How about a different take: This isn't really about two open source organizations fighting. It's a psyop from the powers that want to stop the digital sovereignty initiatives going on around the world by amplifying some friction that already existed. People won't want to use products with so much drama and uncertainty.
TDF needs to eject the members who pulled the strings hardest on this - they are plants.
Damn I didn't know I had that much of a tinfoil hat.
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.
He's using this approach because the EU requires documents to be in an open format, and by him advocating that OOXML is only open by name, he can advance a legal argument that OpenDocument is the only acceptable format.
Office supports OpenDocument.l, it just doesn't use it by default.
I understand his approach but it's a dumb approach. OOXML is plenty open, proven by the fact LibreOffice works with it fine. The push to force Europe switch to ODF only serves to suggest LibreOffice isn't capable of replacing Microsoft Office (in a world where most other organizations use Office). This is a conversation I have at work, where people laugh when LibreOffice is mentioned and suggest it's incompatible and we can't consider it.
A far better marketing strategy would be to loudly announce, continually, that LibreOffice is the best software for handling Office files and ODF alike! And as people switch to LibreOffice and it defaults to ODF, that naturally grows.
Meanwhile, LibreOffice's current marketing strategy may succeed in getting governments to offer ODF files and simultaneously sabotage anyone from ever switching to LibreOffice because LibreOffice's own marketing claims it won't work well with Word and Excel files.
OOXML is a terrible format, significantly overcomplicated and implemented by MS Office in such a way as to make alternative implementations fully compatible with it impossible. It's "open" in the name only, burying it would be the only logical step if wide interoperability and using truly open formats is your real goal.
> The push to force Europe switch to ODF only serves to suggest
No, it doesn't only do that. It also suggests the open xml MS Office format is a mess.*
> This is a conversation I have at work, where people laugh when LibreOffice is mentioned and suggest it's incompatible and we can't consider it.
This is evidence your coworkers are misinformed and you can't correct them. It is not proof that the only thing this blog post does is communicate LibreOffice can't handle Microsoft Office docs.
* this is a tale as old as time, I'm 37, remembering reading about this over and over again on /. when I was a young teen. It was part and parcel with Microsoft's antitrust era. The idea was the open format would help avoid antitrust claims, the complaint was the open format was so byzantine as to be effectively closed.
I don't think GP is talking about average users; they seem to be talking about decision-makers in organizations, e.g., a town board that wants to achieve digital independence, but is made unsure by apparent turmoil in the governance in open source orgs...
After looking at some videos of what this even is, I'd say it can do it but will likely fail on the boolean operation where the two spirals intersect. It might work fine but it's an operation likely to trigger a bug, and it would be sensitive to the exact placement/pitch of everything. Having said that, using the "force to triangle mesh" option solvespace will probably work fine. That should be sufficient for the home 3D printing crowd to make some fun stuff, but you won't be able to save a STEP file then. Just my guess as to how this might go.
>> Anyhow, salutes to the author of this web port, very slick
That credit goes to whitequark, who quit solvespace maintainership in 2020. The branch lingered and suffered some bit-rot. Then a couple people brought it up to date and fixed a few issues. It seemed like a good idea to merge it to prevent it falling behind even though its not quite up to par with desktop. With the newest release we also opted to put this right on the site (even merged a PR today as a result).
Anyway we owe whitequark most the credit for this one even though we havent heard from her in several years.
Even the desktop version sometimes. If I open on one monitor and move to another with different scale factor. It seems Windows lies about window resolution.
Dune3D is more like Solvespace with a few improvements and bug fixes vs being anywhere near FreeCAD in terms of capability. Improvements include using STEP files in assemblies and having some ability to make Fillets or Chamfers. Bugs fixes would be due to using OCCT for NURBS surfaces - solvespace frequently fails with NURBS boolean operations.
As for overall capability, FreeCAD does everything these others do but also supports lofting and other modeling options, BIM for architecture, I think it does pre- and post- processing for FEA, and maybe some other "big tool" things.
It uses GNU unifont, which is a bitmap font. There could be a bug causing the text to get stretched a little - we had that on Windows prior to this release.
TDF needs to eject the members who pulled the strings hardest on this - they are plants.
Damn I didn't know I had that much of a tinfoil hat.
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