from the devs-not-responding-well-to-RC-feedback dept.
Network World reports:
A new version of LibreOffice's Calc program has broken many spreadsheets, users say, and a perceived unwillingness by developers to address the problem has sparked an ill-tempered argument.
The problem has to do with a new method of sorting reference cells that diverges from the method used in both previous versions of Calc and in most other spreadsheets that was included in a recent version of the software. The result is that some users, apparently, are seeing formulas return incorrect results in their spreadsheets, leading to data loss.
Potential problems with new sorting method, which is active by default in versions 4.3 and 4.2.7 of the software, were first noticed in July, but it was eventually included in the stable release of LibreOffice 4.2.7 on October 30.
Some users said years-old spreadsheets suddenly stopped working. One complained that she had to restore spreadsheets from a backup and start using an older version of Microsoft Excel--not a solution likely to appeal to many FOSS enthusiasts.
[...]the issue has been corrected--the older sort function will be enabled by default in future versions
This is news mainly because of the dev team's limp response to user reports of brokenness.
The article has details on that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @02:17AM
Article provides no additional info about the problem or links so we can see the details. Just a bunch of quotes from a developer complaining trolls and users having a sense of entitlement.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:27AM
There's nothing more to say than what's in the summary.
Apparently LibreOffice has fallen victim to the same organizational disease that has destroyed GNOME, Mozilla and Debian: the developers stopped listening to the users.
Ignoring the users has ruined the software of those other projects. Now LibreOffice appears to be next on the list of failed major open source projects.
(Score: 2) by jackb_guppy on Friday November 14 2014, @02:47AM
LibreOffice has had it own version of systemd. A technical change was made without and even after feedback that it is "wrong". They learned that users are the important group, not the developers.
Now when will Debian and other major distros learn this???
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @03:39AM
"They learned that users are the important group, not the developers. Now when will Debian and other major distros learn this???"
Windows 8 had no start menu. Microsoft lost money. Windows 10 is bringing it back. It took a couple of years but the lost revenue forced Microsoft to listen to its users. What do open source distros have to lose? Donations? Developers? Bug-filers? In time we will see the extent of the damage.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 14 2014, @03:45AM
I can't believe I'm actually responding to a piece of this idiotic systemd spam, but you are so wrong it demands response:
Nope, sorry. users are largely irrelevant except insofar as their presence offers incentives to the developers (money, ego, etc). I would think that would be obvious: a sufficiently interesting project can survive indefinitely without any users outside of the developers themselves. Remove the developers on the other hand and the project is dead. Users may continue using the last version for a while, but unless they can lure some new developers to the project they'll all end up abandoning it as the march of time renders it obsolete.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @03:52AM
"I can't believe I'm actually responding to a piece of this idiotic systemd spam, but you are so wrong it demands response:
Nope, sorry. users are largely irrelevant except insofar as their presence offers incentives to the developers (money, ego, etc). I would think that would be obvious: a sufficiently interesting project can survive indefinitely without any users outside of the developers themselves. Remove the developers on the other hand and the project is dead. Users may continue using the last version for a while, but unless they can lure some new developers to the project they'll all end up abandoning it as the march of time renders it obsolete."
As a user, I matter to Microsoft. You can keep linux with that attitude. I'll save my money and give it to someone who cares. BTW, fuck you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:15AM
Congratulations. You have finally learned that not everybody is clamouring for you as a user, and that not all devs stay up at night, tossing and turning wondering how they can attract you to their project. The problem, of course, is that you still think you matter as a user to Microsoft. I'll give you a hint: You don't. As a user, unless you contribute some worth, you don't matter to anybody. To Microsoft, you bring $20. To FOSS, you bring your self-entitlement, and maybe the possibility of submitting a few bugs one day. Nobody is going to start a bidding war over you.
(Score: 2) by LookIntoTheFuture on Friday November 14 2014, @04:30AM
Where do you think developers come from? I bet that most start by being users first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:45AM
LOL, asking for an obvious bug to be fixed isn't "entitlement"!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @10:12AM
no, but expecting someone else to fix a bug for free is
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @12:40PM
Wrong. If a regression is introduced, it needs to be fixed. This is an obligation that is to be fulfilled without compensation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @12:48PM
if it needs to be fixed, then you need to fix it
you have no right to force any other another person to do anything
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:18AM
The parent isn't "flamebait". It's how normal people see software.
