58 ms·

Why is Apache clinging to OpenOffice?

379 points by AuthorizedCust 4y ago

jpswade 4y ago
I imagine that part of this is due to the nature in which it was donated by Oracle to Apache. Legally obligating it’s continued distribution
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
And apache has sunsetted a LOT of projects to it's "attic". It even seems it usually is pretty aggressive in doing so. Maybe there isn't even a person in charge of the project to make the decision anymore, or it's an Oracle employee whose job it is to NOT sunset it.
shmerl 4y ago
Probably Oracle didn't want to cooperate. It's irrelevant though? Anyone who cares works with LibreOffice anyway.
de6u99er 4y ago
My issue with OpenOffice/LibreOffice is, that it's stuck in the past, which makes me prefer using Google Sheets.
- mekster 4y ago
  Unless you're in a closed circle who all use similar version of LibreOffice, it's better to use Google's offering or just pay $10/mo for MS' Office and also get 1TB storage, which sounds like a steal and have a less headache with file compatibilities.
incognitoes 4y ago
jwildeboer 4y ago
Trademarks. Contracts. Egos. I was there when it all happened. When Oracle refused to transfer the trademarks to the Document Foundation. When loud voices on many sides shouted at each other. Leading to the current situation. My current position: Who cares. ODF and Libre Office's community managed to move forward. Let the ASF have their Open Office.
tomnipotent 4y ago
> but that doesn't mean that they're unfounded Yes, yes it does. The very definition of unfounded is having no foundation or basis in facts. That's some "stolen election"-level logic.
- blumomo 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - karmajunkie 4y ago
    - blumomo 4y ago
      - tomnipotent 4y ago
        > You let others do the fact check for you? Isn't that exactly what you did when you recommended the documentary? I'm willing to wager the Reuters fact checking article went through more scrutiny than the documentary.
      - connordoner 4y ago
        But that isn’t the source, is it? That’s a movie which is hardly reflective of reality. That said, you do have to let others — Full Fact, for example — do fact checking for you. You can never know everything in enough detail to fact-check it, and it’s foolish to think otherwise.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        > Continue outsourcing instead of watching the source yourself. I've seen the movie, and I've read the fact checks. Even before reading them though I noticed multiple flaws and problems while watching. If you still think that movie is credible as evidence of wide-scale election fraud I recommend you brush up on your critical thinking skills. If you've already learned how to spot weak arguments and manipulations, maybe you're just out of practice. Personally, I recommend consuming a lot of content that advocates for positions you strongly disagree with. You'll find that you can't help but nitpick every weak argument. Do that enough, and you'll find you won't be able to stop spotting problems with bad arguments no matter how much you agree with the underlying message or where it's coming from.
mig39 4y ago
Someone should fork LibreOffice every time there's a new release, and re-package it with a better name.
- mekster 4y ago
  Which better name?
  - torstenvl 4y ago
    OpenSuite Freedom Office Liberation Office Office Commons Office Publica Ensemble TogetherWorks
effnorwood 4y ago
emmelaich 4y ago
The "LibreOffice" name doesn't help. Not that many people would be able to spell that on first hearing. Libber-what? Lib Re-Office?
schleck8 4y ago
Why did you even post this? The last release was in May of 2022, not 2017! https://openoffice.apache.org/downloads.html https://openoffice.apache.org/downloads.html
greyhair 4y ago
I see a lot of blah blah blah below, but none of it gets to the crux of the matter, and that is LibreOffice is klunky. I used to have it installed, because I had installed it for my father-in-law and I was his tech support (he passed a couple years ago). The API in Writer is a mess. Okay? I am sure I'll get some people sqawking for be saying that out loud, but I also know a bunch of you will be nodding in agreement. And don't get me started on Calc. Lets get another thing clear, I don't love Microsoft Word. I don't. But then, my original experience writing documentation was in nroff/troff using Writer's Workbench. Then later, TeX. But the truth is, through work, or school, a ton of people have become accustomed to be productive in Word. And Excel is simply Superior to Calc in every way. And yes, Microsoft is up to their old tricks, the bastards. We all know it. I mean, WSL2 was pretty good in Windows 10, but OMG WSL2 in Windows 11 competely rules. Native Linux USB support. Wow. That is some wicked bundling there. And then, if you have a family, Office 365, just for the fact that you can hand it out to a total of five other people, and you each get 1TB of cloud storage. For $99 per year. Again, wicked sneaky bundling. Six instances of 1TB cloud for $99? We only use five here, so $20 each, per year, for 1TB of cloud. Oh yeah, you get to use Office 365 if you want, as well. So year, Microsoft pulls under handed market bundling. But that doesn't excuse the fact that LibreOffice is Klunky. Now that I no longer have to support it, I don't miss it at all.
oneepic 4y ago
It's not dead. I use it. Not that I dev for it though.
- jgilias 4y ago
  Why are you using it instead of LibreOffice? Genuinely curious.
  - bluedino 4y ago
    He may not know why he should be using it instead of OpenOffice.
    - rgrieselhuber 4y ago
      I’m also curious. Also compared to OnlyOffice?
      - jraph 4y ago
        OnlyOffice is far from being as comprehensive as LibreOffice. At least when I tried the spreadsheets, I ran into limitations even though I use spreadsheets very rarely.
        rgrieselhuber 4y ago
        Good to know, thanks.
    - mtmail 4y ago
      They (he, she, undetermined) might not even be aware of the other office suites. The sibling commenter lists OnlyOffice, first time I hear about that.
  - oneepic 4y ago
    1) No Windows release afaik. But please correct me if I am wrong -- I don't see a Win download on their page from a quick look on my phone. 2) I did use it on Ubuntu sometime in college (around 2016 for class) and I just didn't like the feel of Libre. OpenOffice still had a lot of feature parity with Excel without buying Excel, so I got that instead.
jsiepkes 4y ago
To be honest I never understood why Apache even started in the first place. By that time the LibreOffice fork was well underway.
- Jasper_ 4y ago
  IBM was shipping their own proprietary office suite based on OpenOffice, Lotus Symphony, and LibreOffice wasn't a good fit for that business model. IBM was the leading charge behind Apache OpenOffice, Oracle would have rather dumpstered it.
  - usrusr 4y ago
    I'd be surprised if the walking dead state of Open separate from Libre wasn't caused by in-house tools somewhere that just never got ported to Libre, or that are somehow inherently incompatible with that fork. Symphony is certainly a prime suspect for the original "version some in-house stuff got built on". The question "do we really want to port yet another minor improvement/fix from Libre to Open instead of porting our own grown mess from Open to Libre?" can be answered with a short-sighted "yes, of course!" any number of times. And Open cannot be formerly declared dead as long as this form of contribution keeps happening.
