[maximus1983]

Yes different file formats are big deal. I've run into problems with just Doc files if they have forms embedded. I've had to deal with quite a lot from different councils in the UK.

A lot of gov / HR departments etc have embedded forms in things like word documents and PDFs. The same problem with alternative PDF viewers, they don't do PDF forms well if at all.

You don't know the requirements of the different departments and saying "this free alternative works fine when writing a doc" doesn't cover their use cases.

The Linux community like to think that Microsoft is the "big evil" that is trying to thwart them at every turn. I know quite a few people in Microsoft and they tell me that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

So sorry I think it is a conspiracy theory and as someone that earns his living processing documents from Office I know that incompatibilities exist between Libre Office (which is a fork of Open Office) and MS Office.

[jacquesm]

So, to summarize: vendor lock-in is a thing and the best way to get there is to create closed stuff that open source then has no chance to properly deal with. You can use this to strong-arm all kinds of entities to deal with you on your terms.

> The Linux community like to think that Microsoft is the "big evil"

I really don't think I speak for the Linux community but I do think that MS is still the big evil, just in slightly nicer packaging. Fantastic PR, crappy company.

[maximus1983]

> So, to summarize: vendor lock-in is a thing and the best way to get there is to create closed stuff that open source then has no chance to properly deal with. You can use this to strong-arm all kinds of entities to deal with you on your terms.

No. Please don't put words into my mouth.

The problem is that there is no specs / documentation for anything generally. Most of my time in dev has been spent dealing and finding work around for all sorts shitty bugs in applications when dealing with either web browsers or generating documents.

This is partially because of deliberate vendor lock-in and partially due to nobody being given time to actually produce specs as these are often an after thought. Customers don't care about me making proper documentation, even when they do other developers that do integrations DON'T RTFM and I have to guide them through it anyway. Customers don't pay for specs / docs etc, they pay for the product that lets them get shit done.

Fanatics of Open Source (and they are that) always argue about cost of the software, vendor lock in etc. The costs of the software are almost nothing compared to hiring people. I was on a team of 6 people doing a major rewrite (which shouldn't have been happening IMHO) and it cost the business about £500,000 just in staff. Licenses for SQL Server and Windows server was a small percentage of that and were about 1 man months worth of cost. These costs are nothing for large councils / businesses that will either recoup that cost from the software itself or will just raise taxes to cover the shortfall (which is what Gov always does).

The really good reason to use Open Source software is security, privacy and being able to run what you want on what you have purchased, but that never gets mentioned, it always the bullshit cost angle because £400 sounds a lot to the kids in University which are broke.

Also vendor lock-in is the norm for a vast number of reasons other than "M$ is the evilz, stop using Windoz". Just look at the 8bit/16bit era, almost everything was lock-in and much more expensive than today (by factors of ten). The free PC ecosystem is NOT the norm in computing.

> I really don't think I speak for the Linux community but I do think that MS is still the big evil, just in slightly nicer packaging. Fantastic PR, crappy company.

LOL. Google, Facebook, Paypal, Twitter are far more powerful than Microsoft and are much much more evil, you know why? Because they think they are the good guys. Microsoft are basically like IBM these days, they sell loads of proprietary stuff that office use because they have won in that sector, they are dominate almost nowhere else.

A great deal of the internet is now hosted on a about 5 or 6 providers, the largest being Amazon's cloud. That is far more frightening to me than Microsoft. Every single competitor (except Microsoft) uses Amazon's Object Storage API because they are the largest.

This isn't the early 2000s where Microsoft were a monopoly they simply aren't anymore because the market has changed so drastically in 20 years.

[jacquesm]

I do believe Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple are as evil if not more than MS, but that does not diminish their crimes even a little bit. Twitter much less so imho.