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LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

blog.documentfoundation.org

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Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#41

Post by ForHackernews »

bee_rider wrote: post #33
ForHackernews wrote: post #29

Why can't governments fund LibreOffice as part of their effort to wean themselves away from Microsoft? This seems like such an obvious thing for governments to fund for their own use and bequeath as a gift to their citizenry.

Anyway, most people don’t want to interact with office type documents, right? The only reason I have it installed is to deal with a problem usually generated by some big organization: documents that aren’t available in an accessible format like Tex, markdown, or html. Let the people generating the problem pay for it.

You are in a bubble. Most office workers want Word documents and Excel spreadsheets (or something equivalent) not markdown and numpy.

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#42

Post by asdewqqwer »

fluoridation wrote: post #36
asdewqqwer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever try to write a email client, you will immediately realize how difficult, if not impossible, to fix all the bugs for a email client. It is a multi-different-protocol-version-async-client-handling-same-database-with-thousands-of-race-condition backwards compatibility nightmare. Writing a email client with support of just up-to-date protocols and assume it is the single client that will operate that account…

I don't know about the rest, but surely the race conditions are the fault of whoever designed the concurrency part. An email client does not inherently have race conditions.

> assume it is the single client that will operate that account

You are still making wild assumption without actually thinking about what means to writing an email client.

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#43

Post by vntok »

accountofthaha wrote: post #27
p-e-w wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bad argument. Established things are established. “If you don’t like what the president of your country is doing, just run for the office yourself.”

"Established things are established" BUT "established things don't always stay there." Things can change, if many people will support said change. The power of many is really something.

Exactly. And it seems that "many people" do not, in fact, support this change, to the point Libreoffice felt necessary to defend it after the fact on their official website.

Maybe "many people" remember what's been going on at Mozilla over the past decade. After all, Mozilla went there before and set the example of downward slope: first donations then partnerships, first opt-in then opt-out then automatically installed addons, first "contribute to the browser" then to sideprojects/non-technical causes, etc.

A similar case could be made for Wikimedia.

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#44

Post by II2II »

I understand that dealing with complaints is annoying, but the response in the article was very unprofessional. Feel free to say what the change is, why it is there, and perhaps even address some of the concerns. But attacking users, even if it is a small segment of the population, does not paint The Document Foundation in a positive light.

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#45

Post by vntok »

carlosjobim wrote: post #26
VadimPR wrote: post #10

I agree with them, nothing wrong to ask for a donation to keep the lights on. At the same time, it needs to be possible to disable this banner for enterprise deployments

If there's anybody who should pay for their software, it's enterprise. They should be able to disable the banner by paying a fair price for their office suite.

If Libreoffice, in addition to not have feature parity with MS Office, now has a similar per-seat pricing... what exactly is the value proposition?

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#47

Post by dfox »

GuB-42 wrote: post #20
nogajun wrote: post #17

The issue here isn’t that we’re asking for donations. The massive banner is significantly impairing usability. It’s wrong to ask for donations at the expense of usability.

On the start page? To me, the start page is mostly just a giant "open" dialog, with huge buttons and not much functionality to it, there is more than enough space for a fundraiser. I don't even use it that much. When I want to open a file, I click on it in the file manager. When I want to create a new file, I launch the appropriate program (ex: LibreOffice Writer), which defaults to a blank document.

The telling part about uselessness of that window is that the most visible difference between StarOffice 5.2 and OpenOffice.org 1.0 was that equivalent of this window was removed. It got reintroduced probably because it makes packaging LibreOffice for macOS easier.

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#48

Post by [deleted] »

II2II wrote: post #44

I understand that dealing with complaints is annoying, but the response in the article was very unprofessional. Feel free to say what the change is, why it is there, and perhaps even address some of the concerns. But attacking users, even if it is a small segment of the population, does not paint The Document Foundation in a positive light.

[deleted]

Re: LibreOffice and the art of overreacting

#49

Post by red_admiral »

They lost me at putting "overreacting" in the title.

If that's the way they react to negative user feedback, they deserve more of it. Even Microsoft sometimes caves in if enough people complain - recall is now optional and I believe opt-in; there's noises about maybe not sticking AI in everything and letting you turn it off in future versions.

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