4 ms·
This was bound to happen and I feel sad. I contributed my inputs to the discussion threat that raised the issue of "community" branding. What I said was: keep
by 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
This was bound to happen and I feel sad.
I contributed my inputs to the discussion threat that raised the issue of "community" branding.
What I said was: keep the current libreoffice as is because that is what it is. Additionally, go and create another "business office" or whatever you care about but leave libreoffice as is.
The businesses behind this move, collabora et al see libreoffice as another "market" they need to acquire. Foss be damned.
During this time, I learned that all the "donations" to tdf are used for "conferences and shit" instead of what as donors we assume it would be used for, "paying developers" because of some stupid quirk, they cannot "compete with businesses" or other nonsense.
I have started using calligra office and it has been a similar experience. Nothing to write home about but still not depressing as libreoffice gets at times.
I dont know, onlyoffice flipped against the "community edition" by restricting features and I feel LO going there slowly because of "early business advanced features" in the business edition that would come because of this change.
That leaves us with calligra office suite which is still holding out but yeah, my money is now on that.
Note: i have been a OpenOffice /libreoffice user since 2008 I think so I have been using it for over 12-13 years.
- himujjal 6y agoI got off LibreOffice myself to OnlyOffice. Docx support wasnt that impressive. One thing I wanted to ask to you since you seem very experienced with LibreOffice is how much effort and money is spent on ODT and other formats. Why not simply use and improve docx like we do with pdf? Second, Is Libreoffice's goal is to be MS Office's OSS clone? If not why? MS Office is quite good and the potential office apps users are mostly non-programmers. I know PDF is by adobe and Docx is by microsoft.
- codegladiator 6y agohttps://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-microsoft-office-file-formats-so-complicated-and-some-workarounds/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
- moron4hire 6y agoThat's not about docx.
- EwanToo 6y agoI think the single biggest thing that OpenOffice achieved was the ODT file format. Showing that an open file format could do everything was a big part of forcing Microsoft to switch from .doc to .docx, which is much more open
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoi am at -2 votes right now... did i say something bad? i'm still trying to understand what makes HN crowd mad
- jshevek 6y agoThis can be hard to predict, but the following is sometimes helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- MikusR 6y agoIt's not the HN crowd. It's more likely people from those commercial LibreOffice vendors and they sock-puppets.
- zerr 6y agoExactly, TDF hires only admin staff, leaving the actual development to volunteers and other companies.
- lumost 6y agoout of curiosity, why do you use an open source office product when a variety of free & high quality web based document editors exist? I chafe when I need to use the microsoft office suite at this point, and premium editors look more like grammarly than word. In the corporate/business use case there are both open source and cheap licensed/self-hosted versions of web based editors.
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agocan you link open source web based editors? i have a need to use excel/spreadsheets
- toast0 6y agoI prefer a local spreadsheet over a browser spreadsheet, because the browser spreadsheets don't always update all the dependent cells consistently. Sometimes, they need to send something back and forth to a server and that's slow and irritating. Resizing columns seems better in a local app than in a browser too, but I'm not totally sure about that. I don't really use a word processor or other parts of an office suite very often.
- buovjaga 6y ago> During this time, I learned that all the "donations" to tdf are used for "conferences and shit" I am paid by TDF to onboard new contributors. I think it is going rather well, with many FOSS outsiders being lured in. Conference expenses are a small part of the budget. A software project is much more than pure development.
- MikusR 6y agoSo you are paid to lure people to do free work for commercial companies?
- buovjaga 6y agoThat is a weird way of referring to value being collectively added to a free software project. I contributed to LibreOffice for five years before being hired. I even did onboarding without compensation, with increasing intensity and regularity. I quite happily worked alongside people employed by various companies and I learned a lot.
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agowhy isnt TDF hiring actual programmers? why are you looking for outside volunteer help when you can do programming in house? its not like TDF is cash strapped or anything? or does leadership at TDF have that mozilla ceo style BS mindset (paying herself millions of dollars salary while laying off actual developers because of cash issues)
- buovjaga 6y agoTDF board works without compensation. TDF was set up as a German charity in a way that it can not operate like a full-blown software company. It has a staff of 11 (some part time like me). TDF is funding development constantly by contracting out work. Budget item proposals for this year: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Budget2021 https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Budget2021 TDF ledgers are public: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Ledgers https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Ledgers Annual reports are also produced as required by German law: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/08/10/tdf-annual-report-2019/ https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/08/10/tdf-annu...