UK government switches to OpenDocument
Big news all around: http://ur1.ca/gj4hk
(I used a shortened URL because this forum hates underscores)
I live in London, UK. I have read this before, it seems great.
A few quotes that I like
"lock-in to propriety vendors"
"Get their work done without having to buy a particular propriety brand."
The next step will be for them to use GNU/Linux. They would probabaly use one with lots of propriatory blobs, but that is much better than windows. They would probabaly use Ubuntu or Debian.
Hey, as long as they save in ODF and PDF in the ISO standardized PDF/A or PDF/X, then I don't care if they use Microsoft Office or not.
If they do use GNU/Linux, I would guess it would be Ubuntu for the support and with Canonical being a local company.
If you were a British citizen, you would probably care that hundreds of millions of tax money goes to Microsoft (rather than probably far less that would go to local companies that would help the administration migrate to LibreOffice).
I am not exaggerating the number: since 2010 the Great Britain has spent 210 millions £ (243 millions €, 345 millions $) for the sole Microsoft office suite!
And that is just one reason. A better one is to not easily let the NSA infiltrate the army/police/whatever computers whenever they want. I know, the British administration is the little dog of the USA and it does not seem to care to be controlled by them... but I doubt the citizens really approve it!
If they went with LibreOffice, wouldn't the money be going towards a German non-profit? Either way, the money isn't supporting a British company.
Not really, unless they decided to buy German support. I'm sure one can find British LibreOffice support if so inclined, much more so if you say here's £100,000 for implementing this or that feature. That's one of the major perks of free software.
Indeed. And a significant portion of the money, spent at the beginning of the transition, would go to training employees (essential to a good migration and *local*).
Hopefully some of that money could go towards updating the ugly and outdated interface of LO. I'm not saying to copy MS Office, but at least make it more appealing to look at.
Afaik the new release contains some modern "flat icons".
Maybe it will improve a little bit.
Indeed. The "Flat Icons" arrived in LbreOffice 4.2. Very GNOME 3-like: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Whiteboards/Flat_icon_set
I am a member!
If using 4.2 already, just install libreoffice-style-sifr (from https://launchpad.net/~libreoffice/+archive/ppa ) and configure LibO to use it: Tools -> Options -> LibreOffice -> View -> User interface, icons...
I bet that PPA is FaiF; I wouldn't expect TDF to be naughty.
THE NSA will still be able to infiltrate if they use windows, and changing the GNU/linux would be quite a big thing, quite expensive
>GNU/linux would be quite a big thing, quite expensive
Yeah, almost as expensive in the short run as not changing and infinitely cheaper in the long run.
It's really the fallout of a (IIRC) 2012 consultation on what sort of standards the UK Government should use. FSFE sent a mailing asking people to write in. The conclusion was open standards first.
The UK, like the rest of the EU, has a large part of its private/real economy made up of SMEs (Small to Medium Enterprises) and so it's really a no brainer on a pork barrel like basis for the UK Government to give UK (and therefore EU) businesses a cut of their contract budgets. Open standards are the only way to go if you want to do that.
Besides, with the EU Competition Commissioner investigating Microsoft for stacking the committee that voted OOXML a standard, the UK Government was unlikely to adopt it.
Another factor is the UK has had stringent cuts and there's nothing like being short of the money to throw the economic inefficiency of the proprietary software business models into stark relief. When the cost of producing proprietary software is at most 5% of the license fee then their business model is so easily open to price competition.
Of course, as RMS is keen to point out, we have to teach economic and other convenience converts (e.g. super computers, mainframe, server room / data center, and embedded where GNU/Linux is endemic) the meaning of the freedoms.
Sadly, I think forum users need to realise that this has got nothing to do with "open government", "free software", "GNU/Linux" etc ... and also that the headline on the Register article is misleading.
Francis Maude is a leading Tory MP whos remit at the Cabinet Office is to make so-called "efficiency savings" in the civil service, a code word that we all know means cuts.
The document is a *reccomendation* on documents that are exchanged in Government, not an actual decision that will start pushing the Govenment towards software freedom.
Software and IT provisions/spending in government is extremely profitable and surrounded by bullshit, corruption and lies. Maybe as part of an "efficiency campaign", Maude may be going after some of the more outrageous practices, but that does not make him a freind of the free software movement.
A former managing director of Morgan Stanley, a director at Asda and at Salomon Brothers duing the mid 1990's (not a good time for Salomon), this guy is not to be trusted, he's speaking Tory code for cuts and austerity imposed because multi-millionaires like him who caused the problems want to keep their power and position.
Sorry to be a bit ad hominem, but this guy is not working against the "corporate machine", he is part of it.