[libreoffice-marketing] Good Article for LibreOffice

Tom_Davies · November 25, 2012, 4:38pm

Hi
It's interesting that there has been almost no posts about articles such as this one.

https://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/660608-libreoffice-a-continuing-tale-of-foss-success

There are some interesting stats that are very well presented in there and it's worth using to spread the word of how LibreOffice works.

For me one of the key things that no article seems to mention is that while many hefty companies are vanishing seemingly overnight it seems somewhat dangerous to rely on just one. It would be like not making back-ups of critical information!! If we can bear to think of LO and AOO as being similar enough that users can migrate from one to the other fairly easily and thus as being 2 prioducts supported by 1 community then that community is massive. Taken as being 1 product it is so robust that even if 1 or 2 companoes the size of IBM or Google (or RedHat or SUSE) were to simply vanish overnight then there would still be a good product out there. By sticking with MS people are risking everything they have by being so heavily dependant on just 1 company and that company is losing market share to mobile devices. Perhaps Win8 might help them recover the OS battle but it might not.

Regards from
Tom

krackedpress · November 25, 2012, 9:46pm

A thing about FOSS that is good, is that there is more than one voice involved in the way the product will be designed/used/etc.. MS people tend to say - This is what you are going to use now and this is how your will do it. Products involved with many companies helping with the development, listens to more than one voice to make the decisions in how to use the product, what it can do, and what it will be like for the user experience.

MS will not likely stop being a big company and provide the products and services they feel the market needs. For a FOSS package, it is good to have a large base of volunteers and companies that provide development of the product. Sure, with everything in the hands of one company and its highly stressed development teams under the control of one manager [that may be just a professional manager] - could be a good thing for a product. But is that better for the user or just better for the company's product manager? MS has in the past shown that they are not in sync with its users, and has done so many times. With the FOSS model, it is hard not to include the user of the package in its development process. Volunteers tend not to want to work on a product that the users will not want to use. MS makes a package and tell the users - here it is so use it the way we tell you to use it.

The article was written the first week of November, and I think I have read it before.

I think packages that cares about the user, like LibreOffice does, will be successful and gain market shares from the products that do not include the users in development of the product, like MS does..

Girvin_R_Herr · November 25, 2012, 10:27pm

Tom Davies wrote:

Hi
It's interesting that there has been almost no posts about articles such as this one.

https://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/660608-libreoffice-a-continuing-tale-of-foss-success

There are some interesting stats that are very well presented in there and it's worth using to spread the word of how LibreOffice works.

For me one of the key things that no article seems to mention is that while many hefty companies are vanishing seemingly overnight it seems somewhat dangerous to rely on just one. It would be like not making back-ups of critical information!! If we can bear to think of LO and AOO as being similar enough that users can migrate from one to the other fairly easily and thus as being 2 prioducts supported by 1 community then that community is massive. Taken as being 1 product it is so robust that even if 1 or 2 companoes the size of IBM or Google (or RedHat or SUSE) were to simply vanish overnight then there would still be a good product out there. By sticking with MS people are risking everything they have by being so heavily dependant on just 1 company and that company is losing market share to mobile devices. Perhaps Win8 might help them recover the OS battle but it might not.

Regards from
Tom

Greetings,
My primary goal is to reduce, or preferably eliminate, risk to my data. I learned the hard way many years ago that depending on M$ and other proprietary software suppliers was way too risky. I then decided to switch to Open Source software and take back control of my computer. I have never regretted that decision. Even if LO/AOO go away, there are still other applications, such as Koffice, that will still allow me to read/maintain my documents & data. And, if it comes down to it, I can always unzip my LO/OO files and get the data from the file(s) inside. That allows me to sleep at night.
Girvin Herr

planas · November 25, 2012, 11:56pm

Tom Davies wrote:

Hi
It's interesting that there has been almost no posts about articles such as this one.
https://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/660608-libreoffice-a-continuing-tale-of-foss-success

There are some interesting stats that are very well presented in there and it's worth using to spread the word of how LibreOffice works.