They don't care about ideological licensing arguments. They don't care about small-genitaled open source contributors wanting to feel "powerful" by forcing their stupid ideas on others.
They want software that works, and they'll even pay Microsoft and others good money for working software.
The open source community needs to realize the reality that they're dealing with.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @07:07AM
Most FOSS developers aren't paid enough to give a shit about what users think/want... they do it for their own self-interest, not yours.
They want software that works, and they'll even pay Microsoft and others good money for working software
How many of the whining trolls out there have ever paid any LibreOffice developer a cent?
LibreOffice developers aren't forcing anyone to use any version of LibreOffice. They offer their skill and knowledge for users to freely take advantage of. If you honestly think Microsoft is going to listen to you as a user in exchange for your measly pittance (compared to the cost of developing new features), go use Microsoft Office.
Try telling Linus Torvalds that he should listen to what users want; I dare you.
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Friday November 14 2014, @07:59AM
U dont think we went to the moon why not tell Louis Armstrong to his face.
(not criticizing just you, or even you, really, just this whole idiotic thread)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @12:48PM
LOL! He'd just blow his trumpet back in your face.
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Friday November 14 2014, @03:54PM
Dude! Louie Armstrong on the moon would totally rock!
That is all.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday November 14 2014, @07:10AM
>The open source community needs to realize the reality that they're dealing with.
It's you who seems to not understand the reality - unless you are somehow contributing to the ecosystem you're irrelevant to the developers. For the most part the OSS community isn't trying to gain market share or take over the world, they're just trying to develop good software for the benefit of themselves and like-minded users. Unless you're contributing something to the cause you're just not relevant. Go ahead and go use proprietary software, no skin off our noses. The vast majority of the people trying to "spread the word" aren't the developers, they're the fan club. And while most people do enjoy basking in the adulation of a supportive fan club, they're generally not going to compromise their artistic/engineering vision trying to increase its size. Who wants fans that only adore you because you're catering to their whims?
OSS developers mostly come in one of two flavors (or some combination thereof):
Volunteer developers, the traditional core of the OSS movement, mostly work for the joy of the work, the personal usefulness of the software, and/or or the ego stimulation and/or monetizable reputation. Users are mostly irrelevant to the first two motivations, and only really relevant to the third motivation if they're supportive.
Paid developers on the other hand work for a company that's somehow making money off the software. Maybe they sell it, or support for it, or maybe it's internal infrastructure. Either way they're in it for the money, just like the developers for proprietary software, and add whatever features their boss tells them to. And their boss tells them what to add based on what they believe will make them a profit, which to some extent probably involves catering to the users. But they're a profit-driven enterprise: if they're not making money from you in one way or another, you're completely irrelevant to them
So ask yourself this: How are you contributing emotional or financial wealth to the developers? And if you're not, why on earth would you imagine that they should care about your idea of what their software should be?
(Score: 2) by LookIntoTheFuture on Friday November 14 2014, @08:20AM
"Volunteer developers, the traditional core of the OSS movement, mostly work for the joy of the work, the personal usefulness of the software, and/or or the ego stimulation and/or monetizable reputation."
Where do you think these volunteer developers come from? They came from being users. By shunning users now, you are shunning future volunteer developers. That's not a good long term solution to open source software is it?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 14 2014, @10:07AM
They only shun users who want to use software that they don't want to make, which is no problem at all. If you're happy using Software X, go nuts, have fun. I'm going to be over here using and improving Software Q, along with all the other people that prefer it to the alternatives. Sure, we may only be a fraction of a percent of the "market", but that's still hundreds or millions of us, and more importantly we're all the kind of people who like using the kind of software that developers like making for themselves: a group that has almost certainly self-selected to be far more likely to join in on development than your average proprietary software user.
