Softmaker on the other had does support RTL. They still have a long way to go to be at the level of Microsoft office, but they are the best Linux office suite that I found
I get that, and they have every right to handle it the way they see fit. If they don't want to invest into it, that's perfectly fine. It would just have been such a different experience if someone would have said "thanks for the effort, looks great, unfortunately we don't have the resources at this point". Would have been a 20 second investment. Instead they keep whimping people off, and the 100k thing just makes it completely ridiculous. It clearly shows where their priorities are, and where they aren't.
1: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/commit/3dc18d95...
IMO unsolicited contributions and contributor entitlement (not to be confused with user entitlement) is a major issue in open source. Don't start working on a huge feature unless you've gotten the green light to do so, or prepare to be rejected. In fact, prepare to be rejected even if you've gotten the green light. Doubly so if you can't even write the code without help. It doesn't matter if you're doing work for free; unwanted work just waste both parties' time, and it's emotionally draining on both sides when the work is eventually rejected. Also, if you're just a random guy without a track record of solid contributions to the project, your chances of implementing an important feature "right" is not good. Ramp up your involvement with small features first. Build trust.
Personally, I'm no stranger to huge unsolicited contributions throughout my open source career. PRs that made changes everywhere, made the wrong architectural decisions, included tons of irrelevant commits and sometimes even changed existing coding style just for the hell of it. What should I say to the contributors? Often times it would cost me less time to rewrite the feature than guide them to fix their contributions. Often times it's not even a feature I would include.
A reminder that open source maintainers don't owe you anything, not even time to review your PR. Video conferencing to help you write your unsolicited PR is a huge stretch by any standard.
(As for "promises", it is indeed on the roadmap, under "planned for future versions": https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/blob/19e3a5d/Ro... Projects should totally have their own pace and priorities rather than blindly "listen to the community", and I've seen my own feature requests implemented after being on the roadmap for five years in software I use, so again, nothing inappropriate here.)
The other side of this equation is: if you get forked then expect either that your software will be fragmented, or the form will take over from you.
If the software is under a free license, and you won’t accept contributions, then the corollary to the assertion that you cannot expect your PR to be accepted is: don’t get upset when a competing fork of your project takes away your market share.
They started in Latvia in 2009 yet it is a fully Russian company.
https://github.com/orgs/ONLYOFFICE/people are all Russian yet they are based in Latvia(Russians nationality is about 25% in Latvia).
https://www.onlyoffice.com/blog/ru/ their blog does not offer Latvian language.
This homogeneity would be normal if they were working toward Russian market but even then you'd expect to see a token Latvian or some other nationality.
Normal 25 person IT company in Latvia working with west would have perhaps 10 Latvians, 8 Russians, an Estonian, a Lithuanian and someone from the west and perhaps someone from east (India or Pakistan) - all speaking English.
Ascensio only job offerings for sales managers (towards Western market no less!) were in Russian (which is borderline illegal in Latvia)
The only rational explanation is that OnlyOffice owners have set a comfortable culture for their workplace and see no need to change it.
I thought a bit about the phrase "planned for future versions" and I felt like I could see where there was a sort of miscommunication. If someone said: "Future versions of this product", I think it could be reasonably understood to mean: "any/all future versions" which could mean: "the (next and all subsequent) version"
The most natural meaning to me, and the one that I believe was intended is that they want it in a/some future version. And then I thought it this was simply because languages can vary in how they specify noun definiteness and indefiniteness? For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_nouns_and_adjectives#St...
https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/166141/how-to-change...