They should give OnlyOffice a try too
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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I'll never not be angry about the EU not developing their own OS/Distro, but using US software with backdoors. It is just insane. Yes, it probably would cost a few hundred millions extra, but a fighter jet also costs 100-130 million € and a safe OS is so extremly more important than a couple of extra fighter jets...
The EU does contribute to free software to some extent. But not enough.
At least 7% of Linux contributors are in Germany+France. An extra 2% from the UK. This is probably underestimated since the source has country info on only half of contributors. https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributors?timeRange=past365days&start=2024-10-06&end=2025-10-06
The EU commission funded free software via NGI, and indirectly via NLnet. It's a great initiative helping many small projects, but its future is incertain. https://nextgraph.org/eu-ngi-funding/
The EU does contribute to free software to some extent. But not enough.
At least 7% of Linux contributors are in Germany+France.
That's not the EU contributing, that's individual germans and french, on their own time or if lucky while employed by private companies. Not the EU [government].
That's right, the commission probably isn't involved on those cases. I interpreted "The EU" literally by including its various components, ie the EU commission, the member states governments, companies and individuals in those countries.
There's no central "EU government" that decides everything. The EU is not a centralized country, not even a federation. Members states takes many decisions on their own, and often need to approve EU comission proposals.
I am not just talking about funding, but about investing in operating an alternative OS. All goverment institutions should be switched over. A single entity alone is not able to do this, because they face too many compatibility problems with other institutions/contractors/software companies (this is also why the article says "mostly", even the military isn't able to do it on its own, not even just for the office package, leave alone the OS). But if the EU decides to do this, everyone else will follow and start using compatible software.
You're talking about a great number of organisations, with different decision makers. It takes time and political will to coordinate and execute this kind of big switch. This needs to happen to become independant from foreign monopolies, but I'm not surprised it hasn't already happened.
The EU commission decides for some EU institutions. Member countries decide for their own institutions and military. Each country and military has its own labyrinth of bureaucracy with lengthy decision making, and large+complex IT infrastructures. All of this has inertia. And switching cost money, even if it's possible to save on license cost on the long run.
Nah, they can give out directives and regulations to force the hand of local legislation. It happens all the time for many things. I personally have to deal with the fallout of one atm.
And I already said it costs money. And that is okay. National security costs money The EU spends several hundred billions every year on its military. A safe OS is much more important than a couple more jets. Even if it costs 5 billion euros, screw it even if it is 5 billion every year, it is still cheap compared to what it brings.
The Austrian military didn't just adopt LibreOffice; they actually contributed back to it. Over five person-years of development work went into adding features they needed. Those improvements are now available to everyone using LibreOffice, which is pretty cool.
The open source dream!
This is how public money should be spent. Every dollar spent on proprietary code is money wasted. Every dollar spent on public code benefits every other country, org, and individual who runs that software. It reduces the cost for everyone, in perpetuity, instead of enriching some sociopathic technofascist and their oligarch investors.
I wasn't a big fan of GNU initiatives, and even less of 'viral licenses', until I encountered Public Money, Public Code. The more you think about it, the more fucked up it appears to you that governments pay for Windows/365/AWS licenses, using your tax money, because decision makers haven't got the slightest clue about FLOSS, and if they do, they mostly don't have the nutsack to implement the sweeping changes that would be necessary to migrate.
While I'm glad to see M$ Office being replaced with LibreOffice, I hope the governments and companies doing so, also channel funds into development.
I'd assume they would probably hire a few developers to get the things they specifically need into the software.
Great news. Public institutions should never buy or use proprietary software.
Now we can say that Libre Office is combat tested and military grade. Lol
Great news.
I want my boss to do this with GIMP. He'd save a lot of money. There's even a guy living nearby who said he'd work for us to write plugins.
Well, Gimp is great, but still lacks some features for the professional user, eg a good RAW support, it can substitute PS if you also use Krita to fill the holes Gimp still has-
You're right that Photoshop has features incorporated into it which GIMP doesn't. It's worth remembering though that although GIMP follows the unix philosophy of not trying to do everything it does do a lot to interoperate with other software. For example, if I want to open a RAW file directly from GIMP, it launches Rawtherapee or Darktable for me, which processes the file and then opens it in GIMP, much the same as an Adobe workflow but more visibly two separate programs working together. And of course there are G'MIC, Batcher and Resynthsizer but they do need to be installed manually as plugins, which is not ideal for newcomers.
I think a big game-changer for some users is going to be the upcoming release of 'Link Layers'. You'll be able to have a layer in your GIMP project which is linked to an external file. So for example you could have a layer in your GIMP project which you are editing Krita.
I'm sure a lot will depend on what you're working on but in my workplace the only thing really holding us back from switching to GIMP is setting correct scaling and position for printing on rolls on Windows 11. If I could get my boss to switch to Linux (probably even more amibitious) we would be done with Adobe.
Curiosity apart, the intelligent object removing in PS is also based on the Resynthesize, which is a invention from GIMP. It it used now also by other editors, even in online versions, like eg.Lunapic, there called "Remove and inpaint" in the seleccion tool.
In Spain also a lot of administrations and companies use LibreOffice or OpenOffice, saving a lot of money by the way.
This seems not just written by an Llm; it slops like one
does anybody know why libreoffice and not only office? user experience and ms office compatibilty is way better for onlyoffice at leas from my perspective.
Why prioritize MS compatibility?
because no soldier is an IT literate and 99.9% of those people are used to ms office + every document template (which are many) would be easier to work with.
Might be the licensing type.
Might also just be what was/is known at the time to the decision makers. I’m in the IT world and didn’t know/learn about ONLYOFFICE until this past year.
no microsoft but the military bases r alright ig cos words not paying them