used, but not in that arrangement. There are no swastikas anywhere (as far as I can see), so it seems as if this rather the flag of the German Empire, which also used the same colors, but predates the Nazis by a good 60 years.
Its a meta property in the HTML. Viisible to software, but not shown in the article.
Afaik, it was the flag of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1935 (so before the Swastika flag).
It’s actually way older. It appeared first as official flag in 1867 for the north German federation, was adopted in 1871 to be the flag of the German Empire and was no longer in official use in1919 (albeit nationalist groups kept using it).
After that, you’re right.
More Info here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_German_Empire
A stock image of Kiel is really not out of place for an article about Schleswig-Holstein, it being our capital and all. It’s also a fleet base. And you can find vaguely similar towers there.
What doesn’t make sense is the rest: The penguins, the what galleons I think with Imperial livery, Schwarz-Rot-Gold in combination with Imperial livery, what looks like a Lübeck flag (of all cities!) but rotated, and whatever the other flag is supposed to be. This is Kiel’s flag, for reference. Oh: Half-timbered houses. Those look like copy+pasted out of Swabia or something.
Okay but the penguins do make sense, right? Penguins are like the mascot of linux
Or more noticably all the southern hemisphere penguins
I wonder what they will choose for their base. I was surprised LiMux was based off Debian since Suse is headquartered in Luxembourg City. I personally would welcome a large organization choosing Suse products as we need more competition for RHEL (which would be a huge boon in productivity since we won’t need like 3 projects to spend a decent amount of time repackaging RHEL).
According to an old interview, pretty much whatever: They’re saying “five big distributions are suitable”.
They’re starting the switch with apps, not the OS. From a technical POV it’d be nice to see NixOS as it’s devops / managed deployment heaven. It also happens to be European and, just like Debian, it’s a community distro.
For a project of this size, doubly and triply if it gets even more states as users, it absolutely does make sense to have your own release channel, have a team working on nothing but pushing patches (security and otherwise) onto an LTS branch and upstream as well as integration testing for the precise desktop you’re shipping to users: The states are paying them to support a desktop, not an OS to run whatever on.
Nix does have an interesting package manager.
The states are paying them to support a desktop, not an OS to run whatever on.
Don’t they need money to fund both aspects? Is there any support to lean on someone goes with Nix?
A lot of governments in the US pretty much go through Microsoft for simplicity. There’s a lot of software obtained from a single vendor. I suppose that’s why rhel is so popular.
Dataport is big enough (5200 employees) to support that kind of thing themselves, and they precisely are the single vendor for the participating states (it’s an inter-state public corporation). More than twice the employees Suse has, quarter the size of RedHat.
Good to know. I did not realize that this team was this large.
Redhat and Debian are separate projects, tmk.
Maybe soon a unified CSV handling might be possible.
I can confidently say that CSV support is one of those problems that even the brightest computer scientists will be pondering for the decades to come.
Supporting CSVs sounds like an easy problem, but it’s not. It’s like a whole different complexity type. Time complexity, space complexity, and now, the dreaded subclass between spec complexity and organisational complexity.
You can’t just make the users agree which delimiter to use and how quotes are supposed to work. That’s nearly impossible. No no no.
Commas are too common, we should go with semicolons. And
\n
and UTF-8 by default. And a header that defines changes from defaults, plus metadata such as data logger model and settings. These are some significant quality-of-life improvements but I’d guess it will take another file extension before that happens.I just don’t like that CSV exists as a format and has no standards currently. If you remove commas from CSV then you’re taking the C out of CSV.
SCSV (semicolon separated values) at least sounds like an upgrade to CSV. Or maybe just use something that is flexible but is standard like JSON?
Yeah, SCSV would work, with a .ssv file extension for FAT compatibility.
JSON is overkill, tabular data is often recorded by 8-bit devices. Yes, you can use a dishwasher to cook salmon, but building a dishwasher is difficult and it can break in many more places. Each piece of salmon also needs to be carefully wrapped.
Yeah, I get what you mean. I’m so overprotective of my dishwasher I actually pre-scrub plates very quickly so not to clog the dishwasher (which is pretty similar to sanitizing inputs for putting them in a database I guess). 😊 It’s still much faster than doing the dishes by hands.
But the point is something simple can run on a simple device with minimal supervision.
At that point why not use TSV?
I love this, but having used ms office extensively for work, we all know it has many more features. Libreoffice isn’t a drop in replacement, but maybe with the increased user base it can become one.
It really depends on the needs.
When my entire company (10k employees) switched to LibreOffice, it was almost fine. There was like 50 ppl who were frustrated at breaking changes. But many adapted and it was a pretty clean transition.
As for LibreCalc, fuck that. What a nightmare. Employees resorted to creating Google accounts to use Google Sheets instead. We still don’t have a solution, and if one particular director gets his way, that whole department might switch back to Windows just for Excel.
Meanwhile another german city (munich) is going back to MS
but maybe with the increased user base it can become one.