Open Source Software has been thriving since the days when there were only thousands of programmers on the entire planet, now there's millions. You only need to attract the tiniest sliver of them to your project and you'll do fine. If I recall correctly the vast bulk of Linux kernel contributions originate with only a few handfuls of people, and that's probably one of the largest and most vibrant FOSS projects in the world. Individual groups do jeopardize their long-term viability if they become too unresponsive to the users, but there's also a long history of unresponsive teams having their projects forked by the larger community so that the work continues and only managerial continuity is lost. Not always of course, but I couldn't hope to list all the proprietary software which has fallen by the wayside over the years either - the universe is an impermanent place, *nothing* lasts forever. With FOSS though the odds are good that at least bits and pieces will live on in other projects.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday November 14 2014, @08:58PM
So if you want actual usable software do not use FOSS...okay good to know. You DO realize that is EXACTLY what you are saying, yes? this isn't some "They have blue buttons while you have green buttons" kind of deal, you understand this, yes? We are talking about a set of formulas done the same way by everybody else EXCEPT Libre Office, it would be like inputting "1+1" and getting 2 in everybody else's program and getting 23 followed by a corrupted file in YOUR "solution".
If you want to make a playtoy for developers that is unsuitable for anything else? that is perfectly fine, just say it is so and do whatever you want....but you can't have your cake and eat it too, understand? you cannot say your software is a suitable replacement for MS Office and then have it shit itself when you run Excel spreadsheets because some developer wanted to "scratch an itch". You are either A or you are B, you can't be both A&B...now which is it? is it a developer playground where functionality doesn't matter, only itch scratching, in which case what you are saying is 100% correct, or is it an MS Office replacement where what you are saying would make it unsuitable for purpose and a waste of time for anyone who isn't a LO developer?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 15 2014, @12:26AM
So if you want actual usable software do not use FOSS
The OP wasn't arguing that FOSS is unusable, but I'm sure you already knew that... which is why the rest of your comment was lost.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday November 15 2014, @02:19AM
Apparently you're unaware of the fact that "usable" is not the same as "usable by any idiot accustomed to a different program". Blender for example is an awesomely powerful and easy-to-use 3D modeling program - *after* you've taken the time to learn how to use it. But it's interface is also very different from most 3D modeling programs, and not particularly intuitive. It's the difference between "intuitive to use" and "easy to get work done with" - the two tend to be somewhat mutually exclusive. As the old adage goes: "Make a tool that even an idiot can use, and only an idiot will do so"
As for Calc - unless I'm misunderstanding something badly, no, it's not. Your freshly-loaded spreadsheet will work just fine. The problem is only that if you perform a sort operation it will modify your spreadsheet in a different manner than pretty much every other spreadsheet program out there. As it happens I agree that this is a problem - if they wish to introduce a new style of sorting operation that's great, but they should add it as an alternate sorting operation, not by replacing the existing operation that pretty much every spreadsheet user on the planet is accustomed to. The fact remains though that we are supplicants, not their employers, and it's unlikely to help anything when people object by acting like whiny little bitches with entitlement issues - if anything that's going to just piss them off and make them dig in their heels over it.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday November 15 2014, @06:21AM
So LO should be treated like dell treats Ubuntu, hidden on a back page behind several warnings? Then I agree completely, it SHOULD be only handed out with several warnings. after all what kind of impression is somebody gonna have of FOSS when a FOSSie feeds them the "LO is just as good as MSO!" bullshit and they take a mission critical spreadsheet and it takes a Cleveland Steamer all over it? probably the same impression thousands are getting right now as LO shits on their spreadsheets, that its another playtoy, not useful for anybody but little Billy and that real users need real software.
Again you can be one OR the other NOT both, now which is it? Is it a suitable replacement for MSO, or is it a developers toy? Can't have your cake and eat it too, again we aren't talking different style GUIs here, we are talking REAL DATA LOSS. So if its supposed to be a replacement for MSO its a GIANT FAIL and if its a developers playtoy its mission accomplished...which is it?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @10:50AM
if the public treated volunteer firefighters with the same disdain and expectation that volunteer open source developers are copping lately, they would let your fucking house burn down
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @12:54PM
Volunteer firefighters don't come along every few weeks and unexpectedly change your locks, break your windows, repaint your walls to hideous colors, and crap down your chimney.
That's essentially what some open source developers, like those working on GNOME, Firefox, systemd and Debian do these days, however. Now LibreOffice does it, too, apparently.
It's no wonder normal people don't like this kind of open source programmer! These programmers behave like psychopaths at times, even if some of them are volunteering.
