I have been on HN since 2010, and I will never understand this sentiment of "we deserve free updates". Unless you were promised an update in the purchase agreement, you got what you literally paid for.

I have to assume a large portion of the community here are paid software engineers or adjacent, how do you think your employer is able to pay you? By selling software...and software updates.

That seems different though. If you are paying a fixed cost for offline software, you are not entitled to updates for it, that seems like wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

Forget the cost. Just having my data and documents in a truly open and documented format is value enough to use LibreOffice.

Even though other implementations of the spec are lacking (looking at you Koffice) the fact that a spec exists is data security. Especially in an age where LLMs are getting cheaper and alternative (or custom) implementations might become feasible to produce.

The commercial software industry has gotten me to the point where I don't want updates anymore. Every time [company] updates their software, it's worse than it was before. It's got more telemetry. It's removed features. It needs a login now. It's moved things around in the UI. It's put things that used to be free behind payments. It's monetizing me. It's cramming ads and spam into it. It needs more memory and disk space to use. I deliberately don't update commercial software anymore. Y'all developers have poisoned the well.

Why do you need the newer version?

Not to mention, old versions of MS Office are not compatible with the new versions of paper they sell today. Technology moves forward, after all.

I have office 2003. Works fine.

No, I don't open rando word docs

>> so you have to spend another $250 to get the newer version

But why? I still use Office 2016 and I haven't yet come across a document it wouldn't open. What am I missing out on?

Yes, I made an assumption, arguably unfounded, that MS365 had been affected by the recent issues.

> AFAIK Open Office doesn't make an open source email server.

How do you draw the line? There is at least one LibreOffice developer who also contributed to Dovecot.

The offline app licensing system is explicitly designed to only require refreshing the status regularly, each successful refresh will keep the state for six months even it it fail to refresh during that period. After the six months there comes the one month grace period (basically reminding the user to get online or contact their IT) where there's a warning banner but it still work. After the grace period it will disable saving.

The super-complicated app that fail when an online service fail in Microsoft's offering is Notepad, at least in one botched update where failed Copilot apparently crash Notepad entirely instead of letting it run without Copilot.