French Government To Use PostgreSQL, LibreOffice In Free Software Adoption Push

The upfront costs of migration (including retraining, coping with missing features, and solving a wide variety of little compatibility issues as they arise) will surely exceed what it would have cost the French Government to stay on Microsoft Office for one or two more waves of upgrades. The important question is: will the upfront cost and disruption be worth it?<p>The data presented by the city of Munich six months ago provides compelling evidence that the answer is a resounding YES: the <i>recurring savings</i> from migration will exceed its upfront costs.[1]<p>The city of Munich identified three types of cost savings: (1) it no longer has to pay for license upgrades, eliminating a significant recurring cost forever; (2) its desktop software and hardware no longer have to be updated as frequently, reducing another significant recurring cost forever; and (3) surprisingly, Munich claims its IT department is fielding fewer user complaints with free software, reducing another major cost forever.<p>--<p>Edit: There's an additional benefit from migration not mentioned by Munich which I think will become very important over time. According to this article, the French government intends to reinvest "between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save" on contributing to the development of the applications they use, so they will have <i>direct, hands-on input</i> into which features get added to such applications and even how such features are implemented. The French government, in other words, will become a 'co-owner' of these Free Software applications, giving them more control over their own IT future. How much is <i>that</i> worth?<p>--<p>[1] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3787539" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3787539</a>

Why are people shitting so much over LibreOffice? I have both on my machine in the office, and I've set LibreOffice to the default and use it almost exclusively. It's faster than Office, has a better UI, more features I see as essential (save to PDF is nice), and the leap from Office to LibreOffice these days is tiny.

I remember reading about a largeish legacy French government system migrating to Postgres a couple of years ago, so maybe they've decided Postgres fits the bill for most scenarios they need a DB for.<p>According to these slides [1] that system did about a billion SQL statements a day at the time, so pretty good going.<p>[1] <a href="http://wiki.postgresql.org/images/1/1c/PGDayEU2010_CNAF_PostgreSQL_migration.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.postgresql.org/images/1/1c/PGDayEU2010_CNAF_Post...</a>

Part of the reason governments are interested in open-source software is their worry about the possibility of the U.S. government's inducing U.S. corporations to put back doors in popular proprietary software.

If by "adopted" you mean "are being considered in part of a plan pitched to the Prime Minister", then yes, otherwise... Well let's just say I've worked in a French administration's IT dept and they tend to take their time.

Poor French civil servants. Being forced to use LibreOffice is a demotivating and frustrating experience. F.ex. Writer is like MS Word 1997, but shabbier. If you're paying an employee more than minimum wage, don't kill their productivity and motivation by feeding them sub-par tools.

Using PostgreSQL is just a damn good idea. LibreOffice, well I would say not so much.

It's a nice idea, better than their mighty OpenOffice Firewall. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4LofqPCQew" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4LofqPCQew</a><p>(yes, this is an ex French Ministrer of Culture talking about open source)

If i had one dollar for every time i saw a "Government X installed open source Y" post... it's started in 1999 and still haunts me

This is a good move, any government using Oracle is wasting taxpayers money and being irresponsible and negligent with its citizen's data.<p>One could talk of NSA backdoors, but there is no need, the security of Oracle products is laughable at best, there is no need for backdoors.