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by the_third_wave 873 days ago
> Computers are tools to let me achieve things

Computers are tools to run software. Software is what makes (or breaks) the computer a useful tool. A computer without software is just as useful as a lump of pig iron: handy as a paper weight but no more.

Closed software which locks your data in its grasp may be OK for some purposes but in the long run it nearly always ends up causing problems - try opening an older Word file in current Word [1] for an example of such.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38906331

1 comments

This is a terrible straw man.

Firstly I have raised two bugs against LibreOffice in the last decade where it can't open files it created and can't print a spreadsheet.

Secondly the specifications for proprietary software are not necessarily closed: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_file_form...

The only thing here is that crap software is crap software. And Word is crap software.