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!

Costs! The old, ugly, familiar costs!

If I ask you to donate $1 CAD to The Document Foundation, you might ask yourself, “What? $1? What is that supposed to achieve? Are you kidding me?” read more...

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.

If you don’t have a ton of money to pay for an MS Office license fee, then you have many other options: read more...

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. read more...