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

The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 277 posts

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#171

Post by Bluestein »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #162
satvikpendem wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like, don't expect anything if not forced. Most people only generally pay for things if there is no other option. It's about what's moral (even then debatable as everyone has different morals) versus what's realistic to expect.

The Guardian's funding model [0] proves this wrong. People will absolutely pay for things voluntarily if you ask them, without forcing them to. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/nov/12/katharine... In a nutshell - voluntary funding by readership. No paywall. You can read as many stories as you like for free, and donate if you want. It works.

I've always wondered how they are actually making ends meet, if at all, that is, what their budget looks like.-

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#173

Post by YetAnotherNick »

dumberquestions wrote: post #142
pocksuppet wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Good thing that "would be nice" doesn't entail that they have to.

What does donation does for open source? Surely it wont come close to pay talented developers who create it. For cloud cost, there are few companies already giving generous free tier for open source.

The only thing that donation could pay for is marketing e.g. events and meetups.

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#174

Post by bayindirh »

dumberquestions wrote: post #142
pocksuppet wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Good thing that "would be nice" doesn't entail that they have to.

Sorry, I can't understand what you mean by that.

Do you mean that it's good that companies can profit over people's mostly voluntary efforts for free, or Free Software is meant to be used for free and never supported in any way, or what?

I'm at a loss here.

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#175

Post by esperent »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #163
dnautics wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No requirement doesn't mean "don't be a mensch"

Yeah but like, we don't know if OP is making any money off this, let alone significant money. Let's not instantly hold them to the same "please contribute or you're dragging things down" standard as a zillion dollar corporation.

> we don't know if OP is making any money off this

I'm not, and don't have any intentions to monetize it.

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#176

Post by foxglacier »

mplewis wrote: post #146
pocksuppet wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

you people are always mixing up the legal thing to do with the right thing to do

"you people" means people that always mix up the legal thing with the right thing? It's tautological to say they're always doing that because that's how you defined them! Are you trying to say that you've encountered other people doing that before too and you've built up an annoyance with them?

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#177

Post by mksaunders2 »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #173
dumberquestions wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing that "would be nice" doesn't entail that they have to.

What does donation does for open source? Surely it wont come close to pay talented developers who create it. For cloud cost, there are few companies already giving generous free tier for open source. The only thing that donation could pay for is marketing e.g. events and meetups.

That's not true at all. Donations are the biggest source of income for The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice, and have been used to pay developers who've joined the team in recent years:

* Michael Weghorn (accessibility)

* Jonathan Clark (language and scripting support)

* Neil Roberts (scripting improvements)

* Dan Williams (macOS support and general UI improvements)

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#178

Post by Jach »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #173
dumberquestions wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing that "would be nice" doesn't entail that they have to.

What does donation does for open source? Surely it wont come close to pay talented developers who create it. For cloud cost, there are few companies already giving generous free tier for open source. The only thing that donation could pay for is marketing e.g. events and meetups.

It obviously depends on the project and the scale and duration of a donation, but plenty of open source projects have benefited from donations. Donations can and do pay for developers, as well, part time or full time. With LibreOffice, you can answer your questions directly by browsing https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/ and as a non-profit you can easily find more detailed reports: https://www.documentfoundation.org/financials-and-reports/

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#179

Post by airstrafer »

dist-epoch wrote: post #75
petilon wrote: post #71

There is a serious threat to Microsoft here, if everyone starts using AI for generating and updating Office docs. At some point Office will become just a viewer.

Don't worry, they are ahead of this. Satya said some time ago that they expect soon to have more agents using Microsoft software than humans, and are working on transitioning their focus from serving humans to serving agents. https://www.news18.com/business/satya-nadella-announces-micr...

This sentiment is also why Microsoft crushed earnings this quarter. Their AI play is to create corpo-slop AI middleware, which sits between AI models and enterprise applications. Sure, others can go and build harnesses which can generate MS office documents, but MS is already doing it, and conveniently such harnesses will come with everyone's existing Microsoft 365 subscription.

The analogy is IBM. Just like IBM helped every old-money corporation on the planet figure out the whole "computers" thing 50 years ago, MS will help everyone solve the "AI" thing. The software will suck and will not really innovate, but it will make a ton of money

Re: The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice

#180

Post by KronisLV »

bayindirh wrote: post #174
dumberquestions wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing that "would be nice" doesn't entail that they have to.

Sorry, I can't understand what you mean by that. Do you mean that it's good that companies can profit over people's mostly voluntary efforts for free, or Free Software is meant to be used for free and never supported in any way, or what? I'm at a loss here.

You are allowed (and encouraged) to do good things without being obligated to.

I think it would be immensely cool if OpenAI donated some of that crapload of AI money to the people behind LibreOffice to help with development - and then having like a blog post about it or something would already improve the project's visibility a bit more (hey, every bit helps). What's peanuts to them could help with the sustainability of the project a whole bunch!

Post reply on HN