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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> it's about open source quality, which quite frankly isn't there. It's like living in a rickety shed at the best of times on the desktop

First, we're not talking about the desktop here, we're talking about services. Open source provides much better quality for services. It is frankly appalling to me to see the government relying on Microsoft services given the quality and reliability and security of open source alternatives--not to mention the lower cost.

Second, the biggest obstacle to a standardized Linux desktop that everyone can use and rely on is the lack of a big player in the market willing to invest in one. Imagine if the government took even a fraction of the money it spends on Windows desktops, and spent it on developing a standardized Linux desktop instead. Isn't that exactly the sort of coordination problem that governments are supposed to solve?

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Show me an open source O365 equivalent that scales to the 10,000 seats in my org.

I agree with your second point. I'm in the UK and have advocated this position for years. We have so much government infra here, considering NHS etc, that it would be cost effective to dedicate people to a "national standard computing" infrastructure. But it doesn't exist. Yet.

> Show me an open source O365 equivalent that scales to the 10,000 seats in my org.

I am forced to use O365 every day in my work. It's a piece of crap. The LibreOffice equivalents that I have on my personal Linux machines are better for everyday office applications. As for server side, even if we leave aside all the times I see supposedly reliable MS infrastructure break when I'm trying to do an everyday task, a quick Google search will show you plenty of equivalents, and as for "scaling", the government, or any large organization, could get better value for money paying someone to engineer whatever customizations are necessary in the open source alternatives--which it could then deploy for free on as many servers as it wanted--than from MS's licensing model.

I suspect you don't actually use O365. There's a lot of collaboration stuff in there which is pretty much unbeatable. I mean I'd rather use LaTeX and a VCS for some of the stuff I do but quite frankly that's just too hard for a lot of people.

Also a lot of assumptions about the ROI there and the availability of any engineers who can customise it.

> I suspect you don't actually use O365.

You suspect wrongly.

> There's a lot of collaboration stuff in there which is pretty much unbeatable.

Evidently you and I have had very different experiences.

https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/

You're welcome.

Now how do I collaborate with the people in the other 3 orgs I work with who use O365?

> It's not really about open source versus priority, it's about open source quality, which quite frankly isn't there.

...

> Show me an open source O365 equivalent that scales to the 10,000 seats in my org.

...

> Now how do I collaborate with the people in the other 3 orgs I work with who use O365?

I hope you used an excavator, moving those goalposts.

Not really. The reason those orgs use O365 is that there isn't a better option with the same ROI and staffing requirements. It because a defacto standard because no one offered anything better.

(I will add I despise it to the core, but I know why people use it)

> The reason those orgs use O365 is that there isn't a better option with the same ROI and staffing requirements. It because a defacto standard because no one offered anything better.

As you pointed out once the goal posts shifted, the reason they use Microsoft is because Microsoft is notoriously incompatible with anyone but Microsoft, but also ubiquitous.

O365 is a bloated piece of shit, I don't want an equivalent.

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