Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer

O

ffice 365 and Google Docs Are Not the Solution to IBM Deleting LibreOffice From Red Hat and Fedora.

In fact, Office 365 and Google Docs are not a solution to anything, at all.

IBM’s employees who were trolling people before they deleted the “HyperKitty” discussion claimed that affected users could just go use Microsoft Office 365 or Google Docs.

This is basically the worst thing a person could do.

Why?

Web Applications are fully controlled by whoever runs the server they reside on.

It’s amazingly worse than a non-Free set of binaries on your computer. It’s even worse than non-Free binaries with “product activation”. If you told me 20 years ago that there was going to be something worse than proprietary binaries with a leash, I would have not believed it. But it’s here.

(LibreOffice doesn’t have the product activator leash. It’s Free and Open Source Software and it doesn’t ask anyone’s licensing server if you can run it!)

It’s flat-out stupid to rely on an application that may not even be there tomorrow, or one you could lose access to, for any reason, including “not paying the rent” (which is too damn high).

On the security front, it also means storing your documents on the server of US corporations, which may be illegal to do where you are, and letting them scan your document contents, and share them or leak them without your knowledge, which could not happen if you stored them on something you control from a program on your computer.

Microsoft refers to victims of Azure as “tenants”.

Some of the victims agreed to do their computing there, except for victims of State governments and corrupt corporations.

I cannot do business with my own State government without giving them documents in Microsoft formats. Fortunately, LibreOffice can quack like Microsoft enough to fake my way past the government agencies.

Illinois a very corrupt State (perhaps the worst in all of America) where government contracts have, since forever, gone out to whoever bribes the politicians.

One Governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner, went to prison after the person he shook down for bribes (for a freeway off ramp to a horse betting track) declared it on their income taxes as a cost of doing business with the State.

At various points we’ve had two Governors in prison at the same time. Rod Blagojevich (for attempting to sell Barack Obama’s vacant US Senate seat) and George Ryan (for selling Illinois Commercial Driver’s Licenses to operate 52 foot big rigs anywhere in America and Canada to people who failed the driving test).

There’s plenty more corruption, and as you may imagine, not everyone who takes bribes goes to prison. Chicago is by far the dirtiest place in the entire State, and while Aldermen frequently get pinched, nobody touches the Mayors.

One of the State’s dirty dealings is steering business to Microsoft.

Microsoft benefits when this happens because then all 12.8 million residents in the State have to figure out a way to make something quack like Microsoft Office when it comes time to submit documents.

It’s not only the State. The State exercises full control over ComEd, the electric company, which barfs out Chrome-isms on you when you try to pay your electric bill, with Azure, which has had a horrible track record on security (like most Microsoft products have).

Even when it comes to private industry, there is corruption. When you send documents to FedEx to be printed, they only accept them in Microsoft formats.

I even tried Open Document Format to see if it would work, and it wouldn’t. You basically have three choices. Microsoft Office, PDF, or take a picture of the document as a screenshot and save it to JPEG and hand it to their printer.

All of this is ridiculous, and on top of that, FedEx tries to charge you 68 cents a page now by opting you to the most expensive paper and “Full Color” for Black & White documents. Confusingly, you have to accept this, and then upload the document, and then in the print preview, you select “Black & White” and then “Standard White” paper, which you can only select when it’s Black & White. Removing “Full Color” drops the price to 23 cents per page, then switching to “Standard White” drops it to 21 cents per page.

Then you can get a FedEx Office account number for free (expect a lot of aggressive calls about how they can help your business) and put that in each time you print to drop it to 19 cents per page. That’s a bit better.

Or you can just put it on a flash drive and select the settings at the printer.

I go through this mainly because the cost of owning a printer is worse. (The ink.)

Even if the problem of Microsoft was solved today, by Microsoft going out of business, we’d be dealing with the Microsoft Office mess forever.

Their products are hardly exceptional, so they have gone to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of dirty tricks and public and private corruption to spread Microsoft Office.

The problem has only ever gotten more obscene. Generally, when people had binaries of Microsoft Office on their computer, they didn’t want to pay $100 to update to a version that didn’t do anything they needed. Since Microsoft couldn’t justify (or may not have even been able to enforce it if they could) taking the binaries off your computer, they let you keep them, but they changed the formats, so that as soon as anyone opened and saved them in the new version, everyone else had to upgrade because they would open it up in their version, which may only have been one release old, and they would get broken rendering.

My dad even commented on this behavior in the 1990s, when he worked for Thomson Consumer Electronics. He said they had to update everything to Office 97 (which forced you to install Internet Explorer and destabilize your computer whether you wanted to or not), and I asked why, and he said “Microsoft breaks the files as soon as anyone opens and saves them in the new format, so you have to upgrade everyone and pay for licenses.”.

Then that spilled over, and before you know it there’s so many Office 97 files out there, there’s no avoiding it, then the same thing with every version since then.

The problem was widely known back then, but business managers killing the company, in part by wasting money on Microsoft products (including Windows NT when IRIX workstations would be the obvious choice), didn’t personally suffer from it at the time (although many eventually got canned as the company fell apart…..you don’t need many of these people when you’ve transformed into a patent troll coasting on MP3).

There were competing office suites, but few of them were any good, and even if they were, their compatibility with Microsoft was lacking.

Today, we have an alternative. LibreOffice.

When there finally was an open standard, OASIS OpenDocument, Microsoft sabotaged it.

They bought a “standard” for their competing OOXML format from the ISO (which is corrupt), then they sabotaged the idea of open data formats for the office programs in numerous ways, the major ones being:

1. Broken OOXML filters for older versions of Microsoft Office.



2. Not implementing their own “Standard” for decades and claiming they had a “Transitional” version instead, which naturally kept changing.



3. Implemented ODF, but did so incorrectly, and had Microsoft Office crap out “Microsoftisms” into the format. This way they could continue selling Microsoft Office to governments that mandated ODF.



4. Bribing and paying off corrupt governments to use OOXML so that people like me would have to figure out how to use it even against our will, even though nobody would reimburse us for having to buy products.

It’s #4 that I need LibreOffice for.

I don’t want to use Microsoft Office, and I especially don’t want their shit show for the “Web”, which could disappear or be changed against my will tomorrow.

I refuse to be their pawn and I refuse to pay to do it.

That’s basically why I packed up and left Fedora for openSUSE, which has not orphaned their real office suite and told me I could go use a solution that may not exist at any point in time, and which wouldn’t even leave me with old binaries I could use when it does.

(Microsoft Office 365 and Google Docs. Google kills so many products that people call them the Google Graveyard. If something isn’t making enough money, they take it out and shoot it and if you’ve incorporated it into your workflow, sucks to be you. It’s the same with any corporation.)

The values of using, advocating, and writing open standards and solutions that used to exist at Red Hat has been taken outside and shot by IBM.

It greatly irritates the people working there that haven’t been laid off when you say this, so keep saying this.

If it wasn’t true, it wouldn’t visibly aggravate them.

One of the ways that IBM is screwing its RHEL customers, the Fedora community, and others, is by helping Microsoft “take down” the competition, in this case LibreOffice, and then providing free advertising of Office 365, which is a trap designed to ensnare fools.

People should think carefully if this is the company they want to support. ⬆