An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement - TDF Community Blog
blog.documentfoundation.org
Dear office suite users, In recent days you will have read various articles announcing the arrival of Euro-Office, which is being “marketed” as the first open-source office suite developed in Europe. We feel compelled — reluctantly, since open source should rest on transparency, not deception — to correct this claim. The first open-source office suite developed in Europe was OpenOffice.org in 2001, based on StarOffice’s source code, followed by LibreOffice from 2010. These are two genuine open-source office suites, built from source code that originated in Europe. They are not a freeware clone of MS Office whose code provenance is undisclosed, nor a product that has rebranded itself out of pure opportunism to ride today’s wave of Digital Sovereignty. It is worth remembering that many of those who champion Digital Sovereignty today were silent back in 2006, when the open ISO/IEC ODF standard — the pillar of Digital Sovereignty — was announced: not only did they not listen to us during all these years, but in some cases they greeted us with a condescending smile. If we can speak of Digital Sovereignty in Europe today, it is thanks to The Document Foundation and LibreOffice community members at large, who kept
  • masterspace@lemmy.caEnglish
    123·
    3 hours ago

    This is horseshit.

    It is worth remembering that many of those who champion Digital Sovereignty today were silent back in 2006, when the open ISO/IEC ODF standard — the pillar of Digital Sovereignty — was announced: not only did they not listen to us during all these years, but in some cases they greeted us with a condescending smile.

    If we can speak of Digital Sovereignty in Europe today, it is thanks to The Document Foundation and LibreOffice community members at large, who kept the flag of open-source office suites flying when everyone was predicting their demise, and who continued to develop the only truly open and standard format that guarantees Digital Sovereignty, as it provides full user control over content.

    The answer to this, is “thank you for your service”. It is / was genuinely valuable. That being said, arguments about what people said or agreed with in the past is irrelevant to discussions about how to move forward.

    The basic premise of this kind of arguing is a smell that you don’t actually have a real argument to lean on. It’s like credential dropping, it’s a heuristic that hints at what could be a likelier truth than another, based purely on debate metadata, but that’s it, and by their nature / definition, heuristics are constantly wrong.

    Insisting on a white knight campaign to make a file format standard when you are not the standard file saving platform is Quixotic. It does not make you an ally of Microsoft to meet users where they’re at.

    The EU government mandating a certain file format might actually move the needle, a niche documenting software’s defaults will not. This is why Microsoft’s famous playbook was “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”, not “try and force a niche number of users into making this a thing somehow” (of course, Microsoft has also tried and failed the latter playbook numerous times).

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    84·
    3 hours ago

    I really don’t get this latest series if tantrums from LibreOffice/The Document Foundation. They are attacking every other up-and-coming open source document project.

    Are you mad about people choosing a different project that’s easier to switch from M$? Stay mad I guess, or make your project better. LibreOffice hasn’t had a major UI update in a decade, and it was a decade overdue at the time. The menus are a crowded mess with poorly thought-out hierarchy. Mobile and collaborative editors are a joke. No one cares if LibreOffice technically has the best backend, with the most accurate rendering and niche features, if it is harder for the average mainstream user to learn and use.

    You can burn your energy bemoaning the loss of users… or you can be better and win them back. Rarely both.

    Last thing, a few facts about the “dreaded” OOXML format they are railing against.

    1. It is an open standard since 2006. Stop litigating a debate that ended two decades ago.
    2. It is a recognized ISO standard, just like ODF. (ISO/IEC 29500)
    3. LibreOffice also supports OOXML and allows users to set it as default.
    4. It is already the de-facto standard, just like PDF or MP3 started as proprietary formats but are now open and among the most widely used formats in their respective areas.
    • psycotica0@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      25 minutes ago

      Their point about OOXML has traditionally been that the format that Microsoft Office itself produces has never once matched the standardized standard they ratified. So Microsoft used it to check a box on some requirements sheet and muddy the waters (like this), but anyone actually following the standard would not have achieved actual cross compatibility with the massive gorilla in the space. But because it’s “Microsoft’s format” any issues would have felt like bugs in LibreOffice rather than bugs in Microsoft Office. In contrast the standardized ODF actually matches the ODF you find in practice.

      That all having been said, I stopped paying attention to that whole scene a while ago, so I don’t know what the current situation is, or if that still applies. It’s possible later version of MSOffice actually moved to the standard version at some point, or that the standard was updated to match what MSOffice actually reads and writes. Possible, but I just don’t know.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 hours ago

      I really don’t get this latest series if tantrums from LibreOffice/The Document Foundation. They are attacking every other up-and-coming open source document project.

      That’s how Italo Vignoli is. He’s been a source of toxic hatred even back in the OpenOffice split days, when Sun handed OpenOffice to Apache, he attacked OO because they didn’t transfer the trademark to him.

      The same happened more recently with Collabora Office. Collabora developed a web frontend for LibreOffice, for whatever reason not as part of the LibreOffice project, then Collabora’s LO contributors were kicked out of TDF / LO development, and then TDF announced a competitor.

      I keep using LO because as a tool it works for me but every single time I see statements by Italo Vignoli, he comes off as totally unbearable.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    3 hours ago

    ITT:

    • leeberoffice reminds us it came from starOffice, and corrects the “first European office” statement.
    • people slag leeberOffice for being imperfect about its existence.