You think the state will contribute? I highly doubt that. At best it will be gov specific functionalities.
Well, Munich decided to switch back around the time Microsoft was negotiating about building their Germany HQ there. There have been allegations of backroom dealings, but I dunno if there’s ever been anything proven. There is a very big, very shiny building with a sign that says Microsoft near where I lived when I was there, though.
Though I also read some articles about them partially going back to FOSS, so who knows what they’ll do in the end.
You’d need a massive increase in tech support. Likely more than you’d spend on ms in the first place. Seems a political gambit or a political gaff.
LibreOffice is perfectly fine for your Dear Princess Celestia letters (which 99 percent of Word users do is write simple letters), but once you start doing more advanced formatting (such as tables and text boxes and other embeddings), LibreO really doesn’t like it. And good luck if you have to convert such a Word document.
This is disingenuous and misleading.
Yes compatibility with Word with complex formatting is problematic, but is that really libreoffice or is it Ms office?
For documents drafted in LibreOffice complex formatting is rock solid. It’s patently false to say its just generally inferior to Word in this regard.
Yeah it is always funny when people shit on non-MS office suites for not being 100% comaltible with MS Office, when it is Microsoft who doesn’t stick to the international standards.
How can they be international standards if they don’t include Microsoft? Doesn’t Microsoft and all its employees count as part of this global international world? See, Microsoft is the victim here.
edit /s /s /s /s /s /s
You might want to look into what standardization means.
Start here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for_Standardization
And here more on our specific case: https://www.iso.org/standard/66363.html
Imo companies who hinder or harm standardization (Microsoft and Apple are the leaders here) are literally among the worst things on this earth.
I do lots of advanced formatting in LibreOffice and it works a LOT better than Microsoft Office ever has, mostly because the functionality is consistently found in the same dialogues across versions. Also, references are not permanently broken like those in documents submitted by my windows using colleagues.
Malarkey. It does give with tables and boxes. I’ve been digitizing my home be brew ttrpg system slowly over the last few years, using libreoffice. Zero issues, zero difficulty.
And I’ve now written three novels, a novella, and many short stories with it. The native epub output isn’t perfect, but it does fine for alpha/beta reading. And that’s the only flaw it has for prose.
I’ve converted older word documents in the process of the ttrpg formatting, btw, with no issues.
The word processing part is all I really use, so I can’t say much about anything else in the suite, but librewriter is fully capable.
Does Word like advanced formatting? I’ve found LaTeX easier to use for typesetting, and I don’t like LaTeX.
Wait a second lemme just quickly program my letter
You don’t compose your letter in word either… Nor do most people need “advance” formating for letter. I doubt you are formating floating subfigures, aligning equations, and organizing citations for every email.
I’m not knowledgeable enough to know if that’s true or not, but having it be pushed to the test with serious work at that scale will hopefully get those compatibility issues ironed out quickly. Anyone can contribute after all, and no doubt the government will have programmers that are looking to help.
That’s a blatant lie. LibreOffice Writer works better than M$ Word for every single purpose and application.
Oh hey, I’m from Schleswig-Holstein! That’s neat! I mean libre office looks like shit (they probably never saw a UX designer and high DPI scaling has been broken since like forever) but at least its not Microsoft. And if its functionally the same, why not? So yeah, good news!
Writer and Calc look almost identical to ms word and excel on my Debian 12 system… Congratulations by the way, you should be proud of your state!
As someone using LibreOffice at home and MS Office at work (both daily): nope, unfortunately, Calc is pretty shit compared to Excel. It’s enough for my personal needs but I wouldn’t want to rely on it professionally.
Good to know, maybe it’s just the port then and their website (shudders) has been a year or so since I tried it. Yeah, I think it’s a good move and if it convinces other States even better.
Yeah, check it out. I’m not a power user of spreadsheets, so I can’t address what the previous commenter said about functionality but the UI looks good on mine and my girlfriend’s systems. She’s been using Calc to run her catering business for over a year without any complaints, so I would feel good about recommending it.
Eh I don’t think it’s that bad and with the dark theme and breeze icons it looks amazing
If you have to tweak it to make it good, it’s bad.
If you go by that logic, most things in FOSS would be considered bad, which is not true.
Well, most things are bad from UX perspective, it’s just that people who use FOSS are used to that.
That’s why only enthusiasts usually use FOSS.
Before you start throwing around the five or so exceptions that exist, I’m well aware, but it’s just that - exceptions.
Damn windows and Mac are dog water then
Both work out of the box really well. Sure, Windows will break inevitably, but it’s usually few months before it does. Office looks really good. And that’s all that matters.
You don’t have to convince me, by the way, I’ve been using Linux for 15 years. But I’ve been in IT pretty much all of my adult life.
Until developers make stuff really good looking out of the box, FOSS will be still the ugly thing no one except IT people want to use.
I use libreoffice on hidpi screen, some even with fractional scaling, and it seems to work fine by default. What are the problems that you have encountered?