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LibreOffice 6.1 released

blog.documentfoundation.org

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Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#41

Post by sjmulder »

mksaunders wrote: post #15
WorkLifeBalance wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. What you've described as 'not "tracking" ' is tracking. It's not third-party tracking but you're still deliberately adding a cookie for the purpose of tracking users across your site. 2. Your privacy policy contains: > !!!add opt-out frame on the website at this position!!!

> 1. What you've described as 'not "tracking" ' is tracking. It's not third-party tracking but you're still deliberately adding a cookie for the purpose of tracking users across your site. OK, we're using open source tools to try to improve the site. Plenty of other FOSS projects do this... Not sure why we're being singled out :-)

Not sure why we're being singled out :-)

Didn't mean no harm or to single you guys out. You're doing fantastic work. But broken and noncompliant notices do bother me a bit.

Sorry to drag on like this but the privacy statement (thanks for linking) says:

takes place only with the consent of the user

It does not, as there appears to be a second cookie notice underneath the first stating how consent is assumed:

We use only those functional cookies which are absolutely necessary to ensure that we give you the best navigation experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with them.

From my understanding, if you're using only functional cookies and no tracking you don't even need consent (as you have legal basis) and you can drop the notice altogether. But I don't think analytics count as functional cookies.

Now aside from that nitpicking, thanks for writing such a clear privacy policy and making such good choices regarding the social media buttons, YouTube's privacy mode, and so on. Props!

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#42

Post by mksaunders »

mrob wrote: post #33
mksaunders wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does the Document Foundation need to track me? It's not "tracking" (in the sense of monitoring what you do on other sites). On the LibreOffice website, we use the open source stats tool Matomo (formerly Piwik) to get an overview of how people use the site, how people go from one page to another, so that we can improve it. Lots of FOSS projects do this. Also, as explained in the privacy policy, JavaScript is req…

Even if your tracking isn't directly harmful (I make no claims if it is or not), it's still indirectly harmful because it's training users to ignore warning pop-ups.

Look at it this way:

* If we had a bad website, people would complain that it's ineffective, and not helping drive people towards FOSS

* If we then add open source analytics tools to try to improve the site, people ask why we are "tracking" them

* If we then add a banner, people complain that we're training people to ignore banners

...so it's hard to get anything right, it seems! We could remove Piwik completely (although it's not my call - I'm just one person in the project). But then it'd be much harder to improve our website. Piwik is really useful and if we want FOSS to be more widespread and adopted, we shouldn't shy away from such tools, IMO.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#43

Post by mksaunders »

sjmulder wrote: post #41
mksaunders wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. What you've described as 'not "tracking" ' is tracking. It's not third-party tracking but you're still deliberately adding a cookie for the purpose of tracking users across your site. OK, we're using open source tools to try to improve the site. Plenty of other FOSS projects do this... Not sure why we're being singled out :-)

Not sure why we're being singled out :-) Didn't mean no harm or to single you guys out. You're doing fantastic work. But broken and noncompliant notices do bother me a bit. Sorry to drag on like this but the privacy statement (thanks for linking) says: takes place only with the consent of the user It does not, as there appears to be a second cookie notice underneath the first stating how consent is assumed: We use on…

Thanks for the feedback! I'll pass it on to the website team :-)

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#44

Post by jhasse »

mksaunders wrote: post #42
mrob wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if your tracking isn't directly harmful (I make no claims if it is or not), it's still indirectly harmful because it's training users to ignore warning pop-ups.

Look at it this way: * If we had a bad website, people would complain that it's ineffective, and not helping drive people towards FOSS * If we then add open source analytics tools to try to improve the site, people ask why we are "tracking" them * If we then add a banner, people complain that we're training people to ignore banners ...so it's hard to get anything right, it seems! We could remove Piwik completely (alt…

You're are assuming that not using tracking will automatically result in a bad website.

> We could remove Piwik completely

Yes, please do that.

> But then it'd be much harder to improve our website.

Why?

