alt Hacker News> the charter of projects like LibreOffice are fundamentally broken—they're aiming to replace Microsoft Office by cloning it, but Microsoft Office itself is part of a busted paradigm
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24759573>
> The LibreOffice project's imprimatur should be to stop existing[…] The editing paradigm perpetuated by the legacy of MS Office is a dead end.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23795918>
I'll amend my previous position and say that the charter should be to (a) as much as possible change the menu and dialog structure to match whatever the last "good" version of the Microsoft Office UI was, but still ultimately focus on (b) doing everything I said in those other comments.
I don't know about paradigms and stuff, but I do know that office productivity apps - document writer, spreadsheet, presentation and the others - put together are the second most used 'app' on a PC/laptop after a browser. And that's probably true for just the document writer alone.
I'm a big fan of plaintext (and things like Markdown). But I don't buy the argument that "plain text over the web is the future" or that that combination can or should supplant office.
Also remember that LibreOffice started before Microsoft Office even existed: as StarWriter in the mid-1980s. Yes, there has been a lot of borrowing between computer apps in this domain (and let's also not forget WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 etc.); and I am even willing to entertain the possibility that in 40 years' time we will all be doing something completely different. I mean, I still think people will be writing letters and CVs and reports but maybe the apps would be very different. Anyway, until that time, we need a decent office app, with support for the world's many written languages and their quirks, without spying on users, with multi-platform support, with a decent license etc. - and LibreOffice is that.