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LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

blog.documentfoundation.org

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Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#61

Post by bluGill »

charcircuit wrote: post #57
asveikau wrote: post #26

I'm not following this, but having drama in an office suite dev team sounds funny to me. I just want to open an occasional word doc and sometimes make a spreadsheet.

A lot of open source software has drama so it isn't surprising to me.

Anything with more than a few humans will have drama. Most marriages have a lot and that is two people (who mostly manage anyway).

lack of drama is a bad sign - it means someone isn't allowed to think/feel. (This is okay in a few contexts but overall bad)

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#62

Post by redeeman »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #52
tomrod wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before Libre Office was Open Office. I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.

I’d love for someone to be able to take it from “yeah it mostly works for me” to “oh fuck you Microsoft, I’m going to move our entire company over to this”. I’m not going to hold my breath.

because thats not about quality, its about "i demand something thats 100% exactly the same as microsofts product, even in the places where its objectively crappier. I also wish it to track the microslop so that it consistently stays as shitty as microslop deems, so that I may never realize I use something else."

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#64

Post by maxloh »

psim1 wrote: post #6

LibreOffice almost seemed irrelevant; with cheap to free (*included) tools in abundance, such as MS Office, Google Workspace, Apple Pages/Numbers/Keynote, the need for LibreOffice is not what it once was, back when StarOffice and OpenOffice were liberating people from the tyranny of Microsoft. Now it's worse than irrelevant, it's a liability.

For context, you cannot export a Google Doc in its native format and import the file later from another account.

That’s the price you pay: Google owns your data. You’ve sold your soul to them.

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#65

Post by ealexhudson »

thayne wrote: post #40
everybodyknows wrote: post #2

Meeks' blog post, for comparison: https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev... Note the references to legal issues; draw your own conclusions.

> at the same time accusing others of historic conflicts of interest Collabora clearly has a conflict of interest, as their Collabora Office products both benefit from, and compete with LibreOffice proper. They even allude to that conflict of interest in the next sentence: > overriding past board and engineering steering committee decisions and violating their own processes to drag code out of the attic to enable com…

This plausibly demonstrates why a nonprofit may not be a great vehicle for some free software projects - while the nonprofit should do whats best for the project, if the main work is done by commercial sponsors then it’s crucial those sponsors feel the relationship is beneficial.

The reality is free software office apps require significant professional development input. Apache Open Office is the obvious example.

It’s a classic version of the tragedy of the commons. If Collabora goes off to its own thing, I struggle to believe they will maintain the development rate with new devs, and without development the TDF sponsorship will fall off.

I hope we are not looking back in two years time regretting this.

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#66

Post by garciansmith »

I wish this was more clearly written. Maybe I missed something, and I guess this is supposing the reader already has a lot of background, but there are several points that confused me.

"At the time, nobody could imagine that the companies that had supported OpenOffice.org until then would create a project to kill LibreOffice."

Did they mean... to kill OpenOffice? Or had supported LibreOffice would want to create a project to kill it later? Because that fact that companies who had previously supported OpenOffice then switched to LibreOffice doesn't strike me as odd, given the situation with Oracle back then. Also, what is the "project" that is trying to kill LibreOffice?

I am not clear on how the Board of Directors differs from The Document Foundation (are they just the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation then?).

What is "TDC"? It is not even clear what that stands for, nor what this "parallel organization" was supposed to do and how it differed from The Document Foundation. And if "the plan to transfer many of TDF’s tasks and assets" to "TDC" didn't happen back in 2020, why is it being brought up here? But then the next paragraph talks about the transfer so it did happen the year before? But then was terminated? Again though, I don't get why it matters now except maybe that some people were upset by that move over five years ago.

"This attempt resulted in permanent damage to relations between the project’s components, and especially between certain BoD members and the team."

Who is "the team"? The Document Foundation?

"After years of discussions marked by accusations and finger-pointing, during which no real progress was made in resolving the legal issues, the authorities requested an audit..."

Who are "the authorities" requesting the audit?

A "third audit" was mentioned, but it is unclear if the one audit mentioned above in the post was that third one or one of the previous ones (describing these and when they happened would have helped).

I still have no clue as to what Collabora's relationship was and is to The Document Foundation.

They apologize for the need for this post, but I don't really understand why. I get the idea that, given their non-profit nature, there were issues, but making those more clear seems laudable (even if I don't think the post especially helped in doing so).

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#68

Post by linguae »

psim1 wrote: post #6

LibreOffice almost seemed irrelevant; with cheap to free (*included) tools in abundance, such as MS Office, Google Workspace, Apple Pages/Numbers/Keynote, the need for LibreOffice is not what it once was, back when StarOffice and OpenOffice were liberating people from the tyranny of Microsoft. Now it's worse than irrelevant, it's a liability.

None of the tools that you mentioned except for LibreOffice and OpenOffice are free-as-in-freedom, and if you’re using Linux on the desktop, then Microsoft Office and the Apple iWork suite are unavailable as desktop applications.

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#69

Post by Aurornis »

cge wrote: post #29

Something that is dismaying to me about this situation is that, on one hand, the anti-Collabora arguments are not unconvincing: the situation with Collabora and the foundation seems to have been dubious at best, and I would not be surprised if their legal worries are well-founded. But on the other, in arguably trying to address the problems, the anti-Collabora side seems to exhibit a distressing lack of honor and dec…

The earlier threads from the Collabora side were also disappointing in how childish all of their arguments were structured. I read their posts and could barely understand what was being claimed in between all of the sarcasm and attacks, and I wasn't alone in the comments here.

From the outside, this entire situation is obviously very heated. What seems to be missing is some adults in the room who can turn down the tempers, get everyone to take a beat, and then start coming to some reasonable compromises.

Instead it feels like we're seeing the inevitable boiling over of passionate people who couldn't work well together and failed to find ways to cool off and work together.

It's a sad situation to watch.

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#70

Post by bityard »

tomrod wrote: post #39
allenrb wrote: post #8

As a person who refuses to use “free” cloud products, and won’t even consider Office on Windows, I’m a big fan of LibreOffice. I’ve donated a few times over the years but probably not enough. I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available. That said, my eyes crossed trying to read this. Do I need to ask an LLM to read the various messages and tell me what’s going on? ;-)

Before Libre Office was Open Office. I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.

There is still Open Office: https://www.openoffice.org
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