4 ms·
LibreOffice's UI is almost deliberately made incompatible with MS Office. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to audit the Foundation's financial statements [0]
by throwawaybutwhy 6y ago
LibreOffice's UI is almost deliberately made incompatible with MS Office. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to audit the Foundation's financial statements [0] for payments from Microsoft akin to what Google is doing to Mozilla.
[0] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Ledgers https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Ledgers
- The_Colonel 6y ago"MS Office implements the obvious, natural UI so anything deviating from that must be intentionally trying to be different at all costs"
- throwawaybutwhy 6y agoAye, that's the spirit (at least, pre-ribbon). It's much more important though that compatibility with the leader's de facto standard is crucial for the underdog. Even in text ediors - compare [0] with [1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24593616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24593616 (Emacs) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24558788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24558788 (VS Code)
- chrisseaton 6y agoBut their whole proposition is 'it's MS Office but free.' It's even in the name. I bet most people they try to sell to it's replacing MS Office. Having their own, slightly worse, version of the MS Office UI is bad for what they want to achieve. And do they have the time, money, and research chops to be doing their own UI research, even if it was a good idea to be doing it?