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Friday November 14 2014, @03:52PM
But volunteer firefighters might feasibly decide to switch to helicopters, and only be able to put out fires by flooding your whole house with water. Perhaps that doesn't meet your needs if you just want a modest response to deal with a small fire. Well, take it or leave it, but stop with the sense of entitlement. If you don't like what the volunteers are offering, start up your own firefighting service - you can even fork (pick up where the old road-based service left off) if you want.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by choose another one on Friday November 14 2014, @08:26PM
The problem comes when you don't get a chance to take or leave the new offering because they don't actually tell you about the change - by the time you know they have flooded your whole house rather than just use a fire extinguisher on a small fire (like they used to, and like every other similar service does) it is too late, the damage is done.
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Sunday November 16 2014, @03:37PM
Well, it's not as egregious as that specific situation, but fair point. I was partly defending Debian and Firefox which had also come in for criticism in this discussion. This particular episode with LO is a poor showing.
But still, the correct response is to thank the LO volunteers for their efforts while politely pointing out how harmful the decision was to change the functionality in this manner, and suggesting that they really need processes to prevent such things happening in the future. If they don't put such processes in place, some people may need to say one final thank and then switch to Excel.
N.B. This kind of functionality change wouldn't happen in Excel. But then, Excel runs on Windows, so you can still suffer data loss - e.g. due to a 0-day security vulnerability. There's no perfect choice when it comes to software.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 14 2014, @04:27PM
Hardly. If you don't like the changes in an update, don't update. Simple as that. You are the one changing *your* copy, they're only changing *their* copy, and then making it available for you if you like it. (Well, except Firefox and a few others where they cram it down your throat - there are arguably good reasons in that case, but that's another conversation). Want some of the changes but not others? No problem go ahead and backport them, they're making the source code available after all. What, you don't have the time/skill to do so? Completely understandable, but stop demanding other people do the work for you for free. Either accept the generosity being offered, or shut the hell up.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Friday November 14 2014, @08:55PM
How do you decide whether or not you like the changes _before_ you update, when the changes are not even documented ? In many cases the only way users will notice this change is if the answers are "obviously" wrong - in many cases it may not be noticed at all, it just produces incorrect answers AND corrupts the spreadsheet (again, not in an immediately noticeable fashion).
There is nothing in the release notes about what is a breaking-change (in a bug fix release) to mature and de-facto standard functionality, a change that makes LO different to just about every other spreadsheet out there, arguably breaks ODS as a portable document format (because now you need to write the spreadsheet differently to get the same - correct - answers in different versions of LO and OO etc.). A note about changes in the sorting function not being stable was added some time after release (looking at the history) - zero documentation about the actual changes.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday November 15 2014, @02:40AM
You don't. You never know for sure what all an upgrade will change, that's why you make sure to have the option to roll back the upgrade on anything important. Look at MS Office - new versions routinely broke compatibility with older files - not just saving by saving data in new formats, but by losing the ability to properly open older files that had opened fine in the previous version.
I agree though that in this particular case this is extremely poor form on the part of the developers. Spreadsheets are used for a lot of mission-critical purposes, and most people don't keep regular backups, so they no doubt caused a LOT of lost man-hours globally. I'm not entirely clear on whether it's an actual bug, or just a "new and better functionality" that silently breaks expectations, but either way it should have at *least* been loudly announced.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday November 14 2014, @09:23PM
Oh My God, and folks wonder why I say FOSSies speak in memes! Ladies and gentlemen allow me to introduce you to meme #46 also known as its free you can't complain [tmrepository.com] also known as the "turd sandwich excuse". You see THIS is what you get when the claims are proven to be made of bullshit or the softare is shown to be unsuitable for purpose, you get meme #46. If the devs shit all over your drivers? Meme #46. LibreOffice sells itself as a suitable replacement for MS Office and then turns your spreadsheets into data salad? Meme #46.
Since I'm sure this will be modded down, followed by a bunch of AC posts I'll never see probably saying nasty things I'll never read, why don't the rest of you count how many times meme #46 gets used in this thread, I'd be amazed if it didn't hit 45%+. Also without even looking I bet there will probably be a bunch of FOSSies invoking meme #5, the ever classic fork it [tmrepository.com] which is usually the jelly in the PB&J of excuses. Remember the devs can NEVER do wrong so when the users find a show stopper they get told #46 followed by meme #5...yes because as a user I'm gonna go to college for computer programming, get a degree, all to fork somebody else's busted shit...that is much more logical than just going out and spending the $50_$200 for a functional product!
