Thoughts about other products

[regisperdreau]

Hello,

I’ve just come back from a French community event called “camp chatons” which is a non-profit community of alternative hosting providers. The aim is to provide an alternative to monopolistic cloud providers. There are free software suite prescriber to a large audience of non profit societies, or low profit, from the social and solidarity economy.

During the three days I heard that :

• LibreOffice is ugly
• Collabora is slow and uses too much memory
• OnlyOffice is better for beginners.
  (of course, progress has been made but it needs to be known).

One of the speakers made a comparison between free software users and firefighters.
If we were firemen with a big fire, we’d start making a code of conduct before putting the fire out.

I think that the “market” for free office products is on fire and that we are using a lot of energy to discuss something that is not a high priority. Code of conduct should be a background process.

Give us back the foundation we love, with imagination, action and kindness…

[gbpacheco]

@regisperdreau

…

• LibreOffice is ugly
• Collabora is slow and uses too much memory
• OnlyOffice is better for beginners.
  (of course, progress has been made but it needs to be known).
  …
  Give us back the foundation we love, with imagination, action and kindness…

Hi Regis!

By coincidence, I was at a ICT event focused on the Brazilian government market last week and got a similar feedback.

I had a long talk with the Zimbra manager for Latin America (responsible for big cases as the Brazilian Navy, a regional bank, etc.) and he told me that most Zimbra 10 users are now using OnlyOffice as the standard online suite because scalability and ease of use.

I want to check and confirm all information I got from him, but my first though was it’s an alert for all of us in our project.

Best,
Gustavo

[elianedomingos]

Hi Pacheco,

Thank’s for sharing.

In addition, we lost a TDF member to the Onlyoffice Community.

Best,
Eliane Domingos
Brazilian LibreOffice Community

[iplaw67]

Out of interest, how does Only Office solve the issue of working with databases and bringing databases into the office environment?

Google, for example, provides a number of different ways now of doing this, from its cloud-based SQL interface with dB server hosting instances, to no-code app development, or appsheet offerings.

MS of course, has Access Online and SQL Server engine interfacing.

LO currently has no such online offering in any of the cloud varieties being touted. Does Only Office have something?

[cornouws]

Note 1: while OnlyOffice is an interesting product, there are clear disadvantages wrt open code, open community, open development, and open standards that I would expect to be an issue for members of our community.
Note 2: if anything, the situation with apparent some advantages, if maybe only in marketing/sales, shows that keeping our full development-including-community together is crucial and that gambling with visionary ideas at the costs of actual contributions by others and simultaneously risking the economic grounds beneath those, belongs into the column ‘We Reject’ of our next next decade manifesto.