alt Hacker NewsThere's a lot of missed opportunity for LibreOffice, almost all of it to do with insisting on seeing the world in terms that fit neatly within the paradigm of 90s and early 2000s era office suites.
Back when they were quarreling over the standardization of OOXML, instead of pushing their own proprietary** desktop format, they should have instead been pushing hard for something that could be shared with and opened by anyone who has a Web browser (in other words: "anyone")—something that uses HTML as a container format and can degrade gracefully even if you don't have any kind of office suite installed and the only reader software you have for it is Chrome/Safari/Firefox/Edge. There was no chance of beating Microsoft's incumbency with Office when being libre+gratis was the _only_ distinguishing feature. It required doing something different at a fundamental level. Even Microsoft beat them to getting halfway to the place they should have been when they bought the company that wrote what became Windows Live Writer app (which is now itself open source, though neglected, and still mired in visions of desktop software from the 90s: <https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter>).
> The LibreOffice project's imprimatur should be to stop existing[…] The editing paradigm perpetuated by the legacy of MS Office is a dead end[…] A standardized "Markdown for the Web" (or AsciiDoc) with native browser support would be a good 80/20 start and would move things out of weird proprietary office formats and towards plain text[…]
> Right now LibreOffice is aligned against this goal as a result of perverse incentives to continue perpetuating the MS Office model of document creation, editing, and (let's face it: email-based) distribution.
Replies
Care to explain how ODT is a proprietary format, please?
Word is a WYSIWYG document editor with built-in version control and annotations. In order to match that feature set with something like Markdown, you'd basically have to reinvent Word in all ways but for file format.
And if you expect Word's current user base to get by with Emacs or Vim or Zed and git, you really are programmer-brained and need to develop more empathy for ordinary people.
> Back when they were quarreling over the standardization of OOXML, instead of pushing their own proprietary* desktop format
ODF was developed by a committee and predates OOXML by years and it was standardized by ISO before OOXML was even announced.
That's not pushing their own proprietary format. That's just using the existing ISO standard and not switching to a different, far more complex standard that served little purpose.
Hell even IBM threatened to leave ISO wholesale over Microsoft ramming OOXML through the standards body.