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 15 2014, @07:09AM
regardless of memes, most people can appreciate the effort of a volunteer, regardless of how good or bad a job you think they do
the efforts of volunteers are celebrated the world over
volunteers are a positive influence on society
you may have every right to complain, but FOSS developers also have every right to tell people like you to fuck off
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday November 14 2014, @08:36AM
You speak cold, hard truth. That said, it's not quite that bleak. OSS developers do gain something from having a fan club, i.e., from knowing that their work benefits a community of users. People want to feel useful, to believe their their work and contributions are valued. Any individual user may be unimportant, but if you drive them away in droves, you will surely take an egoistic or emotioanal hit.
It's not a matter of "artistic/engineering integrity". The problem is the same problem virtually all developers have: It's fun to create something new, it's drudgery to track down and fix errors. There are plenty of long-standing, serious bugs in LibreOffice - some of them are downright catastrophic. But no, it's more fun to create a new sorting method. This is, frankly, a matter of developer maturity and professionalism, or lack thereof...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @10:28AM
part of the problem that has been particularly obvious with respect to systemd is not so much that there are bugs (software will always have bugs) but the attitude of users is turning from one of community encouragement to consumer expectation
consumers are given certain legal rights because they pay for something (in a contractual arrangement). the difference here is that users choose to use a piece of software without entering into a consumer contract because usually they don't pay the developer, so the developer doesn't have any legal obligation to ensure that users are satisfied with their software.
it is only natural that hostility will be met with hostility when an open source developer is not obliged to even hear, let alone pander to user requests for bug fixes or new features. users should be accustomed to this as they will usually receive the same indifference from even commercial software developers like microsoft and adobe, but when the target is small, such as a relatively small group maintaining a single package, or even a single man (in the case of lennart poettering) it becomes easier for users to escalate their anger and frustration to personal attacks.
unfortunately, this increasing 'user is always right' entitlement mentality serves in no way to encourage or nurture a volunteer open source development community, and if it persists we may soon find the community shrinking to the point where actively maintained free alternatives to commercial software are few and far between.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 14 2014, @10:33AM
Hey, if you want professionalism feel free to hire a professional - these guys are working on a hobby in their free time. There's also plenty of bounty programs out there that people could pay into if the bugs really mattered to them that much - that the bounties are too small attract anyone to do the tedious work is evidence enough that they are a low priority among the users.
I don't see it as bleak at all - the problem is only that some people want a community-driven FOSS project to look and act like a commercial production, and it can't. The incentive structures are fundamentally different. A better comparison might be to the local model railroad club: a few people do awesome amounts of work and impress everyone, many more occasionally come up with something cool to show off, and the vast majority mostly just come for the show and maybe make suggestions now and then. The difference is that in this club everyone gets to take home their own free good-as-the-original copy of the the coolest trains and most massive and intricate dioramas. And everyone there is involved because they *want* to be. Some like to tinker, some like to impress, and some just like to get free trains. Everyone is welcome, except for the entitled asshole who goes around demanding people make trains and dioramas to his specs: He's got his own copy to work on - if he wants it customized so badly then he should either do it himself or pay someone else - nobody is there to cater to him.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Friday November 14 2014, @11:01PM
Problem is that there are many, including vocal FOSS advocates and lobbyists, who believe that FOSS is both better _and_ free as in $0 - but reality is that somewhere somehow if you want a professional job, someone needs to get paid, otherwise what you get are enthusiastic amateurs making screw ups like this. Some FOSS projects (e.g. Linux kernel and distributions) have managed to create business models for this, some (office suites...) have not.
Some quotes from this link: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/elibrary/case/complex-singularity-versus-openness [europa.eu] ::
When it comes to office documents, public administrations can choose from two ISO/IEC standards. Only one of these, ODF (ISO/IEC 26300), is vendor-neutral, open and reliable across a span of years and software versions, and supported by a variety of software products.
Not any more - switch between different LO versions and get different spreadsheet answers now.
Creating a spreadsheet in MS Excel, adding some data and some metadata such as dates, calculations or formulas, and saving the document in the ISO-standardized OOXML Strict format can result in trouble when the document is re-opened. Problems can include data loss and features wrongly represented, which might easily remain undiscovered because they do not produce error messages in Microsoft Office.
Or in this version of LO, sort and save and your data is corrupted, without error messages, when re-opened by different version of LO or any other ODF spreadsheet application.
