Ek-Hou-Van-BraaiEuro-Office, a good fork of highly criticized ONLYOFFICE
I found that someone from Europe just forked ONLYOFFICE.
What are your thoughts on this? What document server do you run/use?
redlemace
m4ylame0wecmCongrats. This is a product for collaboration and web-based, not solo chud.
Cassa
poVoqIt is explained in the readme linked in the OP.
tl;dr: they were using it before, but the codebase is old and hard to maintain and also doesn’t scale well in an online cloud office context.
Personally I have been using both (ONLYOFFICE and Collabora Office), and I can see why people prefer the former, even though for small personal use the latter is also ok.
I have also tried both and ONLYOFFICE was better for my use case. It seems much better maintained.
The Stoned HackerTell me then why it took years for them to add a horizontal rule (literally just a horizontal line). I’m not kidding, it was only added in the last few weeks. How do I know? I commented on the github issue about like 3 or 4 years ago (the issue was already multiple years old) and have been getting notifications every time someone asks for it. And finally like a week or two ago I finally got the notification that it was added.
Libre Office is maintained by The Document Foundation which is based in Germany. So from a governance point of view it’s already a European hosted open source project.
Also for online collaboration platforms, Libre Office isn’t really a good option. It is an old, sprawling codebase which doesn’t lend itself to being ported to being a server based collaborative platform. It has actually been done but hasn’t flourished, hence alternatives like OnlyOffice.
puts “Euro” in name
I will now install your software
My gut reaction too. But their readme/faq makes a lot of sound points. Also Nextcloud is one of the main contributors, so you know it’s serious. Also Proton and Ionos (which I admit I’d never heard of, but they seem big)
statelesz
JensSpahnpastaI’m running Onlyoffice on Ubuntu and it has been nice so far. Great software - so where is this “highly criticized” coming from and should I be concerned? Switch to the fork?
gedaliyahIt’s a Russian project, which some people are suspicious of because Russia has leveraged open source projects for less-than-honest purposes in the past.
It’s managed by a for-profit company to sell their server software, which is generally approached with a big grain of salt in the FOSS community.
They preference OOXML files rather than ODF files by default, which some users (notably the document foundation) consider the more poorly-defined open standard, which benefits Microsoft (who mostly developed the OOXML format). This is some complicated inside baseball and the fork does not seem to be swayed by it—they’ll continue to preference OOXML.
OnlyOffice has contribution practices which are sometimes hostile to the FOSS ethos. The maintainers are not as transparent as most projects, they generally prefer to fix issues in-house rather than collaborate with a broader community on pull requests.
I still use it. Here’s why: I don’t think it’s very good ethics to be suspicious of an entire nationality; the code is open, so what are you afraid of? I guess it’s possible to sneak something malicious into a binary blob, but that borders on paranoia. I’ve personally found the team to be very responsive on issues that I’ve brought up in terms of function and design. When I have brought up issues with the function or design, they have been good partners and been clear in their actions. YMMV
FOSS only thrives because of public-private partnerships; I believe we should reward companies that offer open source code, even when they may not comply with some grand FOSS philosophy. I don’t like purity tests.
OOXML has, for better or worse, become the global document standard. Instead of lamenting it, we should be working to make it the best we can.
Basically, OnlyOffice works for me in a number of ways that LibreOffice doesn’t. I’m not interested in server-based document sharing, but I am interested in good design and mobile support. This fork is only focused on the server software, so I won’t be switching at this time.
ODF is the future, OOXML is the past - TDF Community Blog
Whenever a user, a government, a school or a business chooses the format in which to store and exchange its digital documents, it is not merely making a technical decision, but is placing a bet on the kind of digital infrastructure on which it will depend in the future. In this sense, ODF and OOXML are not two equivalent options on the same shelf, but two radically different solutions: one geared towards a future of openness, interoperability and digital sovereignty, and the other towards a past of defending a vendor’s dominant market position through user lock-in. ODF: designed to be open and transparent Open Document Format was conceived from the outset to be an open standard. It was designed and developed by the community under the auspices of OASIS, and subsequently ratified by ISO, to be implemented by anyone, on any platform, without royalties, without hidden dependencies and without the permission of any single company. These are not trivial technical details, but a statement of political and economic strategy embedded within the format itself. ODF is based on a clean XML schema, easy to read even by non-technical users and reusable. Colour naming follows standard web conventions, and its architecture
Good business move, OnlyFans. You have me impressed.