Austria's Armed Forces Switch To LibreOffice (heise.de) 42
alternative_right writes: Austria's armed forces have switched from Microsoft's Office programs to the open-source LibreOffice package. The reason for this is not to save on software license fees for around 16,000 workstations. "It was very important for us to show that we are doing this primarily (...) to strengthen our digital sovereignty, to maintain our independence in terms of ICT infrastructure and (...) to ensure that data is only processed in-house," emphasizes Michael Hillebrand from the Austrian Armed Forces' Directorate 6 ICT and Cyber.
This is because processing data in external clouds is out of the question for the Austrian Armed Forces, as Hillebrand explained on ORF radio station O1. It was already apparent five years ago that Microsoft Office would move to the cloud. Back then, in 2020, the decision-making process for the switch began and was completed in 2021.
This is because processing data in external clouds is out of the question for the Austrian Armed Forces, as Hillebrand explained on ORF radio station O1. It was already apparent five years ago that Microsoft Office would move to the cloud. Back then, in 2020, the decision-making process for the switch began and was completed in 2021.
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Toss another shrimp on the barbie for me!
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Re:An entity in the US of A won't entertain this.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah, it won't come to that. Microsoft will just wait for them to get a new CTO, and then offer them a highly discounted Microsoft Office licensing package. We've seen this story before many times on Slashdot, it usually ends the same way every time.
Re:An entity in the US of A won't entertain this.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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So.... what you're saying is that Microsoft would need to brib... er... "lobby" some higher level government officials to get this ruling changed? They've had no problem doing that in the past, but Austria is pretty small potatoes to their overall business model so they'll probably ignore this for now.
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Not all leaders take bribes. Even the ones that do, may have limits to the type of behavior they can be bribed into. They may care more about the sovereignty or welfare of the nation.
I realize this is a foreign concept in US politics, but we are talking about countries where that kind of behavior is at least not actively encouraged and excused by the social/media and large chunks of the voters.
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Re:An entity in the US of A won't entertain this.. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is different. It's not financial like Munich was. This is digital sovereignty. You can't buy your way into that.
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Indeed. Corrupting this decision would require a coup now. Also note that the decision was made 5 years ago and MS had ample time. And whatever they tried failed.
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Where is the like button? (Score:3)
Oh yeah, wrong environment. There should be a way to like an article.
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There should be a way to like an article.
Ummm... I think you just did.
What's left of this place requires thought and words to keep it alive. I think that introducing a facile click on a "thumbs up" icon would be the end of Slashdot.
Personally, I don't care that you like or don't like a summary or an article - I want to know why. Even when the answer seems obvious - as in this case - sometimes people have surprising and stimulating things to say.
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Ok, yeah, that's fair enough. Point taken.
I personally think that Microsoft Office is way over valued. I have a license for Office 2000, and had been using that way beyond its sell-by date [1] before switching to LibreOffice, with which I've been very happy.
I'm aware that the web version of MS Office is technically free, but I prefer to have my bits local and LibreOffice fits well into my workflow. In my opinion, there's no technical reason to use MS Office anymore, except that large entities tend to fal
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I agree with you regarding MS Office. "Free as in beer" is dodgy at the best of times, but when it's only available on someone else's hardware then it's a hard "No" from me. But "free as in speech" AND it runs on my own computer? I'm in!
My wife is OK with Write, but she can't stand Calc - she's used to Excel and finds the LibreOffice spreadsheet impossible to use. She bought probably the last version of Office available on disk, and it runs without ever needing a network connection. For her personal needs s
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I can see where Excel might be a special case, as there are people who really use a large number of its features, which don't necessarily translate to Calc. I'm glad your wife found a solution, and hopefully she won't get stuck when Microsoft changes the file format or something.
Another reason for having the bits local, I'm really uncomfortable with my content being solely in the cloud. I do occasionally use the free cloud version of Visio (for probably similar reasons why your wife uses Excel -- a long h
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Excel vs Calc is a battle with no heroes. Both have bad interfaces. Both use bad macro programming languages. Both are missing inexplicable functions, though Excel is missing fewer obvious ones that you would want than Calc is so I guess there's a slight edge there, and of course LIVE PIVOT TABLES are massively important to many spreadsheet users and that's an obvious Excel win.
