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The MS Office suite is far more user friendly than the alternatives.

I still use Libre Office on Ubuntu and I wonder why they chose to be so different. It would be great if they could completely copy MS Office in UI/UX, but there's probably some kind of copyright there right?

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The thing is, OpenOffice (and by descent LibreOffice) did copy MS Office's UI/UX. Then Microsoft switched to the "Ribbon" interface, throwing all that shared knowledge out the window. Recreating the Ribbon in LibreOffice is an active development task, last I checked.

Is there any limitations on how much they can copy? Surely Microsoft have some of the design and specs locked down with patents

I don't recall the outcome of that "Apple claims ownership of rounded corners" lawsuit, but I suspect (being absolutely not a lawyer) that'd be the relevant case law.

This really depends on the Google v Oracle lawsuit currently. If Oracle wins then the remains of VisCalc will have a copyright claim against everyone...

Microsoft successfully sued Corel for design patent infringement related to the ribbon interface. Corel had a “Word mode” in WordPerfect X7. The damages were about a quarter million dollars. YMMV.

Oracle v Google is copyright as applied to API’s. Different laws. Patents expire more quickly.

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