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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

"Using Libre Office rather than Office 365 is unlikely to be the limiting factor in how fast anything in a government office is going to run."

Depends. When odf would be the standard maybe, but it isn't. Standard is microsoft office, and libre office is not 100% compatible. But you will still have to deal with lots of microsoft documents, from all the other agencies, ordinary people, companies, ..

Meaning, when Munichs government tried to switch to oss a few years ago, they did indeed lost a lot of time with broken documents, templates, layouts etc. so they ultimately switched back (direct microsoft lobbying with even Bill Gates getting personally involved might have played a role, too).

So I am all for an open standard, but this easier said, than done.

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> Standard is microsoft office

Then change it. By law if need be, and have all government departments go over to Libre Office at the same time.

They tried that, but the question is how do you write the law? In the end they settled on requiring that govt. departments use ISO standards to store docs (which at the time was only ODF).

Microsoft then tried to get their format ratified as an ISO standard. But everyone complained that their spec did not actually specify how to implement, instead it said things like "In accordance with output from Word 2007". So after a bit of back and forth MS realized that they did not want to _actually_ document what they were doing. The solution? Pack the committee with MS shills to vote yes on every proposal by MS. Urgh.

One of the negative flow on effects was that these new committee members only cared about voting for things that MS had instructed them to vote on - so other standards and issues stalled due to a lack of a quorum. It was super disappointing looking at this from the sidelines at the time.

Here is a link that explains a small part of the history: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2618153/how-microsoft-was-...

> but the question is how do you write the law?

I would have defined Libre Office as the reference implementation. Other software is allowed to the extent it reads/writes those files formats correctly.

I would also have mandated open source.

Well, that is one solution, but I would not want to have a urgent problem at that specific time.

I haven't had any issues with Libre Office in years. They even have a paid corporate version with (supposedly) good support.

What I have had more incompatibility issues with is Gsuite (or whatever Google is calling it these days) which a LOT of medium sized businesses and school are using now as an office alternative.

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