Everywhere in Europe municipalities are showing how they can save taxpayers’ money by rejecting Microsoft licences and using Apache OpenOffice or LibreOffice.
See, there is such a thing as a free lunch - we just assume someone else pays the developers, and if nobody does (I mean, surely somebody else will, right?) then, well, you get what you pay for, someone effectively breaks ODF in exactly the same way as OOXML is broken.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday November 15 2014, @02:27AM
You're confusing a few issues here - unless I'm much mistaken nothing is corrupted by the change here, interoperability of the file formats remains unaffected. What *is* effected is that applying a sort operation diddles with your formulas in a different way than essentially everyone is accustomed to. And I agree that that's a problem (I suppose I should have mentioned that). But it's not a problem that can be effectively addressed with the same irate, entitled attitude that you might bring to bear on a commercial software developer. You have (probably) contributed literally nothing to the developers, and they owe you nothing in return.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Saturday November 15 2014, @09:25PM
You're confusing a few issues here - unless I'm much mistaken nothing is corrupted by the change here
If you sort and save, the data is corrupted, permanently - which is why there are people reporting having to restore files from backups.
interoperability of the file formats remains unaffected. What *is* effected is that applying a sort operation diddles with your formulas in a different way than essentially everyone is accustomed to
The problem is that sorting is very often effectively a viewer operation for spreadsheets - you send out the data and expect the recipients to look at it in their preferred ordering. Now, you need to know which software the recipient is using because you now have to write your formulae _differently_ for different software (including different versions of LO) in order to get the correct results when sorted. The recipient / viewer may know nothing about your formulae and may not even understand them or what they do, you will have to test in the weird versions (and now weird option settings) of LO and explain that when sending spreadsheets out. To me, that _is_ an interoperability issue.
Having looked at what the open formula standard says about references, it seems to me that it specifies a syntax for absolute and relative references in formulae (which is at the heart of this issue), but does not specify what that difference _means_ in terms of behaviour - looks like they just assumed that that is "known" (de facto standard?). In which case it is still an interoperability issue, but arguably down to the vagueness of the standard :-(
You have (probably) contributed literally nothing to the developers, and they owe you nothing in return.
I don't think they do owe me anything, my concern is more whether or not they owe a duty of care to the Open Document standards or to those lobbying for such standards to be used (effectively the sales guys for FOSS), with the argument that they improve interoperability and prevent vendor lock-in.
In commercial software sales&marketing and development may well dislike each other, but they _are_ dependent on each other and they _do_ owe each other (and there is a CEO at the top to enforce that if need be). With FOSS, at least in this case, the two groups are completely separate, and the devs can, as in this case, decide to change an application to be completely non-standard at the same time as "sales" are "selling" it as standard. Then they argue that it is fine to do that because they don't owe anyone anything because no one, including those doing the "selling", is paying them to stay on-standard or deliver quality etc. You can say they are all part of the same FOSS community, but nothing is steering the parts of the community in the same direction.
I think events like this show the "community" FOSS model isn't holding up, which I think is sad but possibly inevitable. I don't have an answer, you can't really say pay the devs out of the sales of the software, because then you have lost FOSS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @02:19PM
> they're just trying to develop good software for the benefit of themselves and like-minded users. Unless you're contributing something to the cause you're just not relevant. Go ahead and go use proprietary software, no skin off our noses.
So basically, they're Libertarians, not Socialists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:35AM
Open source projects will not survive in the long term with an attitude like that.
Firefox is basically on life support at this point. It's at 10% of the market now. Soon it will be much less. Everyone smart moved to Chromium or Pale Moon.
GNOME died with GNOME 3 and systemd. Everyone smart moved to Xfce, KDE, or some other alternative.
Debian is on its way out thanks to systemd breaking existing installations and making Debian less reliable and less stable. Everone smart moved to FreeBSD.
Those projects crapped on their users. The users responded by leaving.
LibreOffice seems to be heading in the same direction.
(Score: 2) by caseih on Friday November 14 2014, @05:04AM
Can't tell if you're trolling or if this is +5 Funny.
Debian on the way out and bleeding users because of systemd? Hilarious stuff indeed as systemd isn't the default init in Debian yet!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Synonymous Homonym on Friday November 14 2014, @08:21AM
systemd isn't the default init in Debian yet!
It is in Jessie.
