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Asynchrony is not concurrency

https://kristoff.it/blog/asynchrony-is-not-concurrency/
97•kristoff_it•2h ago•64 comments

Trying to send a sticker in Steam Chat burned through a month of mobile data

https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1m000kp/trying_to_send_a_sticker_in_steam_chat_burned/
56•danso•2h ago•31 comments

Multiplatform Matrix Multiplication Kernels

https://burn.dev/blog/sota-multiplatform-matmul/
31•homarp•2h ago•2 comments

lsr: ls with io_uring

https://rockorager.dev/log/lsr-ls-but-with-io-uring/
276•mpweiher•9h ago•148 comments

Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

https://github.com/bitnami/charts/issues/35164
38•mmoogle•2h ago•13 comments

AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics

https://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-ate-the-economy/
133•throw0101c•2h ago•136 comments

Silence Is a Commons by Ivan Illich (1983)

http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1983_silence_commons.html
10•entaloneralie•46m ago•0 comments

Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with a VIC-20, an Abacus, and a Dog

https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237
50•teddyh•2h ago•11 comments

Wii U SDBoot1 Exploit “paid the beak”

https://consolebytes.com/wii-u-sdboot1-exploit-paid-the-beak/
11•sjuut•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: I built library management app for those who outgrew spreadsheets

https://www.librari.io/
34•hmkoyan•2h ago•20 comments

Trying Guix: A Nixer's impressions

https://tazj.in/blog/trying-guix
118•todsacerdoti•3d ago•32 comments

Show HN: Molab, a cloud-hosted Marimo notebook workspace

https://molab.marimo.io/notebooks
23•akshayka•3h ago•2 comments

Mango Health (YC W24) Is Hiring

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mango-health/jobs/3bjIHus-founding-engineer
1•zachgitt•3h ago

The year of peak might and magic

https://www.filfre.net/2025/07/the-year-of-peak-might-and-magic/
50•cybersoyuz•4h ago•22 comments

How I keep up with AI progress

https://blog.nilenso.com/blog/2025/06/23/how-i-keep-up-with-ai-progress/
132•itzlambda•3h ago•77 comments

CP/M creator Gary Kildall's memoirs released as free download

https://spectrum.ieee.org/cpm-creator-gary-kildalls-memoirs-released-as-free-download
219•rbanffy•11h ago•110 comments

Cancer DNA is detectable in blood years before diagnosis

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cancer-tumor-dna-blood-test-screening
116•bookofjoe•3h ago•65 comments

Evolution Mail Users Easily Trackable Part 2

https://www.grepular.com/Evolution%20Mail%20Users%20Easily%20Trackable%20Part%202
20•zdw•2h ago•2 comments

Show HN: Simulating autonomous drone formations

https://github.com/sushrut141/ketu
5•wanderinglight•3d ago•0 comments

A New Geometry for Einstein's Theory of Relativity

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-geometry-for-einsteins-theory-of-relativity-20250716/
50•jandrewrogers•6h ago•0 comments

Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/exhausted-man-defeats-ai-model-in-world-coding-championship/
37•hassanahmad•1h ago•25 comments

Benben: An audio player for the terminal, written in Common Lisp

https://chiselapp.com/user/MistressRemilia/repository/benben/home
32•trocado•3d ago•2 comments

Making a StringBuffer in C, and questioning my sanity

https://briandouglas.ie/string-buffer-c/
17•coneonthefloor•3d ago•3 comments

Third patient dies from acute liver failure caused by a Sarepta gene therapy

https://www.biocentury.com/article/656520/third-death-from-a-sarepta-gene-therapy
131•randycupertino•3h ago•45 comments

How to Get Foreign Keys Horribly Wrong

https://hakibenita.com/django-foreign-keys
42•Bogdanp•3d ago•15 comments

Section 174 is reversed, mostly

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-section-174-is-reversed
111•jawns•3h ago•53 comments

Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

https://100r.co/site/home.html
205•0xCaponte•4d ago•56 comments

I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

137•proberts•7h ago•232 comments

Hush: Holistic Panoramic 3D Scene Understanding Using Spherical Harmonics

https://vision3d-lab.github.io/hush/
6•PaulHoule•1h ago•0 comments

When root meets immutable: OpenBSD chflags vs. log tampering

https://rsadowski.de/posts/2025/openbsd-immutable-system-logs/
124•todsacerdoti•13h ago•41 comments
Open in hackernews

LibreOffice slams Microsoft for locking in Office users w/ complex file formats

https://www.neowin.net/news/libreoffice-calls-out-microsoft-for-using-complex-file-formats-to-lock-in-office-users/
133•bundie•5h ago

Comments

kazinator•4h ago
Microsoft doesn't lock in people.

People lock in people.

majorchord•4h ago
You might not be wrong, but yelling at people for accepting conveniences that most don't even understand or care about, seems a bit pointless to me. Why even stop at document formats? Why not outrage over their choice of Windows itself?

What good do you think this does? I'm genuinely curious.

tracker1•4h ago
Well, according to StatsCounter, Linux now accounts for 5% of desktop users. :-)

ChromeOS another 2.7% and macOS around 24%.

edit: If I were to guess, Valve/Steam is solely responsible for at least 1 of those 5%.

kazinator•3h ago
> Why not outrage over their choice of Windows itself?

Because it doesn't necessarily affect anyone. Using Windows ipso facto doesn't mean you will send someone a file they can't read without a Microsoft program.

I have two Windows machines in my home; they have LibreOffice on them, as well as Firefox.

ranger_danger•1h ago
No, but I think the people most likely to be oblivious to all this, will be the ones using Microsoft programs that write in proprietary formats by default... and I would say they're not even wrong if that's what most other people use too.

People send me Outlook messages all the time that I can't read at all, and many Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations with features that aren't supported in anything on Linux. I literally have to use a Windows VM with proper Office to read this stuff. And not only work documents, but documents from my children's school/teachers as well.

PaulKeeble•4h ago
Its been Microsoft's strategy since its formation to make a lot of proprietary technology when it moves into any space and do so in a way that locks customers in such that if and when it is no longer the top product the customers can't easily leave. They do this in every single product and market they operate in. Where they can't ultimately win they buy their competitor and integrate the product then slowly kill it.
BizarroLand•2h ago
Gates never even made DOS. He bought it from someone else and rebranded it. He's been a con man since day 1.
edm0nd•2h ago
Still the only big tech CEO who can jump over a chair tho
loloquwowndueo•2h ago
But I bet he can’t throw them the way monkey boy Ballmer did.
ASalazarMX•2h ago
New business idea: selling small luxury chairs to big tech CEOs. Subscription service, if they don't pay a million per month, they lose their license to jump over their chair.
psunavy03•2h ago
. . . being a savvy businessman is a con man? There's loads to criticize about MS in the 80s and 90s, but buying DOS fair and square and then building an ecosystem around it was just a good business move. The stuff they got sued and almost broken up over is the sketchy part.
coliveira•1h ago
The point that he's a con man is that he signed a document with IBM to supply an OS when he had none. Of course in retrospect he was "smart" to go around and buy one, but in fact he was promising IBM something he didn't have and in an alternate universe he could be sued for that.
pletnes•1h ago
If I order a new car, it may well not exist yet. The deal is that there will be a car on hand at some agreed upon date. I don’t think Gates did anything more illegal than the analogous car deal. More risky, perhaps, but that’s another thing entirely!
BizarroLand•37m ago
IF you order a car from an unknown company, you might get lucky and it turn out to be Lamborghini in 1963 but it also might turn out to be Aptera Motors in 2004.
coliveira•2h ago
It is important to remind people of this, because they imagine that MS is integrating open source projects like git, linux, and others for the goodness of their heart. It's well know that this is just step 1 of embrace, extend, and extinguish. Next step (underway) is to add many features that will work only under the MS ecosystem and finally declare those original tools as legacy that should not be allowed in corporations.
madeofpalk•1h ago
I don't think anyone is under the impression that Microsoft is integrating with projects like git or linux out of the goodness of their heart. They do it for the exact same reason anyone does - thats were users/customers are, and they want to make money from them. This isn't some evil conspiracy, it's just normal boring ways to build products for people.
coliveira•1h ago
> just normal boring ways to build products

