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That is stretching the subject beyond reasonable. Proprietary software as a general endeavor is not an invalid business and nobody is saying that here. LibreOf

That is stretching the subject beyond reasonable. Proprietary software as a general endeavor is not an invalid business and nobody is saying that here. LibreOffice is close enough to Microsoft's offering that surely it makes sense accross the many EU states to stop spending millions on it, and spend a few to close the gap, saving even more millions in the future.

kube-system 1y ago
Respectfully, I think it's a bit of a Dunning–Kruger effect for random internet commenters to presume they know what is "close enough" to meet the requirements for the many thousands of different day jobs that people have across the different governments of dozens of different countries. Certainly the people buying software know best what their requirements are.
- davoneus 1y ago
  > Certainly the people buying software know best what their requirements are. I doubt it. The people who are going to use the software are the ones who know what the requirements are. The people buying it should be asking the users, but rarely do.
  - kube-system 1y ago
    For a large software deployment, you should be getting part of your requirements from discussions with users, but there will often be a lot of requirements from non-user stakeholders. For government deployments, even more so.
    - zevon 1y ago
      Have you ever actually worked in a large org or government IT department? :D Commendable ideas, but they do not translate to reality. Even taking the OSS discussion out of the equation: Understanding and integrating user requirements in development processes is a hard problem in general. It gets worse when we are talking about resource-constrained contexts (like government IT)
      - kube-system 1y ago
        I didn’t say it wasn’t hard. Regardless it is extremely routine for multiple stakeholders groups to be involved in software purchases, at least over my 20 years of experience.
    - fakedang 1y ago
      Ideally yes, but do you realistically think that happens?

kube-system 1y ago

Respectfully, I think it's a bit of a Dunning–Kruger effect for random internet commenters to presume they know what is "close enough" to meet the requirements for the many thousands of different day jobs that people have across the different governments of dozens of different countries. Certainly the people buying software know best what their requirements are.

davoneus 1y ago
> Certainly the people buying software know best what their requirements are. I doubt it. The people who are going to use the software are the ones who know what the requirements are. The people buying it should be asking the users, but rarely do.
- kube-system 1y ago
  For a large software deployment, you should be getting part of your requirements from discussions with users, but there will often be a lot of requirements from non-user stakeholders. For government deployments, even more so.
  - zevon 1y ago
    Have you ever actually worked in a large org or government IT department? :D Commendable ideas, but they do not translate to reality. Even taking the OSS discussion out of the equation: Understanding and integrating user requirements in development processes is a hard problem in general. It gets worse when we are talking about resource-constrained contexts (like government IT)
    - kube-system 1y ago
      I didn’t say it wasn’t hard. Regardless it is extremely routine for multiple stakeholders groups to be involved in software purchases, at least over my 20 years of experience.
  - fakedang 1y ago
    Ideally yes, but do you realistically think that happens?