25,000 Danish Hospital Staff Moving To LibreOffice

An anonymous reader writes with news that 25,000 staff across 13 hospitals in Denmark will be switching to LibreOffice over the course of the next year. "The group of hospitals is phasing out a proprietary alternative, 'for long term strategic reasons,' which at the same time saves the group some 40 million Kroner [about $7.7 million] worth of proprietary licenses. The ditching of the proprietary alternative is a consequence of the group's move to virtual desktops, allowing staff members to log in on any PC or thin client. The group found that deploying this new desktop infrastructure would 'trigger unacceptably high costs' for proprietary office licenses... The move is Europe's second largest migration project involving public administrations using an open source office suite."

Re:Stroking a blow!

[bmo]

Come for the beer; stay for the freedom.

--
BMO

A more important reason

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Dagens Medicin, a news site for local and regional administrations, quotes Thomsen explaining that most of the hospital workers, doctors and nurses, will have little trouble using Libre Office. "Most of them do not need the advanced features of these suites."

More important than thatt, 20 years from now they'll be able to open the documents they create today.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[wrook]

Now what the Libre Office guys need to do is wander up to them and say, "You're saving 40 million Kroner in licensing fees. But is there anything in LO that doesn't meet your standards? Because for a tiny fraction of those savings we'd be happy to fix the problem right away."

Re:Freedom isn't free.

[1mck]

I totally agree with you about the fact that there aren't any real "advanced users" out there! I would say that 99% of the people out there that are using office software wouldn't know if they were using M$ or LO. In fact, if you were to "only" have a shop that runs LO, and had the staff trained on it, then they'd think the MS Office would stupid and counter intuitive and really hard to work. Most of the people that I've worked with don't have a clue about technology, so the fact that 25,000 staff across 13 hospitals in Denmark will be switching to LibreOffice over the course of the next year indicates that someone has their head on straight over there in Denmark...finally!

Re:Stroking a blow!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, but if they do need to show a document to some other party, just export it to PDF.

Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[hcs_$reboot]

LibreOffice, not OpenOffice. The really free version

OpenOffice is not free? According to Google [google.com], it is Open Source (and see the new Google Best Guess feature...).
I don't want to be the devil's advocate, but whatever one may think about Oracle, it isn't fair to tell OpenOffice is not free.

Re:whatever happened to

[Dominic]

Except that getting doctors to run hospitals is completely stupid. They are massively more expensive than managers, and when you do medicine at university you tend to learn how to treat people, not run businesses. That's not to say that *appropriate* managers aren't doctors (people such as clinical directors), but if you think that doctors are the best people to decide which printer paper supplier to use, or the logistics company that is responsible for transporting samples around the country, or the million other things that running a multi-million pound business (which is what a hospital is), then you are severely misguided.

Only 3% of NHS staff are managers. That is lower than pretty much any company in the oh-so-efficient private sector. The NHS is also the most efficient healthcare system of seven top industrialised nations: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10375877 [bbc.co.uk]

You, sir, are a right-wing troll. I suggest sticking to facts in your future posts.

Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

[RobbieThe1st]

Note that LibreOffice added a whole set of packages(go-oo) that were not in OpenOffice due to people being unwilling to assign copyright to Sun. So, yes, by day 1 it was *magically* better and more free(as not all copyrights are owned by the controlling interest, it's nearly impossible to change the license in the future).

Re:LibreOffice

[lucidlyTwisted]

I think you'll find that "GIMP" is far, far worse.

Re:Stroking a blow!

[LingNoi]

So it IS the government saying "fuck the free market!" and trying to ram through formats.

ODF is an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006). Of course governments are going to use it! It's not the government controlling the free market.

Microsoft can happily make a word processor that reads and writes ISO/IEC 26300:2006 and compete. Unfortunately they thought it more easier simply to bribe the ISO committee into making their own proprietary format an ISO standard. Something that has never happened to ISO before. In cases of document formats it's the free market corrupting the system and forcing minor players out of the market.