    - Jasper_ 4y ago
      IBM discontinued Lotus Symphony nearly 10 years ago. OpenOffice continues because the Apache project chairs in place hate the GPL, and even worse, they hate admitting they lost. It's a moral/pride thing rather than a practical or business thing at this point. But IBM was the reason it exists in the first place.
      - usrusr 4y ago
        Judging from the simplified fork graph in the article (likely greatly simplified, I admit), I'd expect something depending on Symphony to be far more compatible with current Open than with current Libre. But sure, the licencing difference might very well be a part of that.
hgazx 4y ago
Is it me or the second picture or whatever that is doesn’t load?
- arbitrage 4y ago
  I get a warning about incorrectly embedded external content, which includes a link to the following KB article from Mozi: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page
behnamoh 4y ago
This is what scares me: a FOSS project maintained by a corporation. I tend to install FOSS because imo they are more "future-proof", but some of them are developed by companies (e.g., Fedora Linux) and that makes me wonder if they're truly future-proof.
- api 4y ago
  Nothing is future-proof.
  - bavell 4y ago
    Yep. The only constant is change!
- bombcar 4y ago
  The "future-proof" is that if the corp goes belly up or insane, you can in theory fork the project and continue it, which if there's enough of a user base will happen. But if there's enough of a user base the company probably won't abandon it. Things like Fedora are potentially at a bit more risk, because if IBM decides to stop developing it for whatever reason most users will probably just switch to an entire different distro (or a related one) than bother continuing the existing.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    good readers - I am here to tell you, from experience with my own two eyes, popular important and public software projects absolutely do get closed by private companies, for so many reasons. None of the reasons are "your benefit"
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    > if the corp goes belly up or insane, you can in theory fork the project Yes: for a small + useful + easy to maintain project. No: for bloated or difficult to build projects, which makes most of popular browsers, corp-driven programming languages, devops tools, office suites, corp-driven IDEs, Linux distros... Not to mention non-copyleft licenses that allow proprietization and discourage communties.
datalopers 4y ago
Apache has a few good projects and so much abandonware it’s very difficult to know which to avoid entirely. At this point I think Apache has about 15 different data streaming/queueing/event processing systems.
- eikenberry 4y ago
  I've learned over the last decade or so just to avoid Apache software. It seems like the vast majority of their software is poorly written, enterprise abandonware. They are a joke of their former self. Kind of sad really.
- mekster 4y ago
  What are those some of the good Apache projects? Practically never used anything but httpd (which I no longer use) and everything else looked like bloated software being Java taking huge resource and usually has a better competitor. I occasionally see Kafka being used as parts of software stack but not sure if that is the best choice with huge resource use.
  - aembleton 4y ago
    Their Java libraries and utils are good: Maven, Utils, Commons, CommonsIO
- klysm 4y ago
  At a minimum, and they all have so many bugs :(
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I often feel like projects that are handed over to Apache are basically put in the equivalent of an aircraft boneyard; stashed for archival purposes, but it will no longer receive much development effort.
  - sgift 4y ago
    Come again? Lucene, Solr, Kafka, Zookeeper, httpd, CouchDB, .. and that's just the top of my head.
oniony 4y ago
Wow, didn't realise StarOffice started in 1985.
resoluteteeth 4y ago
The worst thing about this was that openoffice was starting to get some name recognition before oracle killed it, and this whole debacle intentionally or unintentionally turned that name recognition into a weapon against LibreOffice. Ideally they should have given LibreOffice the OpenOffice name, but even if they had just said "openoffice is dead" then it would have been easy for people to find libreoffice. Unfortunately, by taking over the OpenOffice name and absolutely refusing to admit that development has ceased, Apache has caused tons of confusion that has massively harmed libreoffice, because for years people who had heard about "openoffice" would see the terrible, out of date, insecure pile of junk being distributed by the Apache Foundation and not realize that the actively developed LibreOffice was available. In the case of linux distributions it was less of an issue since they just switched to LibreOffice, but I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice (and possibly taking one look at it and giving up and switching to Office 365). Apache should have killed OpenOffice years ago but at the very least they should take it down and honestly apologize for fucking this up so badly. Even ignoring the harm to LibreOffice it's just irresponsible for Apache to keep distributing OpenOffice when they can't even make new releases to simply apply security patches for years.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice I wouldn't be surprised if as many or more Windows users were downloading it than downloading Libreoffice. The problem is that the name isn't punchy and is unpronounceable in English. Plenty of people who are completely knowledgeable about the situation still refer to Libreoffice as Openoffice. It's intentional sabotage, more than probably covertly initiated and maintained by Microsoft, and destroyed the entire Apache Foundation for me. I avoid all of their projects, because if that project has a commercial competitor with deep pockets, I can't trust it not to be intentionally bad or broken.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    ...I'm a native english speaker and I've never had trouble pronouncing libre, is it a problem for others? I've always said "lib-ray", which for all I know is wrong, I never gave it a second thought.
kerblang 4y ago
Does Apache ever "declare" anything dead? In my experience things are just allowed to drift quietly into bureaucratic ghost towns. I'm not sure if they've ever formally disbanded a project, but maybe somebody has an example. It would be helpful if OpenOffice were formally killed though. The name "Libreoffice" is not particularly catchy and I can never remember which is which even though I actually have LibreOffice installed on the computer I'm using right now. Edit: Oh here's an example: https://river.apache.org/ https://river.apache.org/ but it took them several years to come to terms with it, but then again that was quicker than OpenOffice, yes. Edit again: I think coincidentally (or not) Apache River has a similar history to OpenOffice, in that after buying Sun Microsystems, Oracle "donated" it to Apache, "donated" meaning "Good luck, this isn't our problem anymore." One of those things that looks like goodwill but really isn't...
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  IIUC, the central Apache organization can’t or at least doesn’t declare projects dead. I’m not sure what would happen if the maintainers literally disappeared, but as long as the project’s PMC stays active and wants to keep going they can.
