[conspire] (forw) Re: [Sclug] Fwd: [libreoffice-users] Goodbye to Open Office (maybe?)

[Ross Bernheim]

This is not a hypothetical. A number of years ago when OO was maintained,
I used to follow on the support board. A user in France asked about OO 
opening an older version of MS Word files. Answer was not know, but since
OO was free, it was suggested that the user download and try it. OO did 
indeed open the older file that the current and previous version of MS 
Word would not open. 

Next question was could a script be written to batch convert the older MS
Word files to the current OO file format? Answer was yes. When queried 
about how many files, the user admitted that she worked for a French 
government agency and had bout 4 million public documents written in the
older version of MS Word that Microsoft Word would no longer would read.
Effectively MS held their documents hostage.

So much for trusting your documents to MS.

Ross

> On Sep 3, 2016, at 10:37 AM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hell, I won't install that Office365 crap on any of my machines,
>> even though it is free.
> 
> Yeah, I read about that, and, wow, _scare me_!  Sorry, you expect me to
> pay for access to my data on a subscription basis?  Using only hosted
> Internet-based ('cloud') software under someone else's control that is
> subject to withdrawal at someone else's whim?
> 
> Wow, we thought proprietary software was a bad deal, but this doubles
> down on that by ensuring that you don't even have _binaries_ of the
> software, and rent the ability to run Internet-based software on a
> subscription basis.  Want to be able to continue to read your own files?
> You have to keep ponying up.