Articles related to IT and computer
By Eric Bright
We need your help here at The Document Foundation. LibreOffice needs your support. In this article, I am going to ask you for help. I am going to ask you for a commitment to a monthly donation to The Document Foundation.
If I am successful, at the end you will be convinced as to why LibreOffice needs your help, why even a small donation will help, and why a monthly contribution, even if small, makes a huge difference compared to a larger, one-time donation. Here is the story!
By Eric Bright
I don’t need LibreOffice. I WANT LibreOffice.
I am not exactly sure if anyone really “needs” LibreOffice as a product. LO is more an idea, an ideal, than it is a product. For one thing we have had exactly zero customer since the time of OpenOffice all the way to today.
No one needs LO. I am almost sure about it. I, as one, already have MS Office 365 down my throat by virtue of teaching at a college here in Toronto, Ontario. I don’t “need” to use LO.
By Eric Bright
Update 3 2020-10-10:
1- Typo corrected (thank you einpoklum for pointing that out)
Update 2 2020-09-07:
I stand corrected:
1- “ungraceful,” I am told I was, not “ungrateful”
2- The LO forked happened before AOO. That is true. Duly noted and corrected
3- There were many more reasons that lead to the eventual LO fork. Absolutely true
Update 1 2020-09-07:
I was informed by people involved with TDF that:
1- LO is based on “an extremely old, complex C++ codebase full of legacy stuff” [I knew that]
2- I was blaming the programmers for the issues the code has [not true. Read the post again]
3- I was being “ungrateful” [not true. Read the post again]
4- The LO does have some serious issues
5- The contributors have been trying to help and fix them [absolutely true]
6- I am “blaming developers for not doing more” and hence am getting in the way of those who are trying to help [really? ?]
7- I “mis-informed” my friend from whom I asked for insights [read the post and see if that is true]
8- I am advocating for more “committee” to fix the problem of something being “designed by a committee.” [conflating concepts, sarcastic, a red-herring/straw-man cocktail, playing with words. Read the ...
What a wild-goose chase! This is exactly how the AOO’s BoD were reacting to all criticisms back in the days. I came to the same conclusion as those critics of AOO once did: There is no point in all these, since history repeats itself.
“The Internet’s Own Boy follows the story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. From Swartz’s help in the development of the basic internet protocol RSS to his co-founding of Reddit, his fingerprints are all over the internet. But it was Swartz’s groundbreaking work in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to information access that ensnared him in a two-year legal nightmare. It was a battle that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26. Aaron’s story touched a nerve with people far beyond the online communities in which he was a celebrity. This film is a personal story about what we lose when we are tone deaf about technology and its relationship to our civil liberties.”
By Eric Bright
UPDATE 2018-07-07: Updated the URL to the portable version.
UPDATE 2018-02-20: Listed the latest test version.
You need to give Scribus 1.5.4-test, i.e. the development version, a try. It is a totally different beast now.
I always used to test the 1.4.x branch now and then, and it was a GUI disaster. Today, I stumbled upon the 1.5.4-test version and got the portable copy of it from here: