The Document Foundation Blog

I appreciate your thoughtful reply!

One (of the many i'm sure) problems here you defined are:
"...who would love to have a way to embed interactive graphs and tables into your papers to make them more understandable for the reader..."

The solution however may not necessarily be a private 'reader', 'player', or 'binary'. Though the 'format' may be 'open' this single implementation isn't.

You bring up Adobe which isn't a very good business case to follow as the very reasons I brought up are pressing the industry to move toward open implementations[1][2], away from 'free' binary distributions and plugins (for a various list of reasons from security[2], to access on other systems/apps).

This really isn't 1999, and CDF isn't yet a popular nor a de-facto standard[1] much like PDF was. Besides you and I are much more capable these days with newer and _open_ technologies are we not (browser, linux, open documents, etc...)?

Speaking of documents, other examples of 'perceived' open standard files are Microsoft's ill faded OSP[3] promise which spawned traction for OD/F[4] and other.

These reasons are why HTML5/CSS3/JS as a basis to create an open two way street for 'documents' and/or formats are so powerful. It is not enough to only provide an 'open' format, but also an open implementation. This way both use of and implementation of such product be beneficial toward academic progress. Why wouldn't that alone be worth it?

Thus a likely more popular solution I am proposing to your…

LibreOffice developer | Preferably full-time | Remote

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I'm confident the person who most wants to sabotage LibreOffice's success is Italo Vignoli. He's involved in this issue as well, but the other core problem is his marketing strategy: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/author/italovignoli/

Most of his blogs are about how awful OOXML (Microsoft Office's open standard) formats are, and that everyone needs to switch to ODF (his preferred open standard).

What people don't want to use is products which don't work with everyone else's. LibreOffice works with Microsoft Office files really well, but for some reason Italo doesn't want you to know that. He wants the entire world to switch formats to LibreOffice's formats, but really that's just telling potential business users LibreOffice can't meet their needs... interacting with the existing monopoly of Microsoft Office users.

This is a self-sabotaging marketing approach. LibreOffice needs to be promoting itself as an excellent drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office which will easily interoperate with every other organization's office applications, regardless of format.

This is not flat out wrong, it's just the officially given reason. Not the entire story. The source is in German, but EN Wikipedia sums it up nicely:

"In 2018, journalistic group Investigate Europe released a video documentary via German public television network ARD, wherein it is claimed that the majority of city workers were satisfied with the operating system, with council members insinuating that the reversal was a personally motivated decision by lord mayor Dieter Reiter. Reiter denied that he had initiated the reversal in gratitude for Microsoft moving its German headquarters from Unterschleißheim back to Munich."

This is also worth a read:

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2017/02/14/statement-by-the-document-foundation-about-the-upcoming-discussion-at-the-city-of-munich-to-step-back-to-windows-and-ms-office/

In short, it _was_ MSFT lobby grease.

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The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks an individual – or individuals part (or full) time – to be a Development Mentor to start work as soon as possible. The role requires the following:

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My 2¢: I agree formats (in)compatibility is by far the major showstopper in adopting LO. MS Office formats indeed rule, like it or not • Starting with v7.4, back in August 2022, LO is giving formats compatibility the attention they deserve (https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2022/08/18/libreoffice-7-4-community/) Maybe it's too little, too late, and it doesn't look aligned with the state of 'Microsoft Office compatibility' wiki page (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/012#Microsoft_Office_compatibility)… • I am no expert, but how formats with ISO are so hard to implement is beyond me I consider OO and its other remaining forks a waste of effort. Aligning their combined forces with LO, however, could make a huge difference in the formats compatibility effort. Then again, this is the plague (and beauty) of open source projects…