Open-Source Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint, and Word Replications
tomshardware.com35 points by mathgenius 3 hours ago
35 points by mathgenius 3 hours ago
The media response to this omits the fact that these vibe coded "reverse engineered" apps hardly work and we've had open source alternatives to the Microsoft and Adobe products for years. The narrative they're pushing is a frontier model can make a perfect clone of any app, and the reality is it makes a ui that looks somewhat similar but none of the functionality actually works.
Hah, Potemkin Office Suite. Next, Potemkin OS and Potemkin phones?
Maybe that's many are convinced AI can replace developers, they can only see the surface of software and think there's not much more underneath it...
Yeah though FWIW, the overall impact of companies realizing maybe they shouldn't be spending $100k a year on a document editor is likely to raise all boats for alternatives.
It remains really wild people think Office is worth $30/month/user. Anything that erodes that belief is a net positive.
I think a lot of people forget about the labor costs of migrating. The $30/mo looks cheap compared to all of the time spent trying to teach end users how to use something else
i dont think anyone thinks it's worth that on its own, but you need some kind of user management (entra id in this case), some kind of cloud storage (sharepoint in this case) and some kind of standard document format (docx, xlsx, pptx in this case) in any company.
of course you can do all that with open source stuff but office is just easy to buy and hard to get rid of once you have bought in. the bigger your company the harder it is to migrate.
I'd rather wish people put effort into LibreOffice. I'd hoped there would be significant improvements there as there is a huge scope of bug/compatibility fixes. But I guess it is not sexy enough.
Yeah, this entire saga is really unfortunate. The narrative is really enticing (AI is obsoleting Adobe/Microsoft/other corporate software behemoths!) when the reality is it's a vibe-coded slopware that barely functions, according to anyone who has actually tried it, and there are other FOSS alternatives which are much more stable, mature, and deserve people's attention. I wonder how many people shouting "Claude vibed a Photoshop clone, Adobe is done!!" were even aware Krita or GIMP existed.
Do they even allow AI contributions? I'd love to contribute if they do.
Some people tell me why not donate instead, and the reason is the same as me giving people actual presents instead of gift cards: I take the time to choose and understand an issue, spend time on it, just like I spend time picking a present. Both are riskier than giving money directly, but the euphoria of having my PR get merged or present being appreciated is addictive :)
im willing to bet its easier to generate a new office than it is to fix libreoffice
It is not sexy enough.
It has atrocious UX. Crazy bloat from promising to support every one-off file format under the sun for the last 25 years.
Trying to get a PR commit committed is like dealing with an entire army of bureaucrats.
So I get it would be great (in theory) if people wanted to support this, but at the same time it’s too far behind —- and the team is too entrenched in bad UX decisions, ackward support mandates for obscure systems that in reality nobody ever really used.
And this is a hill I’ll die on… Permissive licenses > copyleft. If I fork your code, as long as I put your name in the credits, the code is mine to do whatever I want with. Past authors shouldn't get a say in what I build next. That's real open source.
Can relate to that. Nowadays it's much easier for me to fork a project and fix the bugs for myself rather than convincing the maintainers that my niche bug is worth a fix and the fix is worthy.
I've been thinking about this these days, this is the final revenge of open source. After having ingurgitated all the open source projects there exist in the world, AI is making basically all software un-copyrighteable (yes, you can't copyright a picture made by AI as you can't copyright a piece of software made -entirely- by AI).
Yep, I realized this back in February, you can remake basically anything in a drastically shorter span of time with a single frontier model and patience and test thoroughly.
My thinking is that cloning existing apps is missing the point. It still takes a disproportionate amount of time to get all of the functionalities and quirks of the original right. But, it takes no time to get the handful of things you need working, on your system. That is where I see the most potential: there is little need for massive pieces of software that do everything, I can build the components I need, customized for my use case, and move on.
All I see in this article is bunch of ads and something about people arguing on Twitter. Is there a link to the actual project or announcement?
…isn’t this the same person who submitted Adobe clones to HN last week and then the thread was deleted by the mods?
Can these tools withstand Microsoft’s lawyers?
Internet decentralized the data. Now, AI has decentralized software. Next, we need decentralized AI.
How is AI currently not decentralized?
A very small group of companies have the infrastructure required to train and serve a frontier model. They have a stranglehold on the compute/resources required for a new participant to break in.
And an overwhelming majority of enterprises running AI in production do so via one of two providers.
I’d be thoroughly impressed if all the weird quirks of Excel also make the cut.
Genuinely curious: what weird quirks have you encountered in Excel? Back 10 years ago when I was using Excel daily I didn’t think anything was weird about it (it was actually my favorite tool)
Awesome. Now do one for TurboTax!