If you happen to use SysVinit, upgrading from Wheezy will replace it with systemd, even if you didn't have systemd installed.
You would need to install sysvinit-core if you want to keep sysvinit, which does not exist in Wheezy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @07:37AM
Debian is on its way out
That's a pity... I guess the multitude of downstream distros that depend on Debian including mint and ubuntu will shrivel up and die too?
SN must be gaining traction if its now attracting the shills from /.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @12:58PM
Ubuntu has been successfully destroying itself for years. Unity and that Amazon crap are two good examples of this. Systemd sure won't help with stopping this destruction.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday November 14 2014, @01:03PM
Firefox is basically on life support at this point. It's at 10% of the market now.
My site stats must be an anomaly, then. They show Mozilla (?) at 39.7%, IE 26.5%, Chrome 13.2%, Firefox 12.5%, Opera only 2.6%, Netscape 1.8%, unknown 1.5%, Android .6%, Blackberry .3%. Safari seldom shows up at all, nor do Konqueror or any of the other Linux browsers despite the fact that the OSes list consistently has Windows at #1 and Linux at #2.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday November 14 2014, @03:40PM
I know we're supposed to say, "Parent must be wrong, then," but it kinda sounds like yes, your site is indeed an anomaly. When a SD/SN commenter says "my site" and "usage statistics," I kind of assume that their browser cross-section is going to be more technical users (e.g. less IE penetration) unless it's a site about dog grooming or something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_browser_usage#Summary_table [wikipedia.org]
My first thought was that "Mozilla" was the generic user string for all Firefox-alike browsers, but you have Firefox listed separately (or did Mozilla radically change their version string semi-recently?). 40% of your users are coming in via the Mozilla Application Suite or SeaMonkey or something? Wat?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday November 15 2014, @02:02PM
I wonder about that myself; my host provides the stats.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1) by Synonymous Homonym on Friday November 14 2014, @06:52AM
User feedback makes my software better.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:28AM
I guess this is the bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=81633 [freedesktop.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @04:39AM
It's disgusting how some of the developers treat the users so awfully and with so much disrespect. Disgusting!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @10:39AM
Linus Torvalds says "fuck you!"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday November 14 2014, @03:43PM
No, Linus Torvalds tells his developers "fuck you!" when they won't listen to him telling them to stop doing stupid unsafe things.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 15 2014, @07:15AM
umm... he tells developers all sorts of things because he cares about developers
he doesn't give a shit about idiot users
he's said so more than once that he develops software for himself to use. what others do with it is their business
just because he says nasty things to developers doesn't imply that he gives two fucks about users
(Score: 3, Insightful) by KritonK on Friday November 14 2014, @08:53AM
Although LibreOffice is what I use when given a choice among office programs, I have encountered, on occasion, bugs that made it unusable to me. The typical first response, after reporting such a bug, was that they couldn't reproduce it under a different operating system and locale than the one in my bug report. The typical second response was... none. Eventually, several months later, fixing some other bug might fix my problem, at which point I would report so, and my bug would be closed.
I have come to realize that it is more important to the LibreOffice development team to stick to the rapid release schedule than to have a fully working product, which might require that they stop producing new versions and work on those hard to fix issues for as long as it takes.
(Score: 1) by acharax on Friday November 14 2014, @09:15AM
For casual usage it's nice and all, but when it comes to editing very large documents using it is an exercise in futility. I'm working on a large manuscript (approx. 1800 pages; I know, should've used LaTeX, but there's no point a decade in now is there?) and the differences between Writer and Word (only used 2000 and 2003, so I can't speak for newer versions) are like night and day, Writer takes over 10 minutes to open and render this file whereas Word opens it instantly. It would appear that the Writer developers thunk it a good idea to parse every last nook of the document ahead of time (when Word is forced to parse the entire document in this way by forcing it to spit out a word count it does it in a matter of seconds, so that can't be the entire reason behind Writer being so excruciatingly slow). The problems don't end there, another point of contention are the dictionary files used by LibreOffice (and OpenOffice), Office uses plain text tables sans any arbitrary limit whereas LibreOffice uses a binary format that has a very low limit (5000 I believe it was) which makes importing a dictionary that much more annoying. Yes, Microsoft is using a plain text format while a open source project uses a binary one, what is the world coming to?