Microsoft is never looking for normal, boring ways to build products. A software company does't get much ahead thinking like this. They're using their old and successful strategy of embracing, extending, and extinguishing.

HPsquared•1h ago
A little from column A, a little from column B.
strongpigeon•2h ago
Honestly, having worked on Excel at Microsoft (though pretty far from the file format and a long time after OOXML was introduced), I'm pretty sure that the structure of OOXML is convoluted because it was easier to align with the data structures used by the app.
piker•1h ago
My take as an interested third party as well.
zerr•3h ago
Isn't it the same for PDF format spec?
atakan_gurkan•3h ago
No. There are hundreds of programs that easily read and create PDFs. OTOH, reading .docx is a pain. Far be it from me to defend Adobe, but PDF is nothing like MS Office formats.
jahewson•3h ago
Ooh that’s not fair. Many PDFs don’t conform to the spec and how Acrobat processes them is completely undocumented.
troupo•2h ago
It was funny for a few years when Apple just released Preview, and it rendered many PDFs better than Adobe's own Acrobat
Synaesthesia•1h ago
Yeah it's a great app, one of the big reasons I still use MacOS - but there's certain features which you still need Adobe Acrobat for, I know to fill in the tax forms for my country you do.
cogman10•3h ago
The PDF spec is well designed to be both very expandable and easily readable.

It's absolutely horrible to try and edit.

That's because the structure of a PDF is essentially a bunch of media "streams". It's very easy to say "render a jpeg at this location on the page" but that's about it. It doesn't store, for example, the fact that you might need to wrap words around a page. Instead, it's "Here's a box with text in it".

The only thing that really could make PDF rendering hard is adobe put a whole bunch of garbage into the spec. For example, the full spec had the ability to run javascript and flash at one point (not sure if it does anymore).

mook•2h ago
JavaScript must still be there, because I think that's how form validation works? Don't recall Flash ever being there though.
stop50•1h ago
It was acrobat reader, but not in the standard. For some time only the reader was needed and not the player.
izacus•3h ago
No, that spec is outright nice if you consider the PCs it was made for.
gigel82•3h ago
I doubt this one is explicit "locking in", as much as it's reflecting the increasing internal complexity and lack of focus on product quality. I'd be willing to bet the internal teams dread working with the overly complex structures too.
delusional•2h ago
At this point I doubt Microsoft could even execute on a "lock in" strategy anymore.
vanderZwan•3h ago
Hasn't this always been an argument against it? I remember hearing the same arguments when we tried to get the EU to ditch OpenXML over a decade ago al least.

[0] https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...

rtollert•3h ago
Original blog post by LibreOffice is here: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/07/18/artifici...

I mean… sure? When I saw this headline I was imagining that Microsoft added a brand-new ultracomplicated format. But no, the article is solely about OOXML. Why is the blog post re-litigating a fight that LibreOffice already fought almost 20 years ago?

like_any_other•1h ago
Those who forget the past..?
fsflover•1h ago
Because it still matterts today?
OnionBlender•3h ago
Why does the title say "slams" but neither the headline or URL contain "slams"? I think anything that says slams is not worth reading.
extrememacaroni•3h ago
I don't think microsoft could feel a slam from anyone tbh, much less libreoffice.
Ukv•3h ago
Saving 4 characters (over "calls out") to fit within the HN submission title length limit, I'd assume.
jollyllama•3h ago
Headlinese
betterhealth12•1h ago
it's ridiculous, clearly to get eyeballs. there should be a clickbait label on such titles
WillAdams•3h ago
I'd really like to see an office suite which uses .md and .csv where possible.

