[libreoffice-users] fixing as a service ...

Hi Tanstaafl / Florian,

On Thu, 2014-10-02 at 09:50 -0400, Tanstaafl wrote:
> You obviously haven't read this entire thread. Florian is trying to
> extort money from me to fix this major regression.

        So - just to put my oar in here since Collabora was mentioned; I notice
several issues here and some bugs - let me try to address them in order
from my perspective.

        A. I'm pleased that Florian is excited about our L3 bug
           fixing services (so am I) - but I'd -really- prefer people to
           advertise other competent / certified developers; the project
           benefits from a diverse corporate ecosystem; so it is wise to
           link this instead:

          http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/developers/

        B. It is true that there is a sense in which large corporate
           users of LibreOffice capture a lot of benefit and cost saving
           from that - and a great way to contribute back is to help
           fund someone to represent your interests in the development
           community - by writing regression tests for your pet features
           and being present in the discussions.
                + arriving after the fact and complaining doesn't work.

        C. Anything is possible, don't assume that because it is
           'broken' today, it will not be fixed tomorrow. Please don't
           assume that because it is difficult a volunteer won't fix it
           I know volunteers of amazing skill and tenacity nailing
           horrible bugs left/right =)

        D. Complaining doesn't work, contribution does. IMHO LibreOffice
           does not exist to meet your needs, it exists to allow you to
           collaborate constructively with others to meet our needs :-)
           We are a meritocracy, and constructive contribution should
           give you, whomever you are, influence.

        E. Extortion is a pretty silly word to use to describe a
           mismatch of expectations around a bug or two.

        F. A couple of specific bugs:

           Apparently not a regression: around printing
           https://www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=65205

           Input fields re-work:
           https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79877
           I'm confused wrt. this one, we re-worked text fields adding
           MS Office compatible rich, in-line editable fields for
           LibreOffice 3.x - so - perhaps this is another feature ?
           quite possibly we started mapping old fields to new ones
           in the filters more recently but ...
           The underlying feature un-screwed-up millions of business
           users documents, and hugely improved interoperability so ...

> > A regression should be dealt with, and in your case it has, just not 
> > fast enough for you - but that is life.
>
> Yep... and the consequences, in this case, are that my biggest client is
> seriously considering switching to Microsoft office

        I like the fact that you care about that =) so do I - Free Software is
important - I wish it was perfect; we should try to make the project a
fun & constructive one where more people feel like they want to
volunteer their time to make a positive change. Tone helps there.

        Then again, if you really can't get your work done with LibreOffice
(yet), and you prefer to pay a chunk of cash to Microsoft rather than
pay for having LibreOffice tweaked to your taste, then that is entirely
your choice - and the economics of course depend on how many users you
have: if it is just 5x people - then, it's not enough to justify paying
for any debilitating issue to be fixed - of course.

        Finally, I'm curious how Microsoft handles these pop-out vs. inline
fields - they do have file-format support for their legacy fields of
course I just wonder if they try to update them in newer versions [ if
there are no macros / whatever associated with them ].

        Anyhow - hope that helps,

        All the best,

                Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks@collabora.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot


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