I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available.
That said, my eyes crossed trying to read this. Do I need to ask an LLM to read the various messages and tell me what’s going on? ;-)
there's sqlite db browser, but not much challenger in this space because it either gets turned to a saas (notion, airtable) or is a niche dev tool.
OnlyOffice also seems to have a lack of clarity in regards to the ownership of the org (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47100599) but in general I think they're in the right here - you can't just ignore parts of a software license selectively because you feel like it. Oh and I liked their software when I did try it out, except LibreOffice seems like a slightly safer bet (though I'm also not as sensitive to the way its UI is).
If I need something for a business that I’m going to depend on I’m just gonna give Microsoft ten bucks a month, hate to say it. Office is really better than any of these options by a long shot. I also find the Google suite to be really good and free as in beer.
After having used MS Office for a while, I have to admit that LibreOffice just feels more pleasant to me, when I don't need exact MS compatibility - the UI is customizable, Calc doesn't mess up CSV files when I open them, Writer also has most of the features you need and exporting PDF files is nice and has none of that OneDrive bullshit with them almost trying to hide your local file system as some secondary target.
That said, in some hardware configurations LibreOffice has slow and laggy rendering (you have to mess around with rendering settings, hardware acceleration and Skia and so on), some features like bibliography have broken on me in odd ways, and Impress can be a bit slow for larger presentations. OnlyOffice feels like it has more polish in regards to how approachable the UI/UX might be to a MS user, but feature wise isn't that far off.
I personally wouldn't reach for MS Office unless I wanted it as a part of their overall groupware - mail, Teams, AD and a bunch of other integrated stuff (though aside from AD, most other things feel a bit jank, like the new Outlook or Teams in general when compared to Slack).
For a successful fork you need a notable amount of people engaging in the fork.
I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.
I’m not going to hold my breath.
The main reasons are:
1) ... so my muscle memory work. (In some editor Ctrl+Y is redo, in others no, I never remember in which editors, I hate when it doesn't work.)
2) ... so I can exchange files with coworkers, and they will see exactly what I wrote (I recently received an email with a draft and I complained about a missing ≥. It actually was there was the visor in Gmail was not showing it.)
Organizations choose Office because it:
1. enables interoperability with other organizations
2. has a commercial throat to choke
3. has an existing pipeline of workers trained on it
4. has a deep feature set for edge-case power-users
5. integrates with other products and services that their customers want
Every institutional office-migration project runs into these issues -- they're solvable, but damn if OSS advocates stopped pretending they didn't exist, they might actually fix them. LibreOffice/TDF is the closest anyone has gotten thus far in this regard.
One day, as much as I am aware, the entire national phone company of Brazil switched to using MSFT Office only, by decree from upper management. Why? much later, some correspondence between upper management / C-Suite at the company, and Brazilian attorneys hired by MSFT to negotiate, showed large, opaque payments, long-term discounts, and added support services, in exchange for changing to ONLY MSFT Office products. The change did in fact happen.
Use your own brain and understand that MSFT has able legal and business teams, hired in the target country, that have large incentives based on closing sales. Those sales are closed using negotiation language and incentives that are appealing to the C-Suite and their banking and legal partners, period.
I do not see this reality reflected in the too-neat summary of drivers there.
"Build it and they will come" is a falsehood proven over-and-over by a long history of dead startups who died before they ever figured out how find market fit. It doesn't matter how good your software is, if you don't convince people to use it, you won't have users.
Look at Red Hat, GitLab, etc for examples of how to make OSS successful.
Apache OOo is dumped by Oracle and since then didn't receive much love.
I think a free open source suite will always exist. But probably slow down if existing open source solutions handicap progress for whatever the reason(s).
They should focus on making the office suite much more useful and powerful and wide-spread. Like ffmpg+mpv!