Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OnlyOffice: Free open source office suite with business productivity tools

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 260 posts

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

#41

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

_atreeonmyhouse wrote: post #14
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #2

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.

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…

> 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.

Then it's no worse than any proprietary software; if they pay for a commercial license then it's fine. Of course, if they use it internally then AGPL is also fine.

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

#42

Post by hedora »

_atreeonmyhouse wrote: post #20
kstrauser wrote: post #19

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.

That makes sense. GPL 3 is basically a non-starter for people that ship hardware, but is fine for people that provide web services.

AGPL would level the playing field between Google and device manufacturers and on-prem software companies (like Apple and Microsoft).

Of course they don’t want their employees to use and indirectly support that ecosystem!

I wish they’d produce a GPL 4 that is closer to the AGPL. v3 backfired and is severely hurting end-users’ freedom in practice.

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

#43

Post by komali2 »

roshin wrote: 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.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19#issue...

> @ONLYOFFICE, FYI to add bidi-directional support (LTR, RTL and mixed) in Web interface is as simple to add to element dir=auto.

> If I remember correctly, they are using canvas with custom rendering logic. Hence many native browser capabilities might not be available.

Oh, jeez, why? I want to install this just to point a screen reader at it and watch the havoc. Maybe they got that figured out but good lord...

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

#45

Post by komali2 »

DangitBobby wrote: post #26
kstrauser wrote: post #19

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.

> viral and poisonous

Viral, perhaps if you integrate a library, but in this case it doesn't make sense, you only need to distribute source code if you modify it. Poisonous makes no sense to me, can you clarify?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/poisonous

1. DESTRUCTIVE, HARMFUL

...

3. SPITEFUL, MALICIOUS

In what ways is the GPL or AGPL destructive or harmful or spiteful or malicious? I find it the exact opposite of all those concepts.

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

#46

Post by hoten »

DangitBobby wrote: post #26
kstrauser wrote: post #19

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.

If you don't distribute the program you don't need to care that it's built with GPL dependencies.

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

#47

Post by thayne »

komali2 wrote: post #43
roshin wrote: 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.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19#issue... > @ONLYOFFICE, FYI to add bidi-directional support (LTR, RTL and mixed) in Web interface is as simple to add to element dir=auto. > If I remember correctly, they are using canvas with custom rendering logic. Hence many native browser capabilities might not be available. Oh, jeez, why? I want to install this just to point a screen reader at it and watch t…

Because that is basically what you have to do if you want a truly rich editor that works and looks consistently across browsers and operating systems.

Maybe today you could get something to work using a combination of contenteditable and canvas, with code to handle the inconsistencies between browsers. But I know that at least a few years ago, rendering to a canvas was a necessity for rich web apps like this. Google docs at least used to be canvas based as well. I'm not sure if that is still the case.

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

#48

Post by kstrauser »

komali2 wrote: post #45
DangitBobby wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> viral and poisonous Viral, perhaps if you integrate a library, but in this case it doesn't make sense, you only need to distribute source code if you modify it. Poisonous makes no sense to me, can you clarify? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/poisonous 1. DESTRUCTIVE, HARMFUL ... 3. SPITEFUL, MALICIOUS In what ways is the GPL or AGPL destructive or harmful or spiteful or malicious? I find it the exact opp…

It’s not, except to people who want to use GPLed software without holding up their end of the bargain.

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

#49

Post by mixmastamyk »

JadeNB wrote: post #9
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #2

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.

> 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?

It's quite intuitive if you learned on Office '97 or anything up to '07. If you learned on '07+, you might want a ribbon interface instead. But LO has that available; not sure how good it is.
Post reply on HN