[umanwizard]

That's very disingenuous. The libreoffice code base is big and complex and hard enough to ramp up on that fixing your personal problems with it would quickly become a full time job, even if you already know all there is to know about programming enterprise software in c++

[tomrod]

That depends on what you're trying to fix.

Add a nonlinear solver to calc? Sure.

Add a fill function into draw? _Maybe_ a two-month after-hours project.

[umanwizard]

Draw internals are an absolute mess. I've tried to fix bugs in Draw multiple times and just ended up discouraged.

It took me around 3 months, full-time, to write an import filter for LibreOffice that still only kinda-sorta works. And it depended very little on the rest of the codebase.

I think you underestimate how complicated a modern office suite is, and how much years-old technical debt there is floating around in LibreOffice.

[roel_v]

Oh oh oh this would be funny if it weren't so sad. Thanks for illustrating so poignantly the idiocy of free software fanaticism (that is not to say that all OS software is bad or idiotic, I use a lot of it, it's about the cognitive dissonance in this thread).

So, I have this project in which I need to fill an area in a drawing in a proposal for a client. So my options are:

a) Spend $200 (about an hours worth of billable time, or 2 hours during dry spells) on MS Office.

b) Spend 2 x 4 x 10 = 80 hours (which is no where near enough, but let's go with your number) on this feature, then spend again that on finding and convincing the right people to include my patch, on a half-assed implementation which does just enough what I need, and tell my client 'yeah get back to me in 2 months when I have patched my word processor to deliver the functionality I need'.

Choices choices, which one should I choose?

Just that time alone on a single tiny feature would pay for a lifetime worth of MS Office software!