Open Source Office Suite LibreOffice 7.2 is out

Another part of the Libre Office market is probably people who like having programs and data stored locally (on their own computers) that don’t rely upon Internet connectivity.

Some people prefer that for privacy reasons, but there are also practical reasons that come into play. Sometimes people have limited or slow Internet connectivity, or perhaps lack home or on-the-go Internet in some of the places they take their laptops. Others may occasionally find themselves unable to pay a bill at some point in their lives, or with a potential gap between switching service providers or moving from place to place and getting all the utilities (electric, Internet, etc.) set up. They also might find inconsistent wifi access and quality when they travel. Some people’s Internet connections are still the weakest point in terms of their hardware/OS/software/Internet stack combo in terms of what is limiting their speed as well.

Even where none of that is the case, the power may go off in your neighborhood, and when that’s the case you can still use a locally stored office program until your laptop’s battery runs down. That’s not always true with cloud services. Some make an attempt to have locally stored fallbacks, and maybe the G-suite is one of them, but those are not always the most reliable things in the world for that use case relative to a program that is designed to be used off-line regularly.

There’s also a certain amount of stability in locally stored software. Sure, they can do a design overhaul, and eventually users will probably either have to resign themselves to it and upgrade for security and compatibility reasons, or switch software, *but* they won’t just boot up one day and find that things have been definitively and irrevocably changed and that’s the only version the server will give them now. You can still keeping running (and even install fresh, if you have the install file) old versions of programs- I don’t recommend doing this indefinitely for security reasons, but sometimes programs will support old versions for a while with security fixes when there is a major version jump, and, if that’s not the case with an individual program, you at least have a few days to breath and figure it out, and can finish whatever it is you’re working on the way you’re used to before you have to deal with the situation (Which can be important if you have a deadline or some other reason it’s not a good time to be relearning how to use a new version of something).

A lot of people will stash a few games that don’t check in online, maybe an off-line text-only version of Wikipedia that they can use as an encyclopedia in a pinch, and whatever. That way, their computer doesn’t become a very expensive doorstop the second they find themselves without good wifi access for whatever reason, even in a temporary situation like a power or wifi outage. You can still do something with it.

There’s also the question of why do something on Google’s computer when you can do it on your computer. Putting everything else aside and assuming 100% uptime and 100% privacy, I could see people just deciding there was no advantage to going to the cloud, especially if they routinely make backups of important data. You’ve got this really powerful machine at your fingertips, why not use it?

Plus, a lot of people are already sort of in Google’s orbit with enough things. They may be reluctant to put themselves in a situation where if their Google account gets banned or suspended, even by mistake, that they are utterly and completely screwed, and spread things out a little as a precaution. LibreOffice won’t ban you because it’s just software you download, not an on-going cloud service. The most they could do would be to ban you from their message forum or the equivalent, if one exists, and perhaps their Github or the equivalent (Where bugs are reported and fixed, and code is submitted.), if they have one of those.

There’s also a strong cultural drive that some people have to own things. Now, sure, technically all software is licensed, but Google could shutdown G-suite, restrict your access to it, or make major changes to it tomorrow, if they wanted to you. Your copy of LibreOffice is your copy of LibreOffice as long as it’s just for personal use (And, even there, it’s open-source, so if you can code, you could fork it and distribute it with a new name and logo- LibreOffice itself is a fork of OpenOffice.org [Which still exists, but with only very occasional updates.]).