• BananaTrifleViolin@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I get where you’re coming from but I think you’re overstating the impact in this day and age. If this had been 1995 it’d be a big deal. Now it’s rediculously easy to install any alternative you like for free.

    Libre Office is an entire free fully features office suite.

    I’m less bothered about removing WordPad than I am about Microsoft advertising and pre-installing it’s products in Windows - they force Edge on people, they push OneDrive and preinstall a preview of Office. That’s the real problem - not losing WordPad.

    At one point Anti-Trust / Anti-monopoly regulators globally punished Microsoft for pushing Internet Explorer to consumers and for a long time in Europe had to offer a choice of Browsers to download on new Windows installs. Now it’s allowed to get away with abusing it’s dominant position to force it’s products on consumers.

    • Talos@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I built a new PC two months ago and it’s the first time I didn’t get Office. Libre Office has everything I need and it’s free.

        • insomniac@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          They don’t. Libre Office is maintained by a non-profit called The Document Foundation. They’re funded entirely by donations. I think they make enough to have some full time employees.

          A lot of open source software is created by individuals or non-profits. The Mozilla foundation makes Firefox, for instance. They make money through donations and also Google pays them a ton of money to be the default search engine.

          There are for profit companies that make or contribute to open source software. Such as Red Hat. They tend to make money by selling support for the software.

        • Talos@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I don’t think they make money. It’s an open source project where people donate their time as far as I know.

          EDIT: I forgot to mention you can donate to the project. Something has to pay for web hosting, I guess.

        • LinuxSBC@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          A bit of donations, a bit of unpaid people contributing just to help others.

    • SargTeaPot@lemmy.nz
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      1 year ago

      Or you know, google docs is a thing which is free and imo works better than word

      • MrSpArkle@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        A web browser is not a word processor no matter how much they tart it up. If the thing isn’t saving a file to my local drive that is in a common format It’s not worth putting your effort into.

        So many kids are going to grow up not having the concept where data lives and what the failure modes are.