The Document Foundation Clarifies LibreOffice 7.0's "Personal Edition" Branding

[kpedersen]

but if someone is using it alone, that's not too "community", right?

I have not seen many enterprise spreadsheet tools being used at the same time.

I mean there was that one CSI episode... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ).

Multi-user web gimmicks like google docs are also not exactly what I would call enterprise either. They don't support complex MACROs for a start.

because you seem to be implying that:
-they are limiting functionality (they are not)
-they have secret code where this functionality is enabled (they don't)
-the "enterprise code" is different from the "end user code" (there is no such "enterprise code")

By default, if you compile up and run the web platform it will come up with a message box if 20 users log in at the same time. You will see that commercial vendors will implement a little on top here and withhold the source code. Just wait and see.

[NotMine999]

Isn't that the case. However they have zero chance of making in roads with corporate America.

Corporate Anywhere wants more than just marketing.

Here's an incomplete wishlist of features that Corporate Anywhere tends to look at:

• stable codebase, since Corporate can't or won't go through upgrade exercises every 30 days
• one major release per year or every other year or so, something M$ has done in the past with M$ Office
• quarterly bugfix (meaning NO NEW FEATURES) releases
• volume pricing, since Corporate has a userbase that normally cannot stray from the company standard
• volume licensing, since a separate and unique license on every company device is a total nuisance to manage
• code security, since Corporate has the money to pay for 3rd party code testing for leaks, exfiltrations, etc.
• paid support process, since Corporate expects the vendor to support what they have proffered to Corporate
• legal responsibility, since Corporate will take to court any vendor whose product negatively impacts Corporate's moneymaking efforts

There may be other things that Corporate wants, but be careful to consider the differences between "nice to haves" or "must haves". Branding is a "nice to have" that is an expression of vanity over practicality; something you might see in a startup with a vainglorious CEO at the helm, and I once worked for a few. In the major (meaning BIG or NYSE listed) corporations that I have worked in there was a general motive for practicality over vanity except where it counts...on the internal reports they generate and the bills they send to their customers.

[RahulSundaram]

I'm not saying this is what they want to do, but a third party could easily be far more nefarious.

MPL-2.0 permits proprietary code (or code under any license) to be mixed in and distributed as part of a larger work. The only stipulations are that the MPL-2.0 portions of the larger work have to made available to the public.

The phrasing here seems a bit murky. MPL requires all modifications of MPL files themselves to be made available under MPL. You can think of it more like file specific copyleft software licensing. This is in between say Apache and LGPL.

[Alliancemd]

Remember when they forked OpenOffice for this kind of crap...

[quikee]

In theory a good thing.

But did they fixed the problems with substract they had? Problems that were not to be found in Open Office for example.
(substract done between 2 integers with result not being integer in some cases; when i have to use ROUND to get proper results something is really really wrong...)
Don't get me wrong but if you want to target enterprise area you need to give proper math results with default settings.

For years such bug reports have been closed without fixing the problem (suggesting workarounds like use round is not fixing the problem (I even read in the bug closing message that if you want proper results you shouldn't use Calc, sorry to say but then what's the point to even develop Calc?!?))...

No need to explain me why such bugs happen. Those bugs should be fixed. If Calc is unable to provide proper results for basic math operations then sorry to say this but Calc becomes unreliable and unreliable = useless if we are talking about math like in this case.
The one from enterprise that takes the decisions doesn't care about why it happens like that, he/she wants proper results not wrong results...

Let's say an enterprise decides to use it and well use Calc for payments (because they want to go cheap). After first month the errors in Calc cause total chaos (checks ending up not maching because of the math errors in Calc). Do you think they will ever think about using Libre Office again?

Even an result like 1E-4 provided by default it's not good for enterprise area...

If you want people to take you serious you need to provide quality, not excuses why the quality sucks...

Calc (and other office suites) are storing values in a floating point format and issues like that will occur. Therefor, agree or not, you have to take rounding into account. Every time such an bug is reported, it is checked against the behavior with other spreadsheet programs - most importantly with Excel. Every time such a bug is closed, it is closed because there is no bug and the behavior is consistent with others.

The only time I remember OpenOffice didn't match the output of LibreOffice is when different defaults were enabled (there is "Limit decimals for general number format" which was set to different values). So the result actually did match, but the result was displayed differently (auto rounded).

If you are serious about calculating finances (or anything else), you won't use the "general number format", but you will use "currency format", which is limited to 2 decimal places, or you will use another existing one or create your own, and limit it to the number of decimal places that you care about or set that "Limit decimals for general number format" setting to whatever you are comfortable with. That will handle the rounding of the final result (the value that is displayed) for you.

[thedukesd]

If you are serious about calculating finances (or anything else), you won't use the "general number format", but you will use "currency format", which is limited to 2 decimal places, or you will use another existing one or create your own, and limit it to the number of decimal places that you care about or set that "Limit decimals for general number format" setting to whatever you are comfortable with. That will handle the rounding of the final result (the value that is displayed) for you.

What's the point of Calc (and similar) when it basicaly gives errors when using basic math operations (without using round that shouldn't be used in the first place)? This is actually the question that needs to be answered. You know it gives errors, you don't fix them when reported so what's the point of such application?
The fact that the rest are doing it wrong doesn't justify you doing it wrong also.

That particular problem with - can be fixed by checking if both values are integers and if both are integers then show an integer as result. (This particular check won't slow down anything... If something slow down sorry to say but it's not due to this particular check, it's something else awfull coded...)
But this won't really fix the other cases...
The best way is to implement proper math in Calc even if it slow down things and ask at the first start of Calc if the user want proper math accepting that things will be slow in some situations or the user is fine with errors in math operations (ofc there has to be a setting in options to change between the 2 modes)... Basicaly you kinda have to hand the decision in user hands...

Even I as a personal user ended up with obvious wrong results while using Calc for relative simple stuff (end result supposed to always be 100, yet in some cases it was something else (not that close to 100 in some cases...)...)... It was not critical stuff, but the result was clearly wrong (exactly same numbers and same operations gave me always in Open Office and as far as I know Open Office is not really properly mantained). Coding the stuff for my own use while possible it was going to use way too much time to actually worth the effort.
Yes I didn't reported the problem because the cause it was reported over and over and all the reports closed without fixint it. My report was going to have the same fate so no point to waste my time reporting it when I already knew the answer...

Taking into consideration that Calc give errors even for basic math operation what is the use of Calc in an enterprise enviroment? You do realise that employes won't use round when doing basic operation because they won't be aware of the fact that the result for basic math operation sometimes is wrong without round...

****
I worked in a call center and they were using Libre Office (to cut the costs) to calculated the costs/time for clients if they were asking about them. With Calc not being reliable in term of simple math operations (if it fails to - it probably fails to + also) clients could had easily receive wrong informations...

The suggestion to use round is actually not viable in some cases, especially when you get an awfull spreadsheet (after ages of waiting for it to be generated... I don't even want to say that the PC was having and i3 but it was running worst than an Sempron 145...) from another application for each client and you have to solve the client as fast as possible.

Me telling them that Calc for sure will give wrong results wasn't going to fix the problem, only thing it could had happen was me getting fired. This is the result when the one taking the decision cares only about cutting the cost as much as possible and doesn't care at all about quality (at some point quality goes downhill badly).

This is a case where at work you can't change the stuff you are using and you need to provide proper data when you know the application used is not always providing proper data in a simple way and you need a simple way to meet the time requirements (add that your settings were getting restored to the original image every time you were logging with your user so basicaly if you needed something in particular you had to do it daily or after a pc reboot...)... How do you solve such situation without changing job?