As a person who refuses to use “free” cloud products, and won’t even consider Office on Windows, I’m a big fan of LibreOffice. I’ve donated a few times over the years but probably not enough.
I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available.
That said, my eyes crossed trying to read this. Do I need to ask an LLM to read the various messages and tell me what’s going on? ;-)
I don't know about any of the drama happening, but if LibreOffice ceases to exist, there's still Softmaker FreeOffice as a free & local option. It's nothing fancy, but works for the times when I have to use one. I'm not against cloud products as you are, but it's nice being able to do stuff locally sometimes, it's just more convenient.
OnlyOffice also seems to have a lack of clarity in regards to the ownership of the org (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47100599) but in general I think they're in the right here - you can't just ignore parts of a software license selectively because you feel like it. Oh and I liked their software when I did try it out, except LibreOffice seems like a slightly safer bet (though I'm also not as sensitive to the way its UI is).
I should also disclaim that I only need these office suites for occasional home use. If one of them disappears tomorrow it’s no big loss to me personally, not that I wouldn’t be sad about a loss of consumer choice.
If I need something for a business that I’m going to depend on I’m just gonna give Microsoft ten bucks a month, hate to say it. Office is really better than any of these options by a long shot. I also find the Google suite to be really good and free as in beer.
> I’m just gonna give Microsoft ten bucks a month, hate to say it.
After having used MS Office for a while, I have to admit that LibreOffice just feels more pleasant to me, when I don't need exact MS compatibility - the UI is customizable, Calc doesn't mess up CSV files when I open them, Writer also has most of the features you need and exporting PDF files is nice and has none of that OneDrive bullshit with them almost trying to hide your local file system as some secondary target.
That said, in some hardware configurations LibreOffice has slow and laggy rendering (you have to mess around with rendering settings, hardware acceleration and Skia and so on), some features like bibliography have broken on me in odd ways, and Impress can be a bit slow for larger presentations. OnlyOffice feels like it has more polish in regards to how approachable the UI/UX might be to a MS user, but feature wise isn't that far off.
I personally wouldn't reach for MS Office unless I wanted it as a part of their overall groupware - mail, Teams, AD and a bunch of other integrated stuff (though aside from AD, most other things feel a bit jank, like the new Outlook or Teams in general when compared to Slack).
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.
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...
The questionnis: How does a community form, which can take a project tof that size? TDF andjvre Office cMd out of a long process of independent (from Sun Microsystems) contributions to OpenOffice, which at some point had a momentum to do a proper form and then another momentum to take over as the lead variant.
For a successful fork you need a notable amount of people engaging in the fork.
I’d love for someone to be able to take it from “yeah it mostly works for me” to “oh fuck you Microsoft, I’m going to move our entire company over to this”.
Boggles the mind that corporates stick to expensive, inefficient, insecure and in so many ways crap software. SQL Sever, Office, Oracle (any product), Windows servers and workstations - yet demand peak efficiency from staff.
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 of workers trained on it
4. has a deep feature set for edge-case power-users
5. integrates with other products and services that their customers want
Every institutional office-migration project runs into these issues -- they're solvable, but damn if OSS advocates stopped pretending they didn't exist, they might actually fix them. LibreOffice/TDF is the closest anyone has gotten thus far in this regard.
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.
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.
> "so that I may never realize I use something else"
The main reasons are:
1) ... so my muscle memory work. (In some editor Ctrl+Y is redo, in others no, I never remember in which editors, I hate when it doesn't work.)
2) ... so I can exchange files with coworkers, and they will see exactly what I wrote (I recently received an email with a draft and I complained about a missing ≥. It actually was there was the visor in Gmail was not showing it.)
Well, it exists but got one patch release (fixing 7 CVEs and little more) in 2025, no release in 2024, two patch releases in 2023. Not a really active project. Also most of the community moved on.
Apache OOo is dumped by Oracle and since then didn't receive much love.
> I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available.
I think a free open source suite will always exist. But probably slow down if existing open source solutions handicap progress for whatever the reason(s).
They should focus on making the office suite much more useful and powerful and wide-spread. Like ffmpg+mpv!
