● 09.16.21

Gemini version available ♊︎

●● Deleted Post: “LibreOffice is Becoming Dominated by a Bunch of Corporates, and Has no Place for the Enthusiastic Amateur.”

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Office Suites at 2:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

> Image: Chris Sherlock

Summary: Chris Sherlock, an insider of LibreOffice, cautions about the direction of this very important and widely used project

The post “How to upset someone” has just been self-censored by Chris Sherlock, but it is important to see what he had to say (prior to the post’s disappearance):

Here is how you upset someone:

- You write a set of unit tests to test the moving of some files into a better directory and a way better name – say for instance renaming ImplDeviceFontList to PhysicalFontFaceCollection - You tell that person that they used the wrong vim modeline, but then you say that you don’t know what a modeline is. But that’s what you do, and to be sure you do it on all the files you have touched to try to reduce the build churn - You order them to add sal/config.h – which is a convention you don’t know about – to source files. So you do this. Again, to reduce build churn you do it to all files you touch. - You add a header, so you regenerate the pch file. - As you are adding sal/config.h, as so ordered, you fix the include guards and use #pragma once

A few other things you can do:

- Advise them to rename a class from PrinterOptions to Options, but then you get blowback because you made that change – on their recommendation. - Tell them they aren’t careful with their patches, even though you spend hours and hours ensuring that they are tested and working as best you can. - Tell them, on numerous occasions, that they way that you reorders the VCL headers wasn’t correct – then remember you had already asked about this and realised that you said it was OK.

You do all of these things because that is what you were told to do in the past. It’s not exactly easy to do this, as a lot of these things aren’t necessarily needed in that patch – but hey, that’s what you were told to do.

Evidently, LO doesn’t want unit tests, and the changes I’m making to try to make the codebase easier to read aren’t needed. To hell with it. LibreOffice is becoming dominated by a bunch of corporates, and has no place for the enthusiastic amateur.

Best of luck to LibreOffice!

This is worth documenting in light of the project selling keynotes, manuals, and adopting a sort of 'dual' approach. It also issued a statement against RMS earlier this year, based on a campaign of slander (and the person who did this was incidentally inside OSI). █

selling keynotes

manuals

adopting a sort of 'dual' approach

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