Mostly I use LyX and pyspread which are close/open enough.

eviks•2h ago
These are too primitive for an office suite
prmoustache•35m ago
> I'd really like to see an office suite which uses .md

It is called pandoc and a text editor.

jahewson•2h ago
I didn’t realise we’d entered a time machine to 2007. I’ve worked extensively with OOXML and yes, the documentation is cryptic and often absent, but Microsoft will help you out if you contact them on their forums. I see Libre Office devs there all the time!

But the complexity is not some kind of conspiracy - it’s inherent - it comes from the fact that Office is ancient and very, very complex with a huge number of features. Many features are implemented in backwards compatible way on top of the old version of similar features and then the whole thing has been back ported from a bunch of C structure to XML which has the most woeful and underpowered schema language imaginable.

troupo•2h ago
> it comes from the fact that Office is ancient and very, very complex with a huge number of features.

IIRC one of the many unfortunate decisions made by MS with OOXML (whether intentionally, or not, or both) is to codify a lot of display and formatting quirks directly in the schema with very little explanation or docs. Instead of making it s different namespace or layer.

So, to implement OOXML, you also needed to reverse engineer, say, behavior of Word97 etc.

firesteelrain•2h ago
It’s not just the complex XML based format. Word has collaboration tie-in’s with Skype, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive etc

It’s an entire ecosystem

Also, I have tried to use LibreOffice and you have to learn an entirely new tool. The user interfaces are different. Word has its own issues of course but LibreOffice does not feel as polished

There are things in Word that are legacy and carry overs from another time that carry various nuance. It’s not all documented set of features either

Trying to replicate the entire look and feel is incredibly difficult

Most people are going to encounter Word in a corporate setting and to have them switch to another tool is going to a big hill to climb

trelane•2h ago
If LibreOffice were smart, they'd introduce free licensing for schools and universities, so the students could learn it and then ask for it when they get to jobs later on.

Maybe they could even release the source under a copyleft license, so the students can learn from it and maybe contribute.

piker•2h ago
LibreOffice is free and GPL.
trelane•2h ago
That's the joke, yes. Though it's MPL, not GPL: https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/licenses
piker•1h ago
Woosh!
jasonjayr•2h ago
At one point LibreOffice + MS Office were pretty much on par with each other.

But MS has built this giant moat of integrated proprietary services around these systems that make it difficult to switch away once you are sucked into the environment.

It takes a pretty sizable expense to switch to anything else, while satisfying all of a companies different workflows for various roles and levels of experience.

If not MS Office + it's M365 Eco system, what then? Google Workspace? That's kinda the same problem in a different color?

firesteelrain•2h ago
Google tried to get kids hooked in school and it’s decent. But when you want to do serious work, you need to use Microsoft products. Google’s product is like a toy
trelane•2h ago
Most serious users can use things other than Microsoft just fine. The problem is file compatibility. Unfortunately, network effects are very much a thing. Plus most users just don't realize they don't actually have to keep shovelling money at Microsoft.
eddythompson80•1h ago
I don't know much about advanced Google Docs, but I know that's the far from true for Google Sheets. Google Sheets covers a shit ton of ground that Excel covers, but a serious user can never replace Excel with Sheets.

We had a lot of marketing and sales people who wanted to use Google Sheets instead of Excel to load sales reports from a shared PG database. This is of course a built-in feature (loading a PG table as a sheet) in Excel. Google Sheets obviously doesn't support any imports. They are all paid plugins, and they all make you pay per row or cell or column.

