Hacker News Reader

Comment by _sh | Hacker News Reader

Who's this 'we'? I already use Open Office and, for my needs, it is already 10x better than the alternative used at work. Better because (in Writer) bulleted lists are consistent, and it's easier to manage styles.

Having said that, I'll probably not reject your email attachment, instead I'll just make my edits and send it back to you as an Open Document.

As a side note, why do so many people assume everyone else is a stereotype? When people are complaining about their specific needs, all I hear is "All people want to do is...", and "I don't care about XYZ, it should 'just work' the specific way I want it to because that's all people want", and my all-time favourite, "Joe Six-pack just wants XYZ". I've never met anybody with the surname "Six-pack".

View on HN

I think OP's generalization that most average technology users don't care one iota about the openness of their tech so long as it 'works' is dead on.

Have you honestly had a different experience with non-expert users?

Yes I have a different experience, the non-expert users I deal with struggle on with systems that clearly don't 'work' either by ignorance of alternatives or worse because they are locked-in.

This is probably in part because they keep choosing systems that aren't "open" and then having their short-term stupidity exploited. Which is understandable, as they're not claiming to be technology experts.

Look at all the complaints in this thread: "I'm worried my documents won't look right in the convicted monopolist's de-facto standard office app with it's closed, undocumented, virus propogating, privacy leaking, and generally frankly atrocious memory dump-based .doc file format. And it's all OpenOffice's fault so don't bother promoting open and documented file formats, hippy!"

Why isn't "I'm worried my documents won't look right" a legitimate concern? You're talking about something that has a very real effect on people's lives and you're trying to dismiss it because Microsoft Office exists.

Word definitely has problems of its own, but dismissing concerns about how a document will look to the other 90% of people out there is missing the point.

It's an entirely legitimate concern. But the fault that causes this worry is fundamentally a lack of openess. The solution is to promote openness. To be exact, if the document format was open then there wouldn't be a problem, or at least many orders of magnitude less of a problem.

End users shouldn't have to worry about this because the techies should have figured it out for them. Not only have we failed, there's a bunch of comments here that show that we (techies, as a class) don't even understand the problem.

By the same token, one could ask why the FSF always assume anyone cares about their militant brand of open source.

Maybe because they made what we call "Linux" possible in the first place? (In case you don't remember, GNU pre-dates Linux. The kernel was just the last missing part.)

What about BSD? There are alternatives out there that doesn't require GNU.

Besides the kernel, BSD systems aren't entirely GNU free. (They use at least gcc.) You could change the kernel, but replacing GNU is harder. When LLVM and the related projects are ready, that will be another story.

Sorry s/anyone/everyone/

I give "Joe Six-Pack" arguments some credence since sometimes I am Joe Six-Pack. In term of Open Office that's usually, I don't care why the formatting is bungled I just want to be able to read copy and paste my specs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com