LibreOffice 4.1: a landmark for interoperability

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/AOO+4.0+Release+Notes

AndrOpenOffice is an independent port of AOO, and is not related to that project.

Do you know names of Cor Nouws, Julien Nabet, Joel Madero, Marcos Souza?

They spend hundred hours helping users to make a meaningful bug reports, triaging those reports and bibisect them; they fix some bugs that bother users like me… They are not well-known devs like Michael Meeks, or Miklos Vajna, who are, of course, key figures, but their every day work is essential to success of the project. And they do deserve some words of gratitude. That’s all that they can get for their work.

What Italo does is recognition of their importance; these posts, among other things, let those people realize what do they work for, and what is the goal; what has been achieved thank to them. And the fact that there are so many people like them, that the project becomes home for those different people who don’t know each other, but work together to make things better, is the clear evidence of good work of team makers like Italo.

@mikekaganski

No, you are wrong—but let us try to keep out of the school yard.

I concede that a major reason why open source used to be more about the users is the simple fact that there was a large overlap between the sets of developers and users of a given product. This, incidentally, was the biggest strength of open source compared to commercial software in my opinion—not “a thousand eyes”, “the bazaar” (as contrasted to the “cathedral”), or other more commonly cited aspects.

What we increasingly see is “by the user, for the user” being replaced with a quasi-commercial and highly detrimental attitude, where market share becomes more important than the true interests of the users. At the same time, some of the problems of commercial software has infected open source too, including feature bloat and a patronizing attitude towards users. Notably, the Unix philosophy that once did so much good is increasingly forgotten.

“Users feel it as granted that the open […]”

Of course, that it is risk you take, when you focus on the broad masses who would be just as happy, if a little poorer, if they used MS Office.

“If you feel irritated by marketing spirit of messages of the project’s
primary marketing man (whose first priority must be PR), just don’t read
this blog. Or even better, simply invent a time machine, and enjoy the good
old days.”

I could turn this around: If you (respectively, your PR guy) do not want your words or methods questioned, do not publish them on a blog with a comment function.

More importantly, the underlying problems, of which such marketing is a symptom, will not go away because I duck the message.

@mikekaganski 2

I do not know who Cor Nouws, Julien Nabet, Joel Madero, Marcos Souza are—and that it is entirely irrelevant to my point. Neither do I know who Michael Meeks or Miklos Vajna are.

(I do, however, know quite a few other names, inkluding Donald Knuth (TeX) and Leslie Lamport (LaTeX).)

The contributions of these people can easily be acknowledged without the use of advertizing language and methods, which serve the purpose of leading poor thinkers into making decisions they would otherwise not have made. (I stress that I have no objections whatsoever to a factual and informative message concerning e.g. a new version or release—even be it very different in form and content from tech-centered release notes.)

@a very private person

I _am_ a developer (and more lately an IT consultant): Writing software has been my occupation for almost fifteen years. (And I would not be foolish enough to even try to write an office suit single-handedly.)

I do not need an office suite (except to the degree my current project requires one—and then it is almost always a mandatory MS Office in the first place).
The private needs I have in the area are better covered by LaTeX, Roff, and HTML. In fact, if irrelevant to this particular discussion, I consider the entire WYSIWYG concept to be flawed through its failure to separate content and presentation of content in an appropriate manner, and have found that I, personally, tend to be more productive and less annoyed with tools that base on a markup language (or a similar paradigm).

The sidebar has already been integrated in LibreOffice 4.1, but is still considered experimental and as such must be activated by the user selecting Options > Advanced.