  - heax 4y ago
    They do declare projects dead. They even have a place for them https://attic.apache.org/ https://attic.apache.org/
- xhkkffbf 4y ago
  I use several Apache libraries that are getting pretty old. But so is my code. So I'm glad that they keep things around a long time. Still, I think it might be good to have more warning for the consumer-facing tools.
- sdf4j 4y ago
  Apache moves projects to the "attic" regularly. It's a well known process but requires the project community to be really dead. Which is not the case of OpenOffice just yet. See https://attic.apache.org/ https://attic.apache.org/
rbanffy 4y ago
Online office apps have an edge WRT collaboration. It may well be that the era of the standalone office suite is reaching its end. What would it take to make LibreOffice a web-centric app companies could host themselves? Maybe Apache's resources could be directed that way.
- macinjosh 4y ago
  I think this exists in the form of Collabora Office https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/ It is integrated into NextCloud I believe for self-hosting
- octobus2021 4y ago
  There's definitely a significant niche for offline word processor, spreadsheet, drawing diagrams and such. I do not want to go online, register, have my data "in the cloud", fume when it goes down because of AWS of buggy update, lose it when the company decides to fold, etc. I want to fire up an application on my local, edit it there, and save it on my local. If I need collaboration, well, there's plenty of tools for that. But I'm old and my 14yo son never saw even MS Word (leave along LibreOffice) until I showed it to him, they do everything in Google Docs and that's all they know. So maybe I'm part of a dying breed :-)
- ptero 4y ago
  I am not sure that online collaboration is such a killer feature. Most of the time I would take a good offline office app over the application that requires an internet connection, stores my data in the cloud and forces its design choices, from the UI to the security, down my throat "because of the way cloud apps work". My 2c.
  - LordDragonfang 4y ago
    This is probably a plurality opinion on Hacker News, which means it in no way represents the opinion of the average user or business professional. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=microsoft+word%2Copenoffice%2Clibreoffice%2Cgoogle+docs&year_start=1995&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=microsoft+word... Note that 2010 is the year that MS first started adding cloud-based collaborative tools to MS word, reducing the downward trend.
josefx 4y ago
> Its last major release was version 4.1, from 2014! Oh we are playing major version minor version! Let me try: Libreoffice is only at version 7.3 ! That makes it hundreds of versions behind office365! Proof once again that free software has no business competing with software build by professional commercial developers. Now excuse me while I try to reboot my futuristic Windows 2000. /s Versions may as well be marketing names for most software. If anyone even mentions them I might as well assume a minor case of serious brain damage. Java just flat out dropped the leading 1, Firefox is in the low hundreds, some software just goes year/moth. As Apache office still releases updates I find the claim that it is dead highly misleading, but that is presumably the intention if the post.
- lolinder 4y ago
  The "from 2014" is the important bit they're emphasizing, not the version number. LibreOffice 7.3 was released this year.
  - josefx 4y ago
    The last release is from 2022 not 2014.
    - cesarb 4y ago
      According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apache_OpenOffice&oldid=1090618564#Releases https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apache_OpenOffice...), the latest patch release was 4.1.11 from 2021, and the latest minor release was 4.1 from 2014. That is, since 2014, they are just releasing small bugfixes. Compare with LibreOffice (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LibreOffice&oldid=1094108720#Release_history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LibreOffice&oldid...) which had the latest minor release in 2022, and the latest major release in 2020.
    - lolinder 4y ago
      Minor versions versus major versions do matter. Here are the release notes for the 2022 release of OpenOffice: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?contentId=199539486#content/view/199539486 https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?c... This is pretty clearly a minor version update. There are only four entries under their improvements / enhancements section, and all but one would be more accurately described as a bug fix. They even identify this as a "maintenance release". Here are the release notes for the 2022 release of LibreOffice: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.3 https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.3 Aside from the fact that this is much better documented, you can also at a glance see that this is, in fact, a major version update. LibreOffice isn't padding their versions, they actually are adding new features while OpenOffice fixes a few bugs.
phendrenad2 4y ago
Because of all the organic internet traffic it brings them. Hey, stay awhile, maybe use one of their ML/AI projects and donate some money too!
mseepgood 4y ago
Because the Apache Foundation is a graveyard for open source projects.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
aliswe 4y ago
If trends are telling, as the author seems to think, they tell of Libre's decline, too. One thing I noticed is that the web based MS Office products are significantly snappier and less quirky than their desktop counterparts. Maybe that is part of it? Unrelated: I also noticed that Visio, which I previously found quite pleasant to use, actually is nigh unusable (Desktop - no web version exists). Was it always this bad and have my standards simply gone up, or did it deteriorate?
- n8cpdx 4y ago
  I used to be a big fan of desktop Microsoft office, primarily because of stability, reliability, and ux innovation. They've clearly stopped investing in quality, every time I go back it is buggier and less reliable than before. I don't use Visio, but even Word is becoming a nightmare.
encryptluks2 4y ago
I've always assumed when projects go under the Apache.org umbrella, that is where they go to die.
- gtk40 4y ago
  Should I not be using Kafka? Or CouchDB? I guess we shouldn't using log4j at this point though...
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    I mean yes of course use what works for now, but I think eventually those will die off too. As with most things, Apache projects tend to be bloated Java apps that end up being phased out by more trendy and more performant apps built in Go/Rust.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  That does seem to depend on why/how it ends up at Apache. Something like OpenOffice, or the myriad of Java projects, which have just been throw in under the umbrella is more or less abandoned. There seems to be some misconception that Apache has a number of developers sitting ready, or a ton of money to hire developers to take on any random project. Projects under Apache really only works when the developers are involved and follow the project. At this point I'm a little unsure what The Apache Foundation provides, beyond hosting and some legal support.
maxbaines 4y ago