I didn't do awfully much with Calc, but I remember that they retained the column and row limits of Excel even for their own file format (256 and 65536) which always struck me as odd; whatever memory related or structural reasons led to this limit in ancient versions of Excel, I have severe doubts that they're still valid two decades later.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday November 14 2014, @07:20PM
Interesting. That's the one thing that annoys me most about Word. I'm often opening ~1000 page docs at work (design docs and stuff) where I already know I need to go directly to page 700 or something. So I open the doc in Word, scroll all the way down to the end...and discover the "end" is page 20. In Writer I can jump directly to the page I want. In Word I always have to scroll a few dozen pages at a time, because it seems to only load ~10 pages around what you're looking at, then a few dozen more blank placeholder pages, so if you try to go too far beyond that too quickly it won't even know the pages exist yet.
What's real fun though is when you get a corrupted .doc file. One of those ones that instantly crashes Word. With newer version of Word (using 2007 here) it will automatically restart and try to open the doc again. And will promptly crash again. At which point it restarts and tries to open the document yet again! To be fair, it's something I probably only see once every couple months, and Word isn't the only app that does this (Chrome will often do the same if I try to restore open tabs after one of it's hourly crashes for example.)
(Score: 1) by acharax on Friday November 14 2014, @08:13PM
I've added a button to one of the main toolbars to regenerate the document statistics (should be called Count Words, though there's also an automatic version of the option that doesn't bring up the prompt which is what I attached to the button), this'll make it parse the entire file (which still takes only a few seconds, hence my disgust regarding LibreOffice's "performance") allowing you to jump to any page in it (at least that's how it works in 2003).
Word 2007 would appear to be a mess from what you described. I was never eager to check it out (mostly because of what I heard about the UI changes), now I'll probably stay clear of it for good.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @09:29AM
"Three times it's enemy action"
We're seeing this everywhere in free/opensource software now.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @10:45AM
We're seeing this everywhere in free/opensource software now.
If users keep this shit up, open source developers may end up simply abandoning public repos of their software in protest and you'll end up with no choice but to be ignored by Microsoft instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @01:46PM
Most Open Source developers ignore their users /now/. I doubt users would notice any difference.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 15 2014, @07:17AM
they'd notice if the software they complain about stopped being maintained
(Score: 1) by PiMuNu on Friday November 14 2014, @11:45AM
I have thought for many years that LibreOffice is the weak link in the foss food chain. This is holding me back from recommending that people go over to linux. For those of us who need to knock up a powerpoint [sic] quickly to bring to project report meetings with senior management or whatever, OpenOffice/LibreOffice is a pain in the ass - buggy as hell. Maybe it will get better since the fork from OpenOffice? They've only had a year or so to improve things, change takes time...
(Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Friday November 14 2014, @07:36PM
For my Jr/Sr years of college (2010-2012) I was doing this *all the time*. At least 1-2 presentations per week, every week, for two years. I ran Linux, so every single one of them was created in Impress. The university computers ran Windows and MS Office, so every single one was presented with Powerpoint. The worst issue I ever had was when different fonts (ie, Nimbus Roman No 9 being converted to Times) would cause text to change size and possibly overflow the slide a bit. But that happens with any app, and takes all of thirty seconds to go through and fix.
Although I do tend to go minimalist in all things. So my slides generally consisted of a title, an image on one side, and a couple quick bulleted facts on the other. But I don't think I'm alone in the opinion that, if you're doing more than that, you're probably doing something wrong. Not that most people care about the fact that their slideshows are atrocious....
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Friday November 14 2014, @01:55PM
It's far better for a spreadsheet to instead require the user to name each column and row while allowing the building up of a hierarchy.
Javelin got this right back in 1984 --- Lotus Improv was released in 1991 (for NeXTstep) and Quantrix Modeler is still available (starts at 1,549.00). Everytime I use Numbers.app I have to pause and delete a bunch of empty cells....
Could we please get Flexisheet working again?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/flexisheet/ [sourceforge.net]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @07:39PM
This seems to be the bugzilla report:
https://www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=85571 [libreoffice.org]
To me, it looks like this wasn't a mistake. A developer intentionally decided to "improve" the behavior of the sort function, backwards-compatibility be damned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @07:43PM
Damn, copy/paste error. Let's try again:
This appears to be the real bug report:
https://www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=81633 [libreoffice.org]