You can write a plugin to do it, except their funky AppScript (which is a custom synchronous Javascript/V8 environment where there is no async or callbacks, and promises block.

Except, the plugin can only connect to MySQL. PG support ask has been open since 2011. They decided in 2014 that they don't plan to support PG. Then in 2018 they thought maybe they can only support GCP Postgres.[1]

Ok, fine. You make your own API to call and load data. No, you can't return more than 50 MBs. So better split your query.

Oh, you want to load a 50MB CSV? There are 3 different APIs for that:

- "Import from GDrive". This is the one you want. Import 50MB in a couple of seconds. But it also requires the most permissions to full access the user's GDrive

- "Basic Import API". This imports at ~100kbps but not always. gets slower for large data

- "Advanced Import API". This imports at ~250kbps but not always. gets slower for small data

and you need to run your own benchmarks[2][3] to understand which API to use in which context, then keep reruning them as things change.

[1]: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36752790?pli=1

[2]: https://gist.github.com/tanaikech/d102c9600ba12a162c667287d2...

[3]: https://gist.github.com/tanaikech/030203c695b308606041587e6d...

prmoustache•38m ago
> but a serious user can never replace Excel with Sheets.

This doesn't mean anything.

eddythompson80•35m ago
If you repeat it long enough, it'll be true.
otikik•1h ago
I have the opposite opinion. If I have something that I don’t care if it’s irrecoverable 5 years from now, or I don’t care that it prints differently on each printer, MS Office can fit the bill.

I collaborate with others, a lot, though. Google is simply better at that

freeopinion•2h ago
I have met very few non-techies that could tell the difference between Word and Wordpad or use them any differently.

Most people below the age of 30 can switch between Google Docs or Word without blinking. They don't use more than a few of the features of either.

This "big hill" you mention is a fantasy.

trelane•2h ago
You're right for home users. In businesses, the hill is also that some users are power users that have locked themselves in, in slightly different ways between the different power users. Also the company has also locked itself in by drinking deeply from the Microsoft well (e.g. AD and sharepoint and Windows etc) and marketing away will cost them a lot of time and effort, and therefore money.
freeopinion•1h ago
My comment was focused on Word. There is definitely a lot of lock-in for the larger MS ecosystem in business. But that is the nature of large bureaucracies. They struggle to switch between UPS and FedEx, or between Staples and OfficeDepot. Switching away from the MS ecosystem is significantly harder than that.
ghaff•1h ago
If the lawyers and the financial analysts need Windows Office for certain uses let them use them. But I'd note that the first edition of a book I wrote a while back had a Sharepoint workflow and had moved away by the second edition.

The licensing/support is cheaper carries some weight. But Windows to Linux mostly didn't win a lot of fights on the desktop. But Google Docs for collaboration and general simplicity does win over a lot of companies.

SoftTalker•2h ago
> I have tried to use LibreOffice and you have to learn an entirely new tool.

I use word processors so rarely that every time it's like learning a new tool. Whether it's Word, Google Doc, LibreOffice, or anything else.

I will say that Google Docs and Word both feel a bit more "polished" than LibreOffice which still feels very distinctly like a 1990's era desktop program. I guess because it is.

ghaff•2h ago
Latterly, I worked at a predominantly open source company that switched from LibreOffice to Google Docs over the screams of many. It was a night and day improvement both in terms of the software itself and the ability to collaborate.
jajuuka•1h ago
LibreOffice very much took cues from the old Office setup. While alternatives like OnlyOffice took cues from the current Office setup.
prmoustache•39m ago
Libreoffice was formerly openoffice which was formerly staroffice, an office suite that has its deepest origin in Starwriter, a word processor for the Zilog Z80 released in 1985.
Pooge•2h ago
I know about the lack of tech-savvyness of most humans, but isn't Markdown and Pandoc—if you slam a GUI in front of it—covering the needs of 99% of users?

Granted, when you need formatting, like for a formal letter, you use a template someone made but this is not what most people use Word for.