Because of what’s been highlighted in this article I found it super difficult to figure out a good alternative to MS Office, so agree 100% with the article. Now a happy LibreOffice user.
the_biot 4y ago
The mark of a good open source maintainer is the ability to, when your personal interest wanes, find a new maintainer and hand over. I've done this several times, and certainly development went on much slower than before, but them's the breaks. At least I did the right thing. For such a big organization, with so many open source projects under its big wing, Apache has failed on this mark of maintainership completely. It failed so badly that at this stage, deploying Apache-maintained software for a customer or employer is downright irresponsible. Would you organize all your company's internal communications around Google's latest messaging thing? That's insane, you know it'll bite you in the ass in a few years time when it gets cancelled. Apache is no better.
- _benedict 4y ago
  The ASF is an umbrella organisation. For most projects the ASF’s involvement stretches only to procedures and structures for managing the project. The maintainers are mostly not even ASF Members (even those that steer projects). So, not much inference can be drawn from the failure of one project that applies to another.
ConcernedCoder 4y ago
(shrug) I still use OpenOffice 4.1.5 day to day on windows 10, with no issues...didn't know about any controversy.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  There is no controversy: OpenOffice is crapware, use Libreoffice. The only problem is that Apache still distributes what they are fully aware is an abandoned husk, misleading people like yourself.
  - joemi 4y ago
    This comment does not explain why one should use Libreoffice if Openoffice is working just fine for them.
    - dimensi0nal 4y ago
      security, probably? using abandonware to open extremely complex file formats like microsoft/opendocument ones is kind of a bad idea.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Yes. Do you absolutely trust everybody who sends you a doc or spreadsheet? Do you trust that much everyone who sends them one, that they pass along to you? It is better not to need to think about that, much.
    - Alupis 4y ago
      This is kind of like asking why one shouldn't run Microsoft Office 2003 anymore. Does it still work? Sure... is it secure and has feature parity with modern offerings? Definitely not. Perhaps that's fine - but since LibreOffice is also free and is actively developed (by many of the original OpenOffice team too), I don't see a compelling reason to not make the switch.
tialaramex 4y ago
Here's what I suggested as a goal for OpenOffice, in September 2016 which is now six years ago, as a response to Apache officer Jim Jagielski ("jimjag") who thought this was going well: [[[ I urge you, or the Apache board generally, to look at the facts, and not get yourself into the mess of trusting AOO project members' gut instinct that everything is fine or that the board's oversight is the problem and you should just stop looking. For sure, it is possible that they'll actually manage to turn this around. But there are already AOO people convinced they've done it, and there were six months ago, when in fact as you know they were in deep trouble already. Their feelings about this aren't going to be objective. If in say, three months, there's no measurable evidence that AOO is back on course then regardless of what is said by the handful of AOO people, retirement is the right choice. For example, shipping AOO 4.2 in 10 weeks at ApacheConEU. That's not crazy. Libreoffice goes from feature freeze to release in 10 weeks. A healthy AOO development community should be able to do it, or come so close as to leave no-one in any doubt. ]]] https://lwn.net/Articles/699680/ https://lwn.net/Articles/699680/ Again, I wrote that in September 2016. Did Apache in fact ship OpenOffice 4.2 at that year's ApacheConEU? No they did not. OK, so when did they finally ship the "imminent" OpenOffice 4.2? Never. Here's what the most recent quarterly summary from the Apache OpenOffice project to Apache's board said about version 4.2, "An alpha and/or beta release is planned for the next quarter". That sounds optimistic doesn't it? Well, sadly that's also what it said in January 2020. Huh. Who writes this stuff? Funny, it's Jim Jagielski, the same guy I was addressing six years ago. Try to avoid caring whether people are incompetent or liars, you will find it difficult to tell which is which, so if you ensure you can treat both the same you needn't distinguish. In this case I needn't worry about whether Jim was too stupid to know what the problem was in 2016 or just didn't care.
- csours 4y ago
  Is Jim getting paid to work on AOO?
  - fs111 4y ago
    He works at salesforce atm
lewisjoe 4y ago
I'm in the business of building a word processor. Besides OpenOffice, there is generally reduced downloads of both OpenOffice and LibreOffice. This is not surprising. The world is moving past system-installed, standalone editors, saving them into a file and exchanging them over emails. The convenience that comes with editing, sharing and collaborating right from the browser is picking up speed, and it's a good thing. We have unlimited version history and the social features (comments, reactions and data tables, with ratings and upvotes as column types like in Coda / Notion) is unmatchable with what a traditional word processor can offer. The world is evolving into a different future of Office apps and Apache's projects don't fit into that ecosystem.
- sys_64738 4y ago
  Few regular folk need to share documents and businesses will use name brand word processors for collaboration rather than some unknown, new variation. You're wasting your time, IMO.
- orev 4y ago
  It’s NOT a good thing. I want to own my documents and not have to worry about some cloud provider mining them to sell data about me, or just disappearing one day. Sure I can see the cases where the collaboration is useful, but there are many, many more cases where it’s not needed and cloud introduces far more risk than reward.
  - freeAgent 4y ago
    It’s also hard to beat the UX available to native applications that are dedicated and purpose-built and locally processing rather than an interpreted language wrapped inside a web browser constantly communicating with a server somewhere as I type. I really hate online document editors.
  - notriddle 4y ago
    How many documents do you actually own, but still write them in a full-out word processor? Personally, if it's just for me, I use .txt files. Word processors are too much friction for personal notes. The only cases where I want sophisticated formatting features are for other people's documents, which means it's their business to pick the format. They don't always pick Office 365. Sometimes it's Confluence, or a company-branded tool that I don't even know what it actually is, or Zoho, or G Suite. Between running some random word processor that someone else picked for me in my browser, and giving it unrestricted access to my home folder (or having to fiddle around to get it running in a container of some sort), I prefer the browser. I definitely prefer the browser over imposing a monoculture on word processors. Not so much because I think there's much room to innovate in text editing itself (I often enough copy-and-paste between web-based word processors and Sublime Text), but because of the opportunity to innovate in the data model.

