On 31/12/21 5:45 am, Joshua Coppersmith wrote:
> I really am very pro-FOSS and pro-LO, but I want to interject a wet
blanket here regarding companies picking up FOSS and migrating to LO.
>
> I think the truth is, LO just isn't ready for that kind of prime-time.
Companies can customize it according to their needs. This should not be
a deterrent.
> I've done years of retail sales in electronics, and one lesson I've
learned is never to over-sell, especially not to businesses. Again,
after five years of LO on Linux Mint I would never recommend a company
go with that sort of software stack. The price of the CALs and software
licenses may be significant, but it's still small compared to the extra
work involved using FOSS.
>
> Given some grant money, in fact, we're basically now moving that
school to the Google ecosystem. Linux is the opposite of ChromeOS,
whatever the technical relationship. Linux is about power-to-the-people;
ChromeOS is about convenience-and-control. The latter is what 99%
(made-up number) of companies and institutions want. Now Google is
targeting the business space ever more with ChromeOS, and it makes sense.
People also need to realize the problems with Google rather than just
blindly using any gratis software which is convenient. Schools can and
some of them do use fully free software for education. It is not a
problem of free software if they are not choosing it. For example,
Moodle is better than Google Classrooms in terms of features as well. It
is not a lack of technical solutions, it is a lack of willpower. Making
LibreOffice more feature-rich is not going to solve it because many free
software are already more feature-rich than their proprietary
counterparts and still schools/business don't use it. It is so easy to
set up Jitsi server(even I can do), still schools and businesses are
choosing Zoom/Microsoft Teams/Google Meet.
> In my humble opinion time and effort would be better spent getting
technically minded (post-secondary) students involved in using and
developing LO, recognizing that business integration is still a
generation away.
Why do we have to make it ready for businesses? Businesses usually have
a lot of resources and they can themselves fund the development of LO
and add features they want.
> Again, there may be some narrowly-defined usage cases, or a few tech
firms that have the local know-how to move to FOSS since everyone uses
Linux at home anyway, but very sorry to say, I wouldn't want to
over-sell LO now and then be cursed because of it, even when its time
truly comes in 15 years or so.
This is the problem when everyone wants everything to be ready and
cooked. Businesses don't need a ready and prepared LibreOffice to use.
They can customize it.
--
Ravi Dwivedi
https://ravidwivedi.in/
GPG Keys-> https://ravidwivedi.in/files/ravidwivedi.asc
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