Hacker News Reader

Comment by hbbio | Hacker News Reader

OnlyOffice is better than LibreOffice for people who want a more direct alternative to Microsoft Office

https://www.onlyoffice.com/

(it's AGPL... there is an ongoing dispute with a fork now)

The fork is called EuroOffice and will be released next month. Onlyoffice is from Russian developers and includes binary blobs, it's not fully open source.

What blobs?

I dug a bit deeper after you asked because "compiled or obfuscated code blobs" was the wording from EuroOffice. It doesn't seem like they shipped binary objects hidden inside the editor source tree after a quick glance.

I guess they used "binary blobs" in the broad FOSS-maintainer sense, e.g. bundled third-party assets, fonts, generated/minified JavaScript in sdkjs, and possibly precompiled mobile components...

However, onlyoffice removed their mobile editor repo from Github a few days ago, and EuroOffice has been particularly critical of the mobile apps, claiming they contained proprietary sections. So if there is a concrete concern behind the "binary blobs" accusation, the mobile side seems like the most likely place it was directed at.

It feels a bit like a mudslinging match right now and you were completely right to question the claim :-)

This is what I saw in their site. Thanks for taking the time to double check. Given the anti-Russian propaganda I am very suspicious. I mostly use Libeoffice + ODT or Latex, but occasionally a researcher shares a docx for review. This where Onlyoffice shines.

Russian developers, really ? Thanks for mentioning, I will download it and try it out, because there is nothing wrong with anything that is originated in Russia or made by Russian people.

I tried it just a few days ago, and I can't recommend OnlyOffice. Well, I am not an MS Word user, but I think even MS Word, at least the desktop apps, used to support styles better. What I mean is naming and defining various types of styles, paragraph styles, character styles, table styles, etc. OnlyOffice basically has no character styles that work properly. What you can find online about how to do character styles are hacks for using paragraph styles in such a way that they become character styles. But they are still mixed up with paragraph styles at the top style selection bar thingy. Of course this is an area where LO excels, above and beyond MS products. But I have come to expect what LO can do in terms of styles as the baseline. If a word processor can't even give me those style type choices, it is a child's toy, for writing actually well made documents.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com