For what it’s worth (ie, absolutely nothing), I agree with her 100%. I didn’t get into this field in order to prompt an AI to take care of the details. I got into it because I love the details.
I’m a strong performer on a good team at a company many people would want to work at… and I know the clock is ticking. Sooner or later, I will be too slow.
I’m not going to claim that this is the wrong way to go. It’s obviously the future, and the future doesn’t care what allenrb does or does not want. I’m somewhat hopeful that power and cooling requirements will come down by multiple factors of 10x over time, reducing the environmental damage.
The fact is, I love what I’ve been able to do “the old way” and just don’t feel the urge to move on. So it goes.
Someone the other day was talking about there being two kinds of builders. One likes the details of doing, where the other likes the things they produce.
The idea was that one likes AI and the other naturally hates it.
I thought about that for a bit and decided that, like most things, if you’re any good at something the “hard way” you probably have some of both. Or at least I’m sure it’s true for me.
I LOVE that I can produce the things I want to create without spending months crafting lines of text. The “I know how to architect this, I know what a decent data model looks like, I have a good idea of where someone is likely to introduce security or scaling problems. I can pilot this plane and produce something GOOD.”
But, I really also HATE looking at the final product and forever measuring, in my head, how much of it is even mine. Which parts I haven’t thoroughly reviewed, or would have spent a week learning and didn’t, or maybe wouldn’t have accomplished correctly at all? Am I a fraud, now? I wasn’t before…
Yes, I am much more productive having Claude Code bang out boilerplate back-end code, but honestly I always kind of enjoyed doing it. Now I'm just a micro-manager for an AI.
And honestly, how long will that last? Given that LLMs came out of nowhere to radically redefine my role from software engineer to prompt writer in just a couple years, I have every reason to believe that they're coming for my role as prompt engineer next. (As my CEO surely hopes.)
I'm just glad the timing of the great AI replacement began right when I was nearing burnout anyway.
There are no few smart, knowledgeable people in the world (perhaps self-educated, perhaps not) who for a huge variety of reasons may be either unwilling or unable to hold a typical job.
I’ll bet most of us here know at least a few people along these lines.
Seeing this news story made me briefly fear that they’d found a way to replace this glorious mechanism. Thankfully not. In fact, they’re going to shoot more droplets, more often!
Give me a backup camera without a screen and then we’ll talk. Doubly so because once you’ve got that screen, no automaker will resist making it do other things.
My SO's Buick Enclave has a screen behind the rearview mirror that can be set to show the backup camera. Works okay, but I prefer the actual mirror and just use the dash display. That said, vision issues, so not driving since around this time last year.
This makes me genuinely sad. SpaceX was the one thing of his that Elon has largely avoided screwing up. Imho, this is in large part due to Gwynne Shotwell. She seems to have the personality (not to mention, personal wealth) to kick Elon in the head when he tries to mess things up.
What’s happening now is nothing more than a transparent effort to couple the AI hype-wagon to SpaceX in order to drive the valuation higher in the minds of investors who still think that LLMs will completely transform society.
I’ll be thrilled if the rocket folks can avoid being distracted by this nonsense, but I’m not optimistic.
I’ve been following SpaceX since something like the 2nd Falcon 1 launch and this is the worst thing I’ve seen happen. Sad times.
Not that kind of bus. A “satellite bus” is more of a standardized platform onto which mission-specific payloads are integrated. Saves having to design an entire spacecraft from scratch and gives you a known-good set of functionality.
So, a set of standard software RPCs (remote procedure calls) and APIs (application programming interfaces) and not another electrical signalling standard. Got it.
Thanks for the correction.
So, I guess the next question is what are you folks actually using at the electrical signalling level to talk? (If you are not allowed to say, I understand.)
Nothing about this struck me as a sign that money wasn’t well-invested. From the headline, I was picturing “we raised and then I blew it in Vegas”.
Nothing wrong with admitting to uncertainty and insecurity. I mean, there are two types of people — those who suffer doubt sometimes, and those who don’t admit it. Give me the first kind any time.
I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available.
That said, my eyes crossed trying to read this. Do I need to ask an LLM to read the various messages and tell me what’s going on? ;-)
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