LibreOffice 4.1 New Features and Fixes

LibreOffice won, Oracle lost. Game over.

You might be. Some of us have been moving back the other way, after discovering that doing real work using children's toys instead of grown-up tools is inefficient and frequently produces substandard results.

People have written entire books specifically on how to present information effectively, on top of a vast body of knowledge about graphic design, typography, and the like. The fact that a typical web-based word processor today offers only trivial formatting tools doesn't invalidate all of that previous experience and understanding; it just means that a typical web-based word processor today isn't very good at producing well-presented documents.

Just to be clear, it doesn't matter to the project creators/authors. We don't know that for a fact, but their behavior seems to imply that. I'll admit, I find that a bit surprising, since I've never worked hard on a public-facing project without hoping people would use it and find it useful.

However from a global welfare perspective it clearly matters a great deal. The over-simplified but not-too-far-off math on the social benefit of a project is that global_welfare_added == (value_added_per_user) * n_users, so a positive multiplier on n_users is a positive multiplier on value so long as the value added is positive.

In this case, making the website look like an actual website isn't about "creaing a need", it's about informing people who have that need (designers who need to edit vector graphics) that the product might fill that need. Currently the site doesn't communicate that at all. Furthermore, that their demonstrated indifference to communicating the nature of their product to potential users makes me loathe to donate dev time or money to fund development of a product that will be little used by those who might value it.

> But I wouldn't really want to divert resources towards marketing it and away from making it more usable and functional.

The tiny user base undoubtedly restricts the project's access to resources in terms of donations of both time and money. Again, it's easy to imagine why the authors would be indifferent to this, and my only point is that's a shame for anybody who values a more widely-used project.

> Port Web Wizard from Java to python. 140 files changed, 5076 (+), 11416 (-). Removed 55 files, 10426 lines of java code (Javier Fernandez)

So it looks like they're trying to scrub out the Java parts (except perhaps in Base). Does anyone know if this is the case?