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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

Most of my coworkers in the enterprise I work for use LibreOffice, but the business itself has made no such decision. We're all remote workers, and the business provides none of us with locally run software, or any hardware, just lots of SaaS apps.

So a spreadsheet file gets passed around, usually from a client, and we're just expected to figure out how to read it. Those of us without MS Office already installed for something else usually install LibreOffice, including me.

Is the business doing something wrong here? Should they buy us all copies from Redhat instead of leaving it to us? Am I doing something wrong by using the free version for my enterprise work? Should I pay for a copy out of my salary?

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Depending on your industry, not providing hardware could end up in sketchy legal ground.

Generally speaking, any software development activities I perform on my company issued laptop can be interpreted as belonging to the company without prior agreement. If I was using my own machine - it's likely the company would try to enforce security policies on it, or claim ownership of anything I develop on my hardware. While I am not a lawyer - Given the shrink-wrapped nature of such contracts, it's likely an employee could challenge this in court.

Your employer should be providing the tools for you to do the job, including locally run software.

So yes, they should be providing an office suite whether that be Office365/ Libre Office / etc.

It's been a great benefit to have full control over my own hardware and local software. I'd hate to lose it. In particular I'd hate to have to use something other than Linux, but in practice I'd be forced onto an Apple box, which is dominant in the company.

It's much the same as using my own home to work in. If they were required to provide me with an office, and I had to use it, whatever benefit there is would not go to me.

> Your employer should be providing the tools for you to do the job

Why? Skilled tradesmen frequently own their own tools, and many wouldn't have it any other way. You can bet your ass many of them have spent an order of magnitude more on their tools than a few measly software licenses ($20 for a text editor? Extortionist! But a cheap cordless drill costs several times that...) In California, employers are only required to provide the tools necessary for a job if they're paying you less than twice minimum wage, a bar you surely clear.

Skilled tradesmen are self-employed, and work as contractors to their clients.

Software developers who work as independent contractors generally own their own equipment and software (in Australia that's actually one of the legal criteria for determining whether someone is a contractor or an employee for taxation purposes).

Whereas employees generally use company-supplied hardware and software, which is to the employer's benefit as they have full control over it.

But that's really by the by; whoever is procuring software to be used for commercial purposes, it is reasonable to expect they would purchase commercial licenses to help fund the development of their tools.

I'm surprised privacy and security isn't more of a concern. Howcan they effectively say, "Do whatever you want. It doesn't matter to HQ."?

Why should it matter to HQ? The result of the work probably matters (i.e. a document), but the software used to create it? Doesn't really matter so long as it can be read. There are so many ways to do IT than the old central control of all the things model from the 90s.

Because...Security? That's not an issue? Imagine one unintend breach and poof! customer data splattered across the (dark) web.

I can't imagine how security and privacy are of no concern. Has that been cleared by legal? Or is it laziness and/or negligence?

Because they trust you to do it right. At a certain stage of organization, if you put a lot of barriers in people's way your company will fail.

At the same time, IT is not everyone's forte. If you're a office worker that types documents and looks at spreadsheets, should you be expected to know if the document suite you're using has a zero day that was just released?

I trust you're not being malicious, and I trust that you're not trying to be insecure, but software is a complex world now.

No you're right which is why usually you have some very sane default like Google Sheets and then let people escape hatch when they need to. Then you hire the people who won't use the escape hatch to bring Bonzibuddy PolitburoSuite to do their spreadsheets.

So you're a WFH developer AND a sec expert? If you had those skills you wouldn't be writing code. For example, would you use SMS for 2FA? (Hint: Many trust it, but shouldn't, right?)

This isn't about trust or not. It's about liability. It's about accountability. It's about reasonable expectations. It's about making sure you're not putting your team in a compromising position. It's about not assuming.

Is the hardware paid for by you or the business? If the hardware is paid for by the business then everything on that hardware is essentially business property, unless that business declares otherwise, and thus the business should be providing you with properly licensed software.

No employee hardware is payed for by the business. We all use our own machines, and all three major operating systems are well represented. So in your opinion we're all ethically in the clear?

Ethically who knows but you're definitely legally in the clear

"definitely"? you don't even know what country they're in

You're an employee in an enterprise, so I bet the following applies to you: "TDF stressed that LibreOffice 7.1 "Community" is meant for individuals and that means specifically not enterprise organizations."

The license is free software and it would be suicide for TDF to switch the whole project to proprietary software. Therefore companies are in the clear and will likely remain so for a long time if not forever.

That's more aggressive begging than a mandate. They have a license for a reason, and that license clearly allows OP's use case. If they do not need the "business" level features Libre's partners offer I see no reason to upgrade.

Computers are semi cheap but this is still quite crazy to require employees to come with their own tools to be able to work. I'm happy to live in a country were employers have an obligation to provide that.

It is "properly licensed." That's the issue, and it's why LibreOffice has to beg instead of being able to sue.

If LibreOffice doesn't like this use, they can change to a less libre license. That's the point of proprietary and mixed licenses.

If LibreOffice does this, then the entire fork from Apache OpenOffice is fraudulent.

They just need to rename their community edition to "unsupported edition" or "insecure edition" or "we will leak your IP to china edition".

Does it matter who pays for the hardware? I don't think that distinction is made by The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice offers their suite under the MPL[1], which doesn't restrict usage by corporations as long as they comply with the terms of the license (just like any other individual). And if the corporation allows this software to be used on their hardware, that seems to be "properly licensed".

[1] https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/licenses

Sure, big companies or ones with boomer culture work like this. In practice, at startups I've BYOD easily, I've used company hardware for things not company related, etc. Etc. They're not dicks about it.

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