An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement
67 points by quobit
67 points by quobit
I understand why the letter doesn’t mention it, but Euro-Office is heavily based on the Russian origin OnlyOffice, and nearly all contributors are still in Russia. It’s open-source, so any backdoor would have to be quite clever, but it does seem like a surprising choice for a new European standard for the purpose of digital sovereignty at a moment Europe is threatened by Russia.
It's my understanding that they are forking OnlyOffice exactly because of that reason. The reason for OnlyOffice is because it is, as far as I know, the only OSS office suite with a fairly solid web interface. Which is important in modern times as people have come to expect this to be available (gsuite, ms office in corporate environments).
But isn't the collabora office (or the web version of libreoffice) solid enough (and more aligned with the interests of an eu office suite)? A bit OT, but I find it sad that they favour a web office suite to a desktop version. Is there no work on making libreoffice "network-compatible"?
Apparently there is also some drama between The Document Foundation and Collabora...
https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-developers/
it does seem like a surprising choice for a new European standard for the purpose of digital sovereignty at a moment Europe is threatened by Russia.
Europe is threatened by the US (i.e. Greenland crisis) too so perhaps China would be a better choice. :)
Russia is 40% of Europe by landmass; if you mean "the EU" say "the EU".
(Russian here)
In terms of physical geography, yes, but Europe is also customary used for a vague collection of countries, similarly to how we use “the West”. And, as far as a I can tell, this usage is fairly standard both inside and outside Russia. See, e.g, modern usage in Реформы Петра I and the famous Pushkin’s line "в Европу прорубить окно".
There might be a prescriptive perspective here, whether this kind of linguistic juxtaposition is good, but, from the descriptive perspective, this usage reads totally normal to me.
Somewhat similarly in Finland if you say you're "going to Europe", the assumption is that you're going to be south of the Baltic.
What a weird nitpick to be agressive about. Are you aware that even European countries outside of the EU are threatened by Russia? One called Ukraine for example.
Who's aggressive? You were wrong and I am correcting you.
Who cares about landmass? Land is just dirt.
European Russia has about 15% of the population of Europe, too, going by the numbers on Wikipedia. (c.f. EU having about 60%)
The EU is only 40% of the total landmass of Europe, and Europe's four largest cities are all outside of it.
It's certainly a decent chunk of Europe (especially population as you point out), but it's not "Europe".
It's developed by Ascensio System SIA, registered in Latvia (EU), but with most engineering in Russia. I totally get those concerns.
Slightly off-topic, but what is going on with infographics such as the one in this post?
I keep seeing similar graphics all over the internet - they are visually appealing, but poorly thought through (in this case, the timeline isn't to scale, and it's not quite clear what need there is for visualisation), and they always have some nonsense slogan and pointless information at the bottom.
Also, they usually have some minor visual errors (in this case, the text "Schleswig-H." not fitting into its box).
Is this the result of people asking LLMs to make SVG diagrams? Or is there some other trend I'm not aware of?
Asking not because I'm against it, just out of curiosity. Although it wouldn't hurt to open the diagram with an SVG editor, delete the nonsense text, and fix the size of the text boxes - ironically, LibreOffice have a great vector editor which could be used to do this :)
I mean, you can also make these graphs quite easily in... you guessed it, open office.
Graphs like these break up a long text making it slightly more appealing to a wider audience. The content doesn't matter as much. To me they also aren't new, in fact they fit right in with old fashioned magazines and newspapers where you see images and graphs used in a similar sense.
It is possible an LLM is involved, but in general my mind is so pre-programmed from decades of experience to expect the image to not be that relevant that I glossed right over it.
AI models can generate svg like this pretty easily. Probably slop. A lot of people don’t want to make diagrams by hand.
I've used Claude to generate SVG diagrams before, and it worked well. But in those cases, I drew the diagram that I wanted, and just got the model to write SVG markup. The... odd feeling of these diagrams, and their relative meaninglessness, makes me think people are copy pasting their whole article into the model and saying "make a diagram" or something
Is it a coincidence TDP had that spat with Collabora at about the same time or just terrible timing