On 11/25/2012 05:27 PM, Girvin R. Herr wrote:
Tom Davies wrote:Hi :)It's interesting that there has been almost no posts about articles such as this one. https://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/660608-libreoffice-a-continuing-tale-of-foss-successThere are some interesting stats that are very well presented in there and it's worth using to spread the word of how LibreOffice works.For me one of the key things that no article seems to mention is that while many hefty companies are vanishing seemingly overnight it seems somewhat dangerous to rely on just one. It would be like not making back-ups of critical information!! If we can bear to think of LO and AOO as being similar enough that users can migrate from one to the other fairly easily and thus as being 2 prioducts supported by 1 community then that community is massive. Taken as being 1 product it is so robust that even if 1 or 2 companoes the size of IBM or Google (or RedHat or SUSE) were to simply vanish overnight then there would still be a good product out there. By sticking with MS people are risking everything they have by being so heavily dependant on just 1 company and that company is losing market share to mobile devices. Perhaps Win8 might help them recover the OS battle but it might not.Regards fromTom :)Greetings,My primary goal is to reduce, or preferably eliminate, risk to my data. I learned the hard way many years ago that depending on M$ and other proprietary software suppliers was way too risky. I then decided to switch to Open Source software and take back control of my computer. I have never regretted that decision. Even if LO/AOO go away, there are still other applications, such as Koffice, that will still allow me to read/maintain my documents & data. And, if it comes down to it, I can always unzip my LO/OO files and get the data from the file(s) inside. That allows me to sleep at night.Girvin Herr
+1I prefer the FOSS / open formats model better for the reasons you noted.
From a general user perspective; open formats are probably moreimportant for long term accessibility. Most long term users can remember proprietary formats for software that were very popular 15+ years ago that are unreadable by any software in current release. To make matters worse you may even have files you would like to read in these formats. You may find a conversion software that claims to accurately convert the obsolete format to a currently used format - I can not vouch for anyone's claims.
The problem with any proprietary format is whether someone will continue to provide software that can edit it in the future or will it eventually become an orphan. Amipro and Wordstar come to mind and I am sure others can be named.
-- Jay Lozier jslozier@gmail.com -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+help@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted