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Comment by thezipcreator | Hacker News Reader

cool project, but I don't particularly like "The democratization of spreadsheets" as a catchphrase. Like, what does that even mean? If by "democratization" you mean like, more able to be used, well anyone can go download LibreOffice or for the web use CryptPad's Spreadsheets, and if you mean that it's more open, well both of those are open source. Is this project specifically run democratically or something? It just seems like a really bad use of meaningless marketing terminology.

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Can only agree with you. I just created a ticket for this:

https://github.com/ironcalc/ironcalc.github.io/issues/14

As I said somewhere else I had really bad marketing skills. Maybe I should talk to someone who really knows what they are doing :)

The catchphrase was decided in 5 seconds when I was sending a proposal to the nlNet and stuck.

Thanks for the feedback!

I think it's the general idea that free (as in speech) software is "democratic". Even if the project does not do what you want you can always modify or fork, i.e. make changes privately for your own use or even distribute them. Closed source software is like totalitarianism, the leader or leading party knows what is best for you.

Democracy is not the best analogy, free software projects have BDFLs. The difference is more indirect, in democracies citizens have rights and freedoms. In non-democracies typically less so.

FOSS is more anarchistic than democratic, I think. Sure, there exist democratic organizations like the Debian Organization, but if you don't agree with their decisions not much binds you to them (that's how projects like Devuan can exist). The same applies to projects with BDFLs as well (altho I do disagree with that form of governance for a project).

99,9999999% of the people using open-Source software are absolutely unable to modify or fork said software. From the other 0,00000000% most don't care enought to modify it.

Calling it democratic is is like calling cancer a completely natural phenomenon. It's true, but it's also completely beside the point

So what? Coming back to the poor analogy of democracy, the same fraction of voters could not run a government. The majority has never participated in any public manifestation.That does not mean we should all live under dictatorship.

Because of your comment, I discovered OnlyOffice.

I recommend you un-discover it and take a look at the Collabora office suite. It's basically the LibreOffice engine with a web ui on top. We've been using both OnlyOffice and CODE for years, and CODE has much better performance (both the client and the server; probably because the backend is in C++ instead of Node), it's more stable over the long term, and has better compatibility with msoffice.

https://www.collaboraonline.com/code

https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code

(it's FOSS, the language about "home use" is there to scare large companies into buying commercial versions with support contracts.)

Onlyoffice have a lot better compatibility .

This reason met my definition of democratization:

> Empowering SaaS Developers: Hundreds, if not thousands, of companies have implemented half-baked spreadsheets in their systems. IronCalc aims to provide these businesses with a superior, open-source alternative that enhances their SaaS applications.

I am currently creating SAAS and the idea of implementing LibreOffice on top of my offering just not gonna work.

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