I imagine that part of this is due to the nature in which it was donated by Oracle to Apache. Legally obligating it’s continued distribution

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

And apache has sunsetted a LOT of projects to it's "attic". It even seems it usually is pretty aggressive in doing so. Maybe there isn't even a person in charge of the project to make the decision anymore, or it's an Oracle employee whose job it is to NOT sunset it.

shmerl 4y ago

Probably Oracle didn't want to cooperate. It's irrelevant though? Anyone who cares works with LibreOffice anyway.

de6u99er 4y ago

My issue with OpenOffice/LibreOffice is, that it's stuck in the past, which makes me prefer using Google Sheets.

mekster 4y ago
Unless you're in a closed circle who all use similar version of LibreOffice, it's better to use Google's offering or just pay $10/mo for MS' Office and also get 1TB storage, which sounds like a steal and have a less headache with file compatibilities.

incognitoes 4y ago

jwildeboer 4y ago

Trademarks. Contracts. Egos. I was there when it all happened. When Oracle refused to transfer the trademarks to the Document Foundation. When loud voices on many sides shouted at each other. Leading to the current situation. My current position: Who cares. ODF and Libre Office's community managed to move forward. Let the ASF have their Open Office.

tomnipotent 4y ago

> but that doesn't mean that they're unfounded Yes, yes it does. The very definition of unfounded is having no foundation or basis in facts. That's some "stolen election"-level logic.

blumomo 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- karmajunkie 4y ago
  - blumomo 4y ago
    - tomnipotent 4y ago
      > You let others do the fact check for you? Isn't that exactly what you did when you recommended the documentary? I'm willing to wager the Reuters fact checking article went through more scrutiny than the documentary.
    - connordoner 4y ago
      But that isn’t the source, is it? That’s a movie which is hardly reflective of reality. That said, you do have to let others — Full Fact, for example — do fact checking for you. You can never know everything in enough detail to fact-check it, and it’s foolish to think otherwise.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      > Continue outsourcing instead of watching the source yourself. I've seen the movie, and I've read the fact checks. Even before reading them though I noticed multiple flaws and problems while watching. If you still think that movie is credible as evidence of wide-scale election fraud I recommend you brush up on your critical thinking skills. If you've already learned how to spot weak arguments and manipulations, maybe you're just out of practice. Personally, I recommend consuming a lot of content that advocates for positions you strongly disagree with. You'll find that you can't help but nitpick every weak argument. Do that enough, and you'll find you won't be able to stop spotting problems with bad arguments no matter how much you agree with the underlying message or where it's coming from.

mig39 4y ago

Someone should fork LibreOffice every time there's a new release, and re-package it with a better name.

mekster 4y ago
Which better name?
- torstenvl 4y ago
  OpenSuite Freedom Office Liberation Office Office Commons Office Publica Ensemble TogetherWorks

effnorwood 4y ago

emmelaich 4y ago

The "LibreOffice" name doesn't help. Not that many people would be able to spell that on first hearing. Libber-what? Lib Re-Office?

schleck8 4y ago

Why did you even post this? The last release was in May of 2022, not 2017! https://openoffice.apache.org/downloads.html https://openoffice.apache.org/downloads.html

greyhair 4y ago

I see a lot of blah blah blah below, but none of it gets to the crux of the matter, and that is LibreOffice is klunky. I used to have it installed, because I had installed it for my father-in-law and I was his tech support (he passed a couple years ago). The API in Writer is a mess. Okay? I am sure I'll get some people sqawking for be saying that out loud, but I also know a bunch of you will be nodding in agreement. And don't get me started on Calc. Lets get another thing clear, I don't love Microsoft Word. I don't. But then, my original experience writing documentation was in nroff/troff using Writer's Workbench. Then later, TeX. But the truth is, through work, or school, a ton of people have become accustomed to be productive in Word. And Excel is simply Superior to Calc in every way. And yes, Microsoft is up to their old tricks, the bastards. We all know it. I mean, WSL2 was pretty good in Windows 10, but OMG WSL2 in Windows 11 competely rules. Native Linux USB support. Wow. That is some wicked bundling there. And then, if you have a family, Office 365, just for the fact that you can hand it out to a total of five other people, and you each get 1TB of cloud storage. For $99 per year. Again, wicked sneaky bundling. Six instances of 1TB cloud for $99? We only use five here, so $20 each, per year, for 1TB of cloud. Oh yeah, you get to use Office 365 if you want, as well. So year, Microsoft pulls under handed market bundling. But that doesn't excuse the fact that LibreOffice is Klunky. Now that I no longer have to support it, I don't miss it at all.

oneepic 4y ago

It's not dead. I use it. Not that I dev for it though.

jgilias 4y ago
Why are you using it instead of LibreOffice? Genuinely curious.
- bluedino 4y ago
  He may not know why he should be using it instead of OpenOffice.
  - rgrieselhuber 4y ago
    I’m also curious. Also compared to OnlyOffice?
    - jraph 4y ago
      OnlyOffice is far from being as comprehensive as LibreOffice. At least when I tried the spreadsheets, I ran into limitations even though I use spreadsheets very rarely.
      - rgrieselhuber 4y ago
        Good to know, thanks.
  - mtmail 4y ago
    They (he, she, undetermined) might not even be aware of the other office suites. The sibling commenter lists OnlyOffice, first time I hear about that.
- oneepic 4y ago
  1) No Windows release afaik. But please correct me if I am wrong -- I don't see a Win download on their page from a quick look on my phone. 2) I did use it on Ubuntu sometime in college (around 2016 for class) and I just didn't like the feel of Libre. OpenOffice still had a lot of feature parity with Excel without buying Excel, so I got that instead.

jsiepkes 4y ago

To be honest I never understood why Apache even started in the first place. By that time the LibreOffice fork was well underway.

