Euro-Office, ONLYOFFICE, and their licensing dispute
21 points by ana_glz
21 points by ana_glz
At least this whole debacle is making it exceedingly clear that ONLYOFFICE is just another proprietary office suite, as far as the authors are concerned.
What I still don't get is their reasoning for not working with Collabora or LibreOffice. Besides recent events, LibreOffice is still a much more mature solution from what I can tell.
Working on an ancient monstrous Java code base might just not be their area of expertise.
Honestly it might be nobody's expertise. If LibreOffice was going to become decent, it probably would've done so already.
I’d say it’s well beyond decent these days. I can’t speak to it’s use in a professional setting but it’s perfectly reasonable for my occasional usage
Well, I disagree. I use Calc relatively often just to plot small things and even with my super basic use, there are constant obvious features I find missing and weird UX flaws. I sadly don't remember the missing features off the top of my mind, but one of the most annoying UX things is that it's incredibly easy to accidentally rotate a graph when I mean to move it. I can't think of a single situation where I would want to rotate a graph.
Writing my dissertation in LibreOffice. I find it quite nice with only minor issues. I prefer the UI of OnlyOffice but it fully messes with my formatting when I bring it back into LibreOffice sadly. Collabora seems to add little but a cleaner UI and a financial incentive. I prefer my writing application to be purely FOSS. Would not trust such data with another company.
Why don't you use LaTex? It's also FOSS and much more suited for larger professional documents.
PS: I would actually just do a Phd so I could use LaTex again. I miss it sometimes...
From my experience - in academia maths/CS/maybe physics are using LaTeX, but e.g. chemistry? I had no luck when trying to convince my fiance, because no one would be able to work with her on papers without learning LaTeX from scratch (and they're unwilling to)
Even LibreOffice was out of question due to "standard" MSO Word extensions in their univeristy unit
Thanks for the suggestion. Would you recommend it for non-math related fields? I’ve always assumed it was mainly for that.
It is general purpose. You can do anything with it. I personally know people who use it for fiction books, letters, papers or thesis in all kinds of fields. Overleaf is an online platform to write LaTex documents and they have a good collection of templates: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates
My favorite library / package is TikZ. You can create professional drawings with it which embed perfectly in your document. Resizing is not a problem, because line width and text height is constant (it also uses the same font as in the text). Here is a good example: https://texample.net/bernoulli/. The results are pretty stunning.
Java has been optional as far back as I remember in OpenOffice.org days. Very little has ever needed it, and now I think it’s almost nothing. Maybe HSQLDB databases (default for Base, I think) and a couple of wizards, I think that’s it.
My impression is that the ONLYOFFICE copyright licence, which I would characterize as modified AGPL, is not a FOSS licence. You can look at the code, but you can't redistribute a modified copy.
IMO, Euro-Office has no legal right to modify the licencing terms to new terms that are more beneficial to them.