4 ms·
This will hurt a lot of institutions who have sometimes decades of content. I don't see why a tool like this can't be made free / unsupported, or if IP allows,
by frognumber 3y ago
This will hurt a lot of institutions who have sometimes decades of content.
I don't see why a tool like this can't be made free / unsupported, or if IP allows, even open-source.
All that archival content is dead the instant the license servers go down.
This is also very unlike Microsoft, who usually cares so much about client business continuity. It's more a Google thing. That's the whole reason people pick Microsoft.
- timschmidt 3y agoThere is some existing open source work here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DLP/Libraries/libmspub https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DLP/Libraries/libmspub
- chris_wot 3y agoIt's limited, LibreOffice does a good job but it has still got compatibility problems.
- timschmidt 3y agoI'm sure they'd welcome bug reports or patches related to any issues you run into. Seems like your only option other than keeping an ancient and unsupported copy of Publisher in a VM.
- chris_wot 3y agoI don’t use Publisher, but have done some code patches to the widgeting toolkit used by LibreOffice. I’ve seen bug reports already :-) somebody would need to fix them…
- chris_wot 3y agoYeah, Microsoft have screwed up with this one. Publisher had a market (still does) and so far as I'm aware despite them saying that you can do the same thing as you did in Publisher in Word, you can't open Publisher files in Word. That's the issue. If you could open them in Word, then I could understand them getting rid of Publisher. But you can't, so it doesn't make any sense.