Jasper_ 4y ago
IBM was shipping their own proprietary office suite based on OpenOffice, Lotus Symphony, and LibreOffice wasn't a good fit for that business model. IBM was the leading charge behind Apache OpenOffice, Oracle would have rather dumpstered it.
- usrusr 4y ago
  I'd be surprised if the walking dead state of Open separate from Libre wasn't caused by in-house tools somewhere that just never got ported to Libre, or that are somehow inherently incompatible with that fork. Symphony is certainly a prime suspect for the original "version some in-house stuff got built on". The question "do we really want to port yet another minor improvement/fix from Libre to Open instead of porting our own grown mess from Open to Libre?" can be answered with a short-sighted "yes, of course!" any number of times. And Open cannot be formerly declared dead as long as this form of contribution keeps happening.
  - Jasper_ 4y ago
    IBM discontinued Lotus Symphony nearly 10 years ago. OpenOffice continues because the Apache project chairs in place hate the GPL, and even worse, they hate admitting they lost. It's a moral/pride thing rather than a practical or business thing at this point. But IBM was the reason it exists in the first place.
    - usrusr 4y ago
      Judging from the simplified fork graph in the article (likely greatly simplified, I admit), I'd expect something depending on Symphony to be far more compatible with current Open than with current Libre. But sure, the licencing difference might very well be a part of that.

hgazx 4y ago

Is it me or the second picture or whatever that is doesn’t load?

arbitrage 4y ago
I get a warning about incorrectly embedded external content, which includes a link to the following KB article from Mozi: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page

behnamoh 4y ago

This is what scares me: a FOSS project maintained by a corporation. I tend to install FOSS because imo they are more "future-proof", but some of them are developed by companies (e.g., Fedora Linux) and that makes me wonder if they're truly future-proof.

api 4y ago
Nothing is future-proof.
- bavell 4y ago
  Yep. The only constant is change!
bombcar 4y ago
The "future-proof" is that if the corp goes belly up or insane, you can in theory fork the project and continue it, which if there's enough of a user base will happen. But if there's enough of a user base the company probably won't abandon it. Things like Fedora are potentially at a bit more risk, because if IBM decides to stop developing it for whatever reason most users will probably just switch to an entire different distro (or a related one) than bother continuing the existing.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  good readers - I am here to tell you, from experience with my own two eyes, popular important and public software projects absolutely do get closed by private companies, for so many reasons. None of the reasons are "your benefit"
- goodpoint 4y ago
  > if the corp goes belly up or insane, you can in theory fork the project Yes: for a small + useful + easy to maintain project. No: for bloated or difficult to build projects, which makes most of popular browsers, corp-driven programming languages, devops tools, office suites, corp-driven IDEs, Linux distros... Not to mention non-copyleft licenses that allow proprietization and discourage communties.

datalopers 4y ago

Apache has a few good projects and so much abandonware it’s very difficult to know which to avoid entirely. At this point I think Apache has about 15 different data streaming/queueing/event processing systems.

eikenberry 4y ago
I've learned over the last decade or so just to avoid Apache software. It seems like the vast majority of their software is poorly written, enterprise abandonware. They are a joke of their former self. Kind of sad really.
mekster 4y ago
What are those some of the good Apache projects? Practically never used anything but httpd (which I no longer use) and everything else looked like bloated software being Java taking huge resource and usually has a better competitor. I occasionally see Kafka being used as parts of software stack but not sure if that is the best choice with huge resource use.
- aembleton 4y ago
  Their Java libraries and utils are good: Maven, Utils, Commons, CommonsIO
klysm 4y ago
At a minimum, and they all have so many bugs :(
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I often feel like projects that are handed over to Apache are basically put in the equivalent of an aircraft boneyard; stashed for archival purposes, but it will no longer receive much development effort.
- sgift 4y ago
  Come again? Lucene, Solr, Kafka, Zookeeper, httpd, CouchDB, .. and that's just the top of my head.

oniony 4y ago

Wow, didn't realise StarOffice started in 1985.

resoluteteeth 4y ago

The worst thing about this was that openoffice was starting to get some name recognition before oracle killed it, and this whole debacle intentionally or unintentionally turned that name recognition into a weapon against LibreOffice. Ideally they should have given LibreOffice the OpenOffice name, but even if they had just said "openoffice is dead" then it would have been easy for people to find libreoffice. Unfortunately, by taking over the OpenOffice name and absolutely refusing to admit that development has ceased, Apache has caused tons of confusion that has massively harmed libreoffice, because for years people who had heard about "openoffice" would see the terrible, out of date, insecure pile of junk being distributed by the Apache Foundation and not realize that the actively developed LibreOffice was available. In the case of linux distributions it was less of an issue since they just switched to LibreOffice, but I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice (and possibly taking one look at it and giving up and switching to Office 365). Apache should have killed OpenOffice years ago but at the very least they should take it down and honestly apologize for fucking this up so badly. Even ignoring the harm to LibreOffice it's just irresponsible for Apache to keep distributing OpenOffice when they can't even make new releases to simply apply security patches for years.

pessimizer 4y ago
> I wouldn't be suprised if there are windows users who are still downloading OpenOffice I wouldn't be surprised if as many or more Windows users were downloading it than downloading Libreoffice. The problem is that the name isn't punchy and is unpronounceable in English. Plenty of people who are completely knowledgeable about the situation still refer to Libreoffice as Openoffice. It's intentional sabotage, more than probably covertly initiated and maintained by Microsoft, and destroyed the entire Apache Foundation for me. I avoid all of their projects, because if that project has a commercial competitor with deep pockets, I can't trust it not to be intentionally bad or broken.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  ...I'm a native english speaker and I've never had trouble pronouncing libre, is it a problem for others? I've always said "lib-ray", which for all I know is wrong, I never gave it a second thought.

kerblang 4y ago

Does Apache ever "declare" anything dead? In my experience things are just allowed to drift quietly into bureaucratic ghost towns. I'm not sure if they've ever formally disbanded a project, but maybe somebody has an example. It would be helpful if OpenOffice were formally killed though. The name "Libreoffice" is not particularly catchy and I can never remember which is which even though I actually have LibreOffice installed on the computer I'm using right now. Edit: Oh here's an example: https://river.apache.org/ https://river.apache.org/ but it took them several years to come to terms with it, but then again that was quicker than OpenOffice, yes. Edit again: I think coincidentally (or not) Apache River has a similar history to OpenOffice, in that after buying Sun Microsystems, Oracle "donated" it to Apache, "donated" meaning "Good luck, this isn't our problem anymore." One of those things that looks like goodwill but really isn't...

SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
IIUC, the central Apache organization can’t or at least doesn’t declare projects dead. I’m not sure what would happen if the maintainers literally disappeared, but as long as the project’s PMC stays active and wants to keep going they can.
- heax 4y ago
  They do declare projects dead. They even have a place for them https://attic.apache.org/ https://attic.apache.org/
xhkkffbf 4y ago
I use several Apache libraries that are getting pretty old. But so is my code. So I'm glad that they keep things around a long time. Still, I think it might be good to have more warning for the consumer-facing tools.
sdf4j 4y ago
Apache moves projects to the "attic" regularly. It's a well known process but requires the project community to be really dead. Which is not the case of OpenOffice just yet. See https://attic.apache.org/ https://attic.apache.org/

rbanffy 4y ago

Online office apps have an edge WRT collaboration. It may well be that the era of the standalone office suite is reaching its end. What would it take to make LibreOffice a web-centric app companies could host themselves? Maybe Apache's resources could be directed that way.

macinjosh 4y ago
I think this exists in the form of Collabora Office https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/ It is integrated into NextCloud I believe for self-hosting
octobus2021 4y ago
There's definitely a significant niche for offline word processor, spreadsheet, drawing diagrams and such. I do not want to go online, register, have my data "in the cloud", fume when it goes down because of AWS of buggy update, lose it when the company decides to fold, etc. I want to fire up an application on my local, edit it there, and save it on my local. If I need collaboration, well, there's plenty of tools for that. But I'm old and my 14yo son never saw even MS Word (leave along LibreOffice) until I showed it to him, they do everything in Google Docs and that's all they know. So maybe I'm part of a dying breed :-)
ptero 4y ago
I am not sure that online collaboration is such a killer feature. Most of the time I would take a good offline office app over the application that requires an internet connection, stores my data in the cloud and forces its design choices, from the UI to the security, down my throat "because of the way cloud apps work". My 2c.
- LordDragonfang 4y ago
  This is probably a plurality opinion on Hacker News, which means it in no way represents the opinion of the average user or business professional. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=microsoft+word%2Copenoffice%2Clibreoffice%2Cgoogle+docs&year_start=1995&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=microsoft+word... Note that 2010 is the year that MS first started adding cloud-based collaborative tools to MS word, reducing the downward trend.

josefx 4y ago

> Its last major release was version 4.1, from 2014! Oh we are playing major version minor version! Let me try: Libreoffice is only at version 7.3 ! That makes it hundreds of versions behind office365! Proof once again that free software has no business competing with software build by professional commercial developers. Now excuse me while I try to reboot my futuristic Windows 2000. /s Versions may as well be marketing names for most software. If anyone even mentions them I might as well assume a minor case of serious brain damage. Java just flat out dropped the leading 1, Firefox is in the low hundreds, some software just goes year/moth. As Apache office still releases updates I find the claim that it is dead highly misleading, but that is presumably the intention if the post.

lolinder 4y ago
The "from 2014" is the important bit they're emphasizing, not the version number. LibreOffice 7.3 was released this year.
- josefx 4y ago
  The last release is from 2022 not 2014.
  - cesarb 4y ago
    According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apache_OpenOffice&oldid=1090618564#Releases https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apache_OpenOffice...), the latest patch release was 4.1.11 from 2021, and the latest minor release was 4.1 from 2014. That is, since 2014, they are just releasing small bugfixes. Compare with LibreOffice (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LibreOffice&oldid=1094108720#Release_history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LibreOffice&oldid...) which had the latest minor release in 2022, and the latest major release in 2020.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    Minor versions versus major versions do matter. Here are the release notes for the 2022 release of OpenOffice: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?contentId=199539486#content/view/199539486 https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?c... This is pretty clearly a minor version update. There are only four entries under their improvements / enhancements section, and all but one would be more accurately described as a bug fix. They even identify this as a "maintenance release". Here are the release notes for the 2022 release of LibreOffice: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.3 https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.3 Aside from the fact that this is much better documented, you can also at a glance see that this is, in fact, a major version update. LibreOffice isn't padding their versions, they actually are adding new features while OpenOffice fixes a few bugs.

phendrenad2 4y ago

Because of all the organic internet traffic it brings them. Hey, stay awhile, maybe use one of their ML/AI projects and donate some money too!

mseepgood 4y ago

Because the Apache Foundation is a graveyard for open source projects.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

aliswe 4y ago

If trends are telling, as the author seems to think, they tell of Libre's decline, too. One thing I noticed is that the web based MS Office products are significantly snappier and less quirky than their desktop counterparts. Maybe that is part of it? Unrelated: I also noticed that Visio, which I previously found quite pleasant to use, actually is nigh unusable (Desktop - no web version exists). Was it always this bad and have my standards simply gone up, or did it deteriorate?

n8cpdx 4y ago
I used to be a big fan of desktop Microsoft office, primarily because of stability, reliability, and ux innovation. They've clearly stopped investing in quality, every time I go back it is buggier and less reliable than before. I don't use Visio, but even Word is becoming a nightmare.

encryptluks2 4y ago

I've always assumed when projects go under the Apache.org umbrella, that is where they go to die.

gtk40 4y ago
Should I not be using Kafka? Or CouchDB? I guess we shouldn't using log4j at this point though...
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  I mean yes of course use what works for now, but I think eventually those will die off too. As with most things, Apache projects tend to be bloated Java apps that end up being phased out by more trendy and more performant apps built in Go/Rust.
mrweasel 4y ago
That does seem to depend on why/how it ends up at Apache. Something like OpenOffice, or the myriad of Java projects, which have just been throw in under the umbrella is more or less abandoned. There seems to be some misconception that Apache has a number of developers sitting ready, or a ton of money to hire developers to take on any random project. Projects under Apache really only works when the developers are involved and follow the project. At this point I'm a little unsure what The Apache Foundation provides, beyond hosting and some legal support.

maxbaines 4y ago

Because of what’s been highlighted in this article I found it super difficult to figure out a good alternative to MS Office, so agree 100% with the article. Now a happy LibreOffice user.

the_biot 4y ago

The mark of a good open source maintainer is the ability to, when your personal interest wanes, find a new maintainer and hand over. I've done this several times, and certainly development went on much slower than before, but them's the breaks. At least I did the right thing. For such a big organization, with so many open source projects under its big wing, Apache has failed on this mark of maintainership completely. It failed so badly that at this stage, deploying Apache-maintained software for a customer or employer is downright irresponsible. Would you organize all your company's internal communications around Google's latest messaging thing? That's insane, you know it'll bite you in the ass in a few years time when it gets cancelled. Apache is no better.

