Comment by piker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by piker | Hacker News Reader

Dead on.

Microsoft is just dominant and exporting its 40 year old legacy codebase as a spec. LibreOffice team is frustrated that the for-profit model is beating the OSS model and crying foul over mostly necessary complexity. If LibreOffice started from scratch they’d probably appreciate how much Microsoft serializes because a sufficiently complicated document saved to .docx basically provides a reference implementation.

We do need for-profit alternatives to Word, and I’m working on one in legal.

[edit: I hope to put some real thoughts on this down soon, but most of the wonkiness emanates from evolving functionality and varying trends in best practices over the decades. I’ve implemented a fair bit of the spec here: https://tritium.legal, but most of the hard part is providing for bidi language support, fonts, real-time editing and re-rendering, UI and annotations like spellchecking and grammar, not conforming to the markup spec. Spec conformance is just polish and testing. A performant modern word processor of any spec, however, is a technological achievement on the order of a web browser.]

I feel like Libreoffice became largely irrelevant the day Google Docs came out. People put up with LO wonkyness because it was free and office was expensive.

Google completely flipped the game and then cloud collaboration became everything.

I mean, multiplayer features are useful, but Google Docs is wonkier than LO. At least when LO loads a document, it's fully loaded.

LibreOffice has versions that you pay for, with support. The most prominent is Collabora, which is a (if not the) biggest contributor to LibreOffice.

Where does the article say it’s a necessary complexity?

> Thus, the primary goal for this new format wasn’t to be elegant, universal, or easy to implement; it was to placate regulators while preserving Microsoft’s technological and commercial advantages.

That sounds quite anti-competitive to me

> We do need for-profit alternatives to Word, and I’m working on one in legal.

Wow, big undertaking!

What we really need, though, is a for-profit alternative to Excel, that's not Google. I think Excel is more of the Killer App than Word has ever been.

That's Apple Numbers.

... which comes tied to macOS and with it Apple hardware. Neither play well in a shop that uses x86 Windows-only software, and Apple's switch to ARM hasn't made that easier.

So? The person I was replying to didn't impose any conditions beyond it being not Google.

Adding Apple to implied conditions. :)

This may be nitpicking, but the complexity in OOXML is not "necessary", at least not in the sense of what Fred Brooks would call essential complexity. As OP clearly demonstrate, the complexity in OOXML is not artificial: there was never some grand conspiracy by Microsoft to create a format that competitors will find it hard to implement.

But very little of this complexity is necessary for a standard interoperable document file format. The background was that the EU started pushing for a standardized document exchange format, and several governments started implementing regulations requiring the use of this format — Microsoft now had some very big customers which urgently needed a feature: a standard document file format. Microsoft _could_ have implemented and submitted a new format that doesn't include slavishly reflect their in-memory object graph and legacy issues. Or they even could have just adopted ODF (shudder). But they've chosen the easy way, because, frankly, they probably just didn't have the time. They took the accidental complexity which was the hot mess Microsoft Office internals (like a buggy date format) and serialized it to disk. It was never an ideal solution, but this was quick to implement.

That's just a classic case of technical debt: Microsoft needed to deliver a feature fast, and they were willing to make compromises. The crazy political shenanigans Microsoft had executed to standardize their technical debt are ironically just another form of accidental complexity.

> [T]here was never some grand conspiracy by Microsoft to create a format that competitors will find it hard to implement.

No, it's just an ordinary conspiracy. Everywhere in the spec you see shit that says "Do it like Word95 does" or "Do it like Word97 does" is an intentional aspect of the standard that makes it unreasonably difficult for anyone who wishes to faithfully read or write documents in this format to do so.

It is inappropriate for an open standard to define behavior in terms of an undocumented proprietary black box. The primary reason for an open standard to exist is to permit interoperability. Anyone who has read nontrivial portions the standard would argue that ISO shouldn't have standardized OOXML as it was. It's a damn shame that Microsoft acted in bad faith to exploit ISO's rules [0] in order to ram a very poorly-specified standard through. It's always sad when people and organizations that should be acting pro-socially choose to do the opposite.

[0] By paying money to stack the organization with a bunch of entities whose only interest was to vote "yes" for the ratification of this standard, natch. IIRC, ISO had to modify their rules again after the OOXML vote because they couldn't get quorum due to those one-issue voters refusing to show up for future business.

> If LibreOffice started from scratch

What do you mean though? Libreoffice wrote their application from scratch, did they not? And they managed to implement a superior serialization format, did they not? And they managed to get that format standardized without bribing and cheating, did they not?

What you're saying is akin to "those residents of banana republics are just frustrated capitalism (and a little help from the CIA) is beating democracy"

> We do need for-profit alternatives to Word

Why does it have to be for profit?

I think this is definitely some weird attempt to justify a terrible piece of technological junk....

For all the hate people gave CSS, it was/is fantastic at its job. Word documents are an example of how you don't design a document, and how when a for profit org designs a thing (instead of standards and market pressures), you get a technological monstrosity...

To be clear, I don't think LibreOffice is great. Part of their issue, they were built as a way to "not pay" for office, and it turns out that no, volunteers don't really do a better job at implementing 1000 pages of nonsense that the people who came up with that spaghetti code in the first place...

We don't need that software anymore, though. If you use it, know we are looking at you like you are pulling out a physical paper phonebook to store your numbers in, or a less hurtfully but just as topically, a record or CD player...it is dinosaur technology that pretty much has no place in todays world...

So, they have a point, I don't disagree with them, however it probably would be better just to "admit defeat", get MS to open source their code for compat reasons, and work on something new that's not trying to write viruses on your computer better than paragraphs...

> LibreOffice team is frustrated that the for-profit model is beating the OSS model

Let's take a look at this "for-profit model" - is it just higher price outweighed by better product? lol:

Microsoft, after getting beat up in the press for making propietary extensions to the Kerberos protocol, has released the specifications on the web -- but in order to get it, you have to run a Windows .exe file which forces you agree to a click-through license agreement where you agree to treat it as a trade secret, before it will give you the .pdf file. Who would have thought that you could publish a trade secret on the web? - https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/kerberos-pacs-and...

Back in 2001, Be, Inc. managed to get BeOS pre-installed on one computer model from Hitachi. Just one. On the entire PC market. Microsoft forced Hitachi to drop the bootloader entry to hide BeOS from customers buying it. They enforced their monopoly over the only possible niche BeOS could find on the PC market, crushing Be, Inc. in the process. - https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_w...

So why aren't there any dual-boot computers for sale? The answer lies in the nature of the relationship Microsoft maintains with hardware vendors. More specifically, in the "Windows License" agreed to by hardware vendors who want to include Windows on the computers they sell. This is not the license you pretend to read and click "I Accept" to when installing Windows. This license is not available online. This is a confidential license, seen only by Microsoft and computer vendors. You and I can't read the license because Microsoft classifies it as a "trade secret." The license specifies that any machine which includes a Microsoft operating system must not also offer a non-Microsoft operating system as a boot option. In other words, a computer that offers to boot into Windows upon startup cannot also offer to boot into BeOS or Linux. The hardware vendor does not get to choose which OSes to install on the machines they sell -- Microsoft does. - https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

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