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OnlyOffice: Free open source office suite with business productivity tools

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Re: OnlyOffice: Free open source office suite with business productivity tools

#21
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m surprised ONLYOFFICE isn’t more popular in more distributions. It’s AGPL, open source, and almost infinitely more intuitive than LibreOffice to anyone coming from Microsoft Office. As someone who doesn't even know MS Office well enough to know what I'm missing, what's unintuitive about LibreOffice to someone who knows MS Office?

Looks like OnlyOffice uses a ribbon UI that looks to be pretty well modeled on the MS Office pattern. Somewhat better preservation of muscle memory. I am not saying that Libreoffice has a worse interface (or really 'unintuitive').. Just more different from MS Office.

LibreOffice also offers one that's fairly decent, just not enabled by default. It has many other modes as well: https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2023/01/Enable-ribbon-tab...

Re: OnlyOffice: Free open source office suite with business productivity tools

#22

Anyone have a good comparison between this and LibreOffice?

OnlyOffice seems to be the only FOSS office suite that handles Microsoft Office documents correctly.

When I open my Word docs in LibreOffice, they still look significantly different than in Word after all these years. In OnlyOffice they look exactly like in Word. So it replaced Word-in-Wine for me.

Re: OnlyOffice: Free open source office suite with business productivity tools

#23
post #11

I’m surprised ONLYOFFICE isn’t more popular in more distributions. It’s AGPL, open source, and almost infinitely more intuitive than LibreOffice to anyone coming from Microsoft Office.

My only serious gripe with OnlyOffice is that when opening a CSV, you have to choose an encoding and delimiter, and there is no way to set a default. You must click twice, in two places, every single time you open a CSV.

CSV is not a standard (rfc4180 exists but only very few things actually pay attention to it) so no behavior is a sane behavior when trying to import it.

Re: OnlyOffice: Free open source office suite with business productivity tools

#24
post #22

Anyone have a good comparison between this and LibreOffice?

OnlyOffice seems to be the only FOSS office suite that handles Microsoft Office documents correctly. When I open my Word docs in LibreOffice, they still look significantly different than in Word after all these years. In OnlyOffice they look exactly like in Word. So it replaced Word-in-Wine for me.

The elephant in the room is excel not word IMO.

Re: OnlyOffice: Free open source office suite with business productivity tools

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s so sad. I’d hate to work at a shop that wouldn’t allow AGPL’d software for internal tooling. What a completely legally unnecessary, productivity-hobbling decision. Perhaps the best feature of the AGPL is that it predominately hampers companies with ineffective legal departments.

One of the most notable examples is Google.

Pity. They said it’s because they’re afraid someone outside Google would use it, which is legitimate for companies without sufficient technical SBOL controls to prevent using third party software in violation of its terms. Their take is basically “we don’t have a way to keep our internal software internal, so you can’t use it at all, ever, for anything”. I wouldn’t have expected that of them.

Re: OnlyOffice: Free open source office suite with business productivity tools

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some confusion here. The linked GitHub repo clearly says Apache License, but their commercial website does say AGPL. They're not even remotely similar. The AGPL is regarded as so toxic that nearly all companies where office suites matter, place it on a "do not use" list. It's a good way to artificially limit your potential customers. It doesn't matter that they have a page saying "sure go ahead and use it in…

That’s so sad. I’d hate to work at a shop that wouldn’t allow AGPL’d software for internal tooling. What a completely legally unnecessary, productivity-hobbling decision. Perhaps the best feature of the AGPL is that it predominately hampers companies with ineffective legal departments.

Licenses intended to be viral and poisonous are avoided by companies interested in ownership over their own IP. Huge shocker.

Re: OnlyOffice: Free open source office suite with business productivity tools

#29
post #28

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19 I'm still waiting for this 7 year issue. I have doubts about how open source this is. Based on the comments, someone created a PR to support RTL, but the maintainers refused to review it.

The responsiveness of maintainers to PRs has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it's actually open source.

Re: OnlyOffice: Free open source office suite with business productivity tools

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s so sad. I’d hate to work at a shop that wouldn’t allow AGPL’d software for internal tooling. What a completely legally unnecessary, productivity-hobbling decision. Perhaps the best feature of the AGPL is that it predominately hampers companies with ineffective legal departments.

Licenses intended to be viral and poisonous are avoided by companies interested in ownership over their own IP. Huge shocker.

What do you mean by "poisonous"?
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