_benedict 4y ago
The ASF is an umbrella organisation. For most projects the ASF’s involvement stretches only to procedures and structures for managing the project. The maintainers are mostly not even ASF Members (even those that steer projects). So, not much inference can be drawn from the failure of one project that applies to another.

ConcernedCoder 4y ago

(shrug) I still use OpenOffice 4.1.5 day to day on windows 10, with no issues...didn't know about any controversy.

ncmncm 4y ago
There is no controversy: OpenOffice is crapware, use Libreoffice. The only problem is that Apache still distributes what they are fully aware is an abandoned husk, misleading people like yourself.
- joemi 4y ago
  This comment does not explain why one should use Libreoffice if Openoffice is working just fine for them.
  - dimensi0nal 4y ago
    security, probably? using abandonware to open extremely complex file formats like microsoft/opendocument ones is kind of a bad idea.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Yes. Do you absolutely trust everybody who sends you a doc or spreadsheet? Do you trust that much everyone who sends them one, that they pass along to you? It is better not to need to think about that, much.
  - Alupis 4y ago
    This is kind of like asking why one shouldn't run Microsoft Office 2003 anymore. Does it still work? Sure... is it secure and has feature parity with modern offerings? Definitely not. Perhaps that's fine - but since LibreOffice is also free and is actively developed (by many of the original OpenOffice team too), I don't see a compelling reason to not make the switch.

tialaramex 4y ago

Here's what I suggested as a goal for OpenOffice, in September 2016 which is now six years ago, as a response to Apache officer Jim Jagielski ("jimjag") who thought this was going well: [[[ I urge you, or the Apache board generally, to look at the facts, and not get yourself into the mess of trusting AOO project members' gut instinct that everything is fine or that the board's oversight is the problem and you should just stop looking. For sure, it is possible that they'll actually manage to turn this around. But there are already AOO people convinced they've done it, and there were six months ago, when in fact as you know they were in deep trouble already. Their feelings about this aren't going to be objective. If in say, three months, there's no measurable evidence that AOO is back on course then regardless of what is said by the handful of AOO people, retirement is the right choice. For example, shipping AOO 4.2 in 10 weeks at ApacheConEU. That's not crazy. Libreoffice goes from feature freeze to release in 10 weeks. A healthy AOO development community should be able to do it, or come so close as to leave no-one in any doubt. ]]] https://lwn.net/Articles/699680/ https://lwn.net/Articles/699680/ Again, I wrote that in September 2016. Did Apache in fact ship OpenOffice 4.2 at that year's ApacheConEU? No they did not. OK, so when did they finally ship the "imminent" OpenOffice 4.2? Never. Here's what the most recent quarterly summary from the Apache OpenOffice project to Apache's board said about version 4.2, "An alpha and/or beta release is planned for the next quarter". That sounds optimistic doesn't it? Well, sadly that's also what it said in January 2020. Huh. Who writes this stuff? Funny, it's Jim Jagielski, the same guy I was addressing six years ago. Try to avoid caring whether people are incompetent or liars, you will find it difficult to tell which is which, so if you ensure you can treat both the same you needn't distinguish. In this case I needn't worry about whether Jim was too stupid to know what the problem was in 2016 or just didn't care.

csours 4y ago
Is Jim getting paid to work on AOO?
- fs111 4y ago
  He works at salesforce atm

lewisjoe 4y ago

I'm in the business of building a word processor. Besides OpenOffice, there is generally reduced downloads of both OpenOffice and LibreOffice. This is not surprising. The world is moving past system-installed, standalone editors, saving them into a file and exchanging them over emails. The convenience that comes with editing, sharing and collaborating right from the browser is picking up speed, and it's a good thing. We have unlimited version history and the social features (comments, reactions and data tables, with ratings and upvotes as column types like in Coda / Notion) is unmatchable with what a traditional word processor can offer. The world is evolving into a different future of Office apps and Apache's projects don't fit into that ecosystem.

sys_64738 4y ago
Few regular folk need to share documents and businesses will use name brand word processors for collaboration rather than some unknown, new variation. You're wasting your time, IMO.
orev 4y ago
It’s NOT a good thing. I want to own my documents and not have to worry about some cloud provider mining them to sell data about me, or just disappearing one day. Sure I can see the cases where the collaboration is useful, but there are many, many more cases where it’s not needed and cloud introduces far more risk than reward.
- freeAgent 4y ago
  It’s also hard to beat the UX available to native applications that are dedicated and purpose-built and locally processing rather than an interpreted language wrapped inside a web browser constantly communicating with a server somewhere as I type. I really hate online document editors.
- notriddle 4y ago
  How many documents do you actually own, but still write them in a full-out word processor? Personally, if it's just for me, I use .txt files. Word processors are too much friction for personal notes. The only cases where I want sophisticated formatting features are for other people's documents, which means it's their business to pick the format. They don't always pick Office 365. Sometimes it's Confluence, or a company-branded tool that I don't even know what it actually is, or Zoho, or G Suite. Between running some random word processor that someone else picked for me in my browser, and giving it unrestricted access to my home folder (or having to fiddle around to get it running in a container of some sort), I prefer the browser. I definitely prefer the browser over imposing a monoculture on word processors. Not so much because I think there's much room to innovate in text editing itself (I often enough copy-and-paste between web-based word processors and Sublime Text), but because of the opportunity to innovate in the data model.