And don't get me started on "people wouldn't understand how to put things in bold or italics"; they can barely use Word anyway. Might as well use something much simpler. Office "productivity" suites are over to me.

n8cpdx•2h ago
If you have such little regard for formatting that markdown suffices, you also don’t care about the difficult edge cases of docx.
carlosjobim•2h ago
WordPad, Notepad, or TextEdit is already included on the computer and perfectly fine for most writing and printed communication.
thangalin•2h ago
* https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9...

Here are some of my Markdown documents:

* https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf (99% pure)

* https://pdfhost.io/v/4FeAGGasj_SepiSolar_Highlevel_Software_...

* https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdow...

A lot is possible with Markdown, especially with pandoc extensions.

cahaya•2h ago
I can confirm. When trying convert simple Word sentences and tables to e.g. Markdown/HTML from a Word XML you need a PhD in XML edge cases and nested garbage.
paulbjensen•2h ago
I wonder if this tool by MSFT is able to handle that:

https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown

I was amazed when I realised that Word docs were just zip files and you could poke around in the xml files embedded inside of them.

I almost implemented a working React -> Word document renderer back in 2017, but it didn't have support for creating the xml tags with : inside of them (which OOXML documents use).

strongpigeon•1h ago
Technically, they're a bit more than just zip files (they're OPC containers [0]), but if you're hand editing the file content it doesn't really matter.

[0] Open Package Convention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Packaging_Conventions

favorited•1h ago
Even though markitdown is a Microsoft project, it's just a thin wrapper around a bunch of 3rd party Python packages. For example, to go from docx to Markdown, it uses mammoth to convert docx to HTML[0], then uses markdownify to convert the HTML into Markdown[1].

[0]https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/da7bcea527ed04c... [1]https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/da7bcea527ed04c...

superjan•2h ago
Well, it is not pretty to see how the sausage gets made, but extracting formatted text from docx is absolutely doable, no PhD involved. Source: I have done it as a little sidequest because it was useful to audit a set of word documents.
AtNightWeCode•2h ago
It is a plague across the whole industry. The format in this case is highly influenced by how one corp designed their own products. Multiple document formats have this problem. But you can also find the exact same thing in PCI DSS and other standards. Like, one corp designed a tool to scan for a certain flaw and suddenly it is mandatory. Just ridiculous.
eviks•2h ago
Meanwhile, has a better modern featureful extensible rich text format been invented?
prmoustache•34m ago
asciidoc and html?
pseudosavant•2h ago
How did this make the HN homepage? There isn't even any news here. It is an argument about ~20-year-old XML file formats, at a time when file formats couldn't matter less?

On top of that, Office supports OpenDocument formats, just like LibreOffice supports Office formats.

Also, IME the Office XML file format is far better supported by third parties - countless apps read/write them. I have multiple apps installed that can read/write an Office file, but MS Office is the only app on my machine that opens OpenDocument.

jajuuka•1h ago
Yeah this is basically just an ad for LibreOffice. To be complaining about XML in Office in 2025 is wild.
magicalhippo•1h ago
Microsoft Office isn't even compatible with itself, deapite its bespoke file format. For example formulas in Excel not being portable between different languages.
fsflover•1h ago
This is an old problem that is still harming the user freedom and hinders the adoption of LibreOffice today, due to Microsoft's anti-competitive practices. Are you saying it's not worth discussing?
piker•2h ago
I feel qualified to opine on this as both a former power user of Word and someone building a word processor for lawyers from scratch[1]. I've spent hours pouring over both the .doc and OOXML specs and implementing them. There's a pretty obvious journey visible in those specs from 1984 when computers were under powered with RAM rounding to zero through the 00's when XML was the hot idea to today when MSFT wants everyone on the cloud for life.

Unlike say an IDE or generic text editor where developers are excited to work on and dogfood the product via self-hosting, word processors are kind of boring and require separate testing/QA.