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I wasn't aware that Calc didn't do live pivot tables. Heck, even I've done that in various jobs. I'm working a project right now that requires we pick up a huge spreadsheet, pivot and burst.
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Calc will generate pivot tables, but not with a live WYSIWYG interface where you can tweak it as you go. It creates a new tab in your sheet after you fill in a dialog which is static, so if you want a current one or want it to be slightly different, you have to create it all over again.
I hear that these days it handles very large files OK, so IMO this is the last major feature needed before it can really be taken seriously as an Excel replacement.
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There should be a way to like an article.
There is... Slashdot's Firehose:
https://m.slashdot.org/firehos... [slashdot.org]
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Up/down votes are massively abused elsewhere. Mainly to down vote a post into oblivion.
If LibreOffice the main app dujour (Score:2)
Re:If LibreOffice the main app dujour (Score:4, Insightful)
Then you might as well run LibreOffice on a vanilla bare bones Debian install
It wouldn't surprise me to find that what you suggest is the next step. Not necessarily on "bare bones Debian" though - there's no need to be masochistic about the thing... ;-).
More seriously though, you're right in suggesting that they really should be getting rid of Windows altogether. I think that transition would receive a lot less push-back if they chose a more fully-featured DE that looks and feels more like Windows.
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Given that our military is starting to wean itself off American planes, subs, etc, perhaps Carney would be amenable to switching us over to Linux as part of the effort. It's possible that he's not even aware of this possibility and its advantages, so someone should mention it to him.
If the military IT folks are as good as you remember, they'd likely jump at the chance. Nobody who's good at IT trusts Windows, and I imagine the best of them also don't even like it much.
If Canadian Armed Forces switched to Lin
Re: If LibreOffice the main app dujour (Score:2)
Human nature is always the first and main consideration.
So many, so wrong (Score:1)
1. Austria is the other side of Eurasia from Australia
2. Y'all are just fine with no privacy at all, and (if you're American), Russian hackers playing with your personal and financial data, right?
And the difference between timesharing on someone else's mainframe, and storing data in "the cloud" is?
The most important reason (Score:4, Insightful)
... to ensure that data is only processed in-house ...
The cost savings and digital sovereignty are great bonuses - but for a military, keeping the data secure in-house is, on its own, a sufficient justification.
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The reaility is there are unlikely to be any cost savings, it may even cost more overall. If you go down this path for cost saving benefits you will be sorely disappointed.
Fair enough - I can see that cost savings might not be a valid selling point, at least in the short term.. I wonder, though, about the long term.
Seven to ten years out, there might be significant savings. A lot could happen during that time that would make Windows and its direct descendants either unavailable, unsuitable, or more unsafe than Windows is even now. Then, moving to Linux might turn out to have been a smart bet.
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I always felt the slide transitions in LibreOffice impress, since around the OpenOffice.org fork to LibreOffice, were far better than PowerPoint.
PowerPoint was always the "joke" product in MS Office, never polished so there were always reasons to upgrade.
Glad open source focuses on quality every release, not revenue from the next release.
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I'm not big on that side of things with presentation software, you can do motion paths and that kind of stuff, don't know when it was introduced without looking at the changelog. Looks like there's videos on this if you're interested. I was happy with the GL transitions, didn't want stuff moving around though always felt that sort of stuff was better to demonstrate live if you wanted to show movement.
Re: IMO Impress is not impressive (Score:2)
You're not wrong but also what is the point of a 'presentation'? Images, words or more usually a wall of text the presenter reads to the audience.
Impress is fine, the real issue is that the 'state of the art' for presentations is bullshit.
Re: IMO Impress is not impressive (Score:2)
Snore. I mean that literally. How many times did you doze off during some "important" presentation?
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Because Austrian army is in so dire need of shiny PowerPoint presentations....not!
Meanwhile Windows (Score:2)
Austria has no army. (Score:2)
Austria has no army, had decided not to participate in the defense of Europe and is a nest of Russian spies anyway. So the stakes are minimal.
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Absolutely no army [wikipedia.org]. Well, a small army for a small country.