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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

#91

Post by pessimizer »

shevy-java wrote: post #36
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the article: Some founders/directors kept using money from the foundation to pay their own private companies to get work done. This is highly irregular: you can’t manage funds that aren’t yours and use those funds to buy from a company which gives you profit. Legal council warned the of this irregularity, and nothing was made to change the status quo during years.

Isn't this theft, if true?

It's a kind of corruption referred to as "self-dealing."

As directors of LibreOffice, they should be looking for the best deals for LibreOffice. Contractors (or any employee) are always (logically and reasonably) looking to do the least amount of work possible for the most compensation possible, so if as a director you use yourself as a contractor, your duty opposes your interests.

And if on the one hand you're being paid a flat salary (or no salary at all) for making decisions for LibreOffice; and on the other hand the worse the contracts you make with yourself are for LibreOffice, the more income you will receive, plunder is absolutely inevitable.

This is exacerbated even more with some nonprofit who is answering to an amorphous public who is funding it. They have no way of stopping you, other than withdrawing entirely.

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

#92

Post by overfeed »

blm126 wrote: post #51
shevy-java wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this theft, if true?

I wouldn't call it theft, exactly. Presumably work did get done. If I'm reading it right, its just a terrible conflict of interest. The board uses donations to pay companies to work on LibreOffice. That seems totally fine. Some of the board were running/part of companies that rely and work on LibreOffice. That also seems mostly fine? You want your board to represent your community. Then, those same board members dire…

> Some of the board were running/part of companies that rely and work on LibreOffice. That also seems mostly fine?

Those board members were elected by foundation members who also work for Collabora, so it was a privilege escalation from contributors to (controlling?) foundation board seats

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

#93

Post by mistrial9 »

kube-system wrote: post #90
redeeman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

This is the kind of attitude that stops OSS from becoming widely adopted. If simply shipping a quality office suite was enough, this problem would have been solved last millennium. (WordPerfect fuckin' slapped) And in fact, there are many quality office suites. Organizations choose Office because it: 1. enables interoperability with other organizations 2. has a commercial throat to choke 3. has an existing pipeline o…

curious that item zero is missing.. for specific example, long ago.. Brazil was in the middle about modernizing using desktop computers, language translations, support, and a large dose of polarization about depending on American products. So many kinds of Office software were being tested, including of course the MSFT products. This story is from the late 90s.

One day, as much as I am aware, the entire national phone company of Brazil switched to using MSFT Office only, by decree from upper management. Why? much later, some correspondence between upper management / C-Suite at the company, and Brazilian attorneys hired by MSFT to negotiate, showed large, opaque payments, long-term discounts, and added support services, in exchange for changing to ONLY MSFT Office products. The change did in fact happen.

Use your own brain and understand that MSFT has able legal and business teams, hired in the target country, that have large incentives based on closing sales. Those sales are closed using negotiation language and incentives that are appealing to the C-Suite and their banking and legal partners, period.

I do not see this reality reflected in the too-neat summary of drivers there.

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

#94

Post by heresie-dabord »

c7b wrote: post #88
deafpolygon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If LO ceases to exist, then I will just use plain text typesetting tools.

There are many good options for text editing, some for presentations, but what about spreadsheets? Using Python/R/SQL everywhere ain't no panacea, spreadsheets are really useful in some cases and LO has the best implementation I've seen apart from Excel.

Gnumeric, since 2001

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnumeric

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

#95

Post by kube-system »

snmx999 wrote: post #63
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's $8.30/month. It's cheaper than Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Over 50 years' time that's $4980.

50 years ago you needed about 5 million bucks to get started with electronic spreadsheets on your IBM mainframe

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

#96

Post by starkparker »

This entire fucking mess is a bunch of people writing open letters at each other that nobody outside of the closed system can parse at all. All of these stupid posts just make everyone involved look childish and incompetent. They seem to be comprehensible only if you're already too entrenched on one side to be swayed by anything, much less this horseshit.

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

#97

Post by BobBagwill »

kkfx wrote: post #47

Considering that office suites are software from a bygone era, born from the idea of letting untrained secretarial staff use a PC as an advanced typewriter and calculator, the business and the squabbles surrounding them, which have absolutely nothing to do with FLOSS, are frankly laughable, if they weren't so pathetic. LibreOffice (and any office suite) is a piece of software as massive as it is absurd, and those who…

Too late for that. If you can't do it on a smart phone, it's not worth doing. And with AI, who needs a GUI?

  This is the end
  Beautiful friend
  This is the end
  My only friend, the end

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

#98

Post by kube-system »

mistrial9 wrote: post #93
kube-system wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of attitude that stops OSS from becoming widely adopted. If simply shipping a quality office suite was enough, this problem would have been solved last millennium. (WordPerfect fuckin' slapped) And in fact, there are many quality office suites. Organizations choose Office because it: 1. enables interoperability with other organizations 2. has a commercial throat to choke 3. has an existing pipeline o…

curious that item zero is missing.. for specific example, long ago.. Brazil was in the middle about modernizing using desktop computers, language translations, support, and a large dose of polarization about depending on American products. So many kinds of Office software were being tested, including of course the MSFT products. This story is from the late 90s. One day, as much as I am aware, the entire national phon…

As if it is somehow MSFT's fault that others failed to do the same?

"Build it and they will come" is a falsehood proven over-and-over by a long history of dead startups who died before they ever figured out how find market fit. It doesn't matter how good your software is, if you don't convince people to use it, you won't have users.

Look at Red Hat, GitLab, etc for examples of how to make OSS successful.

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

#99

Post by eudamoniac »

kackerlacker wrote: post #71
fhdkweig wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If LibreOffice ceases to exist, won't the old installers still work? Is it forkable to a new project? I seem to remember that it was Star Office then Open Office then LibreOffice.

I think such situations are rather big risk that a community that already wasn't very active atrophies or splits and then atrophies. With code bases like that there's also a lot of maintenance so being able to run an old version is not necessarily enough.

What maintenance are you talking about? I'm quite sure I could open any document on my computer with a libreoffice version from ten years ago. The functionality doesn't magically rot away...

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

#100

Post by [deleted] »

bluGill wrote: post #61
charcircuit wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

[deleted]
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