MSFT has the deep pockets to fund that development and testing/QA. LibreOffice doesn't.

The business model is just screaming that GPL'd LibreOffice is toast.

[1] Plug: https://tritium.legal

fractallyte•1h ago
*poring over

Lawyers also tend to pore a lot, so it's worth getting the word right! ;-)

piker•1h ago
TIL
gchamonlive•48m ago
There are non-native English speaking lawyers in the world afaik
gus_massa•1h ago
There is an old post by Joel Spolsky that worked as PM in Excel a looong time ago, and he agree with you: "Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)" https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros... (HN discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12471604 (393 points | Sept 2016 | 229 comments) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=118909 (60 points | Feb 2008 | 20 comments))
eikenberry•45m ago
> The business model is just screaming that GPL'd LibreOffice is toast.

Only if Word formats remain dominant. There might be hope with the EU moving off Word that an alternative, real standard might take root.

wizzwizz4•1m ago
Microsoft may have the deep pockets, but there are Word documents that LibreOffice opens correctly, MS Word 2007 opens correctly, and MS Word 2024 doesn't.
TheMagicHorsey•1h ago
Never attribute malice where incompetence is a sufficient explanation.

Microsoft isn't intentionally obfuscating the docx. Docx is a shit-show because hundreds upon hundreds of Microsoft business initiatives, executive pet projects, and ancient compatibility rules have all collided to make a giant pile of dung.

If LibreOffice is worried about what docx does to their productivity ... you should see the fucking engineers lamenting INSIDE Microsoft about what it does to their friggin productivity.

This horseshit isn't anyone's plan. This horseshit is an emergent phenomenon like a fucking termite hill in your back yard ... where no single termite is responsible or knoweldgeable, but all of them together made a pile that breaks your lawnmower.

curiousgal•1h ago
Tangent: Is there a Firefox extension that blocks articles with slams, claps back, rips ?
Lammy•1h ago
> The two office suites take very different paths here. LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an open standard meant to be controlled by no single company. Microsoft, on the other hand, created its own Office Open XML (OOXML) to support every feature in its own software, giving us the familiar .docx and .xlsx

It's so impressively underhandedly sneaky that Microsoft named their ODF-competitor format “Office Open” just as OpenOffice.org's (LibreOffice's direct ancestor) hype peaked with OO.o 2.0 having ODF as its native format, when MS Office finally had a viable and popular competitor for like the first time ever.

https://www.openoffice.org/press/2.0/press_release.html (2005-10-20)

https://news.microsoft.com/2005/11/21/qa-microsoft-co-sponso... (2005-11-21)

redeeman•1h ago
and ooxml is basically just a serialization of microsoft office internals, with attributes such as "likeword95" on certain elements..

microsoft made a total piece of steaming turd, and its users dont care.

TriangleEdge•37m ago
After having worked for many companies, I think the complex file formats is likely due to employee turnover, pressure from management to just get shit done, and careless coding. Not ill intended anti-competitive practices. The locking in is likely an unintended bonus for Microsoft.
dismalaf•27m ago
Everyone needs to stop competing with Office and just build a better office.

The truth is, no one needs to be compatible these days. Everyone is either:

- using the same software company-wide, whether it's LO, Google Docs or MS Office

- exporting to PDF when sharing docs with someone outside the organization

The real thing that LO is missing is server side hosting and easy syncing... Until they get that, it's just going to be something used by individuals and small orgs.

I still remember, at my university we had LO installed on lab computers, MS Office was a "requirement" for students to purchase, but most profs simply insisted we simply hand in assignments as Google Docs links because there was incompatibilities between .doc, .docx, the formats made by LO, etc... Google Docs were the only ones that could be shared and be 100% identical on every computer with the link.

If LO had a web hosted solution and provided easy to install server code for organizations, they'd dominate. But they don't...