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#45

Post by kijin »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #39
kijin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office suites, as the name suggests, are for office workers. You know, the kind of people who write stern letters on official letterhead, work on Excel workbooks, and give PowerPoint presentations in front of other people. It's probably not the kind of job that a typical programmer would like to have, but there are hundreds of millions of these jobs in governments, schools, and corporate offices all over the world. I…

>My professors would have been very confused if I had sent them anything other than .doc(x) for review. This, in particular, is the most important point. The parent commenter says "I prefer to let the final production medium to dictate the production process". Well, in the vast majority of cases, .docx is the final production medium. Most people use MS Word as both a document editor and a document reader. I've worked…

Moreover, I think the trend you described will only become more popular as the world moves away from printed media.

When STEM people think of a "final production medium", they usually think of articles in journals. But who reads paper journals anymore? Most people who are active in their fields don't even read PDFs of paper journals; they've already seen the preprints on arxiv. We're all just exchanging tarballs of source code, and nobody is compiling anything.

The thing I like the best about Microsoft Word is the review feature. Multiple people can edit, annotate, and comment on specific parts of the same document. You can inspect each diff and either accept or reject it. Everything is color-coded and can be manipulated using a mouse. It's like commenting on a github commit, but much more intuitive for people whose job is to exchange human-readable documents, not source code.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#46

Post by wila »

mksaunders wrote: post #23
wila wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then simply use the older icons :-) Simple for you doesn't mean simple for other people. Without writing down the steps on exactly how-to use the older icons, it doesn't equate to simple in my opinion. IOW, you probably had done yourself a favor to not use the word "simply".

I was referring to the fact that he "hated" the icons - it's not the end of the world, as you can use the old ones. But you're right, I've added the three steps to my original post!

Cool. Great that it can be changed via the GUI, disliking icons certainly is not the end of the world.

FWIW, I didn't like the word choice on not like an icon set with the word "hate", but well I guess that's what he felt.

Personally I do like the new icons. Keep up the good work!

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#47

Post by megaman22 »

kqr wrote: post #25

I have grown increasingly disinterested in Office Suites, and in particular word processors, over time. When composing documents, I prefer to let the final production medium to dictate the production process. (If I don't, I tend to run into issues relating to the final product that are costly to overcome late in the process.) With this mindset, I still haven't found the use case for word processors. If I aim for some…

Generally, I write everything in plain-text, and then as a final processing step, bring it into Word and format it. I hit on this process when I was in college, since SVN, which I was using for version control at the time, is such shit with doc files. It doesn't help that it is absolutely miserable to try to add footnotes to a paper as you are writing it in Word, and at the time, and perhaps still, futzing with them was a good way to make Word crash and lose a few unsaved paragraphs.

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#48

Post by zouhair »

kqr wrote: post #25

I have grown increasingly disinterested in Office Suites, and in particular word processors, over time. When composing documents, I prefer to let the final production medium to dictate the production process. (If I don't, I tend to run into issues relating to the final product that are costly to overcome late in the process.) With this mindset, I still haven't found the use case for word processors. If I aim for some…

Maybe you want to give Lyx[0] a try.

[0]: https://www.lyx.org/

Re: LibreOffice 6.1 released

#49

Post by djsumdog »

mksaunders wrote: post #11
mrob wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I browse with Javascript disabled by default, so I didn't know they were doing this. Why does the Document Foundation need to track me? Is LibreOffice itself doing something sneaky that I don't know about? I'd expect this kind of behavior from Facebook or Google, not a Free Software charitable foundation. Seeing that pop-up when I enabled Javascript made me think less of the Document Foundation. If they have a legiti…

> Why does the Document Foundation need to track me? It's not "tracking" (in the sense of monitoring what you do on other sites). On the LibreOffice website, we use the open source stats tool Matomo (formerly Piwik) to get an overview of how people use the site, how people go from one page to another, so that we can improve it. Lots of FOSS projects do this. Also, as explained in the privacy policy, JavaScript is req…

> formerly Piwik

I met two of the Piwik guys years ago. They got free office space at an open source company in NZ. Cool people. I remember at the time Piwik did support log scraping and Javascript tracking, but they recommended having how Piwik instances if you wanted both (one that scraped logs and the other that just did Javascript). I'm not sure there are any platforms that actually do both (which would also let you build stats on who has Javascript off or what may or may not be a robot).

But the short story long: they can just do log parsing and not need the Javascript component.

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