For me one of the key things that no article seems to mention is that while many hefty companies are vanishing seemingly overnight it seems somewhat dangerous to rely on just one. It would be like not making back-ups of critical information!! If we can bear to think of LO and AOO as being similar enough that users can migrate from one to the other fairly easily and thus as being 2 prioducts supported by 1 community then that community is massive. Taken as being 1 product it is so robust that even if 1 or 2 companoes the size of IBM or Google (or RedHat or SUSE) were to simply vanish overnight then there would still be a good product out there. By sticking with MS people are risking everything they have by being so heavily dependant on just 1 company and that company is losing market share to mobile devices. Perhaps Win8 might help them recover the OS battle but it might not.
Regards from
Tom

Greetings,
My primary goal is to reduce, or preferably eliminate, risk to my data. I learned the hard way many years ago that depending on M$ and other proprietary software suppliers was way too risky. I then decided to switch to Open Source software and take back control of my computer. I have never regretted that decision. Even if LO/AOO go away, there are still other applications, such as Koffice, that will still allow me to read/maintain my documents & data. And, if it comes down to it, I can always unzip my LO/OO files and get the data from the file(s) inside. That allows me to sleep at night.
Girvin Herr

+1
I prefer the FOSS / open formats model better for the reasons you noted.

From a general user perspective; open formats are probably more

important for long term accessibility. Most long term users can remember proprietary formats for software that were very popular 15+ years ago that are unreadable by any software in current release. To make matters worse you may even have files you would like to read in these formats. You may find a conversion software that claims to accurately convert the obsolete format to a currently used format - I can not vouch for anyone's claims.

The problem with any proprietary format is whether someone will continue to provide software that can edit it in the future or will it eventually become an orphan. Amipro and Wordstar come to mind and I am sure others can be named.

doug11 · November 26, 2012, 2:14am

/snip/

important for long term accessibility. Most long term users can remember proprietary formats for software that were very popular 15+ years ago that are unreadable by any software in current release. To make matters worse you may even have files you would like to read in these formats. You may find a conversion software that claims to accurately convert the obsolete format to a currently used format - I can not vouch for anyone's claims.

The problem with any proprietary format is whether someone will continue to provide software that can edit it in the future or will it eventually become an orphan. Amipro and Wordstar come to mind and I am sure others can be named.

I can send a copy of WordStar if anybody needs it. (DOS version.) However, you're right about the CPM version--I had it on 8" floppy,
and I threw all of them out many years ago--probably nobody has a working 8" drive anymore!

--doug

planas · November 26, 2012, 5:00am

Doug

You noted another problem, even if you have the media do you have a device to read it. I never had 8" floppies but at one time many 5.25" and 3.5" floppies.

Tom_Davies · November 26, 2012, 9:39am

Hi
Arachaic formats (ie old formats that are almost never used nowadays but may have been popular once) might be something that Extensions could be used to deal with. We might not want legacy code retained in the main code to read ancient formats that 'no-one' uses anymore but it might be nice to be able to add-on an Extension to read old love letters and such.

Also formats that kept the same name but went through many changes. So that one Extension might help people read Doc formats prior to the 1997 version and another reads the 97 one. That might be something to help our poor devs deal with the 3 different DocX formats now in use. One to read DocXs from MSO 2007, another for the 2010 and the 3rd for MSO 365. At the moment it would probably be best to have the 2010 one by default but if that could easily be swapped-out and replaced by the 365 one in a couple of years then we might retain a way of being able to read all of them.

I think such Extensions would need to be released on OpenSource licenses either BSD type licenses that need to attribute previous artists/authors/coders or GPL type ones that don't acknowledge previous coders. Then when the Extensions become outdated it might still be possible for people to update them so they work in whichever future version of LO we are on by that time.
Regards from
Tom

planas · November 26, 2012, 1:59pm

Hi
Arachaic formats (ie old formats that are almost never used nowadays but may have been popular once) might be something that Extensions could be used to deal with. We might not want legacy code retained in the main code to read ancient formats that 'no-one' uses anymore but it might be nice to be able to add-on an Extension to read old love letters and such.

Also formats that kept the same name but went through many changes. So that one Extension might help people read Doc formats prior to the 1997 version and another reads the 97 one. That might be something to help our poor devs deal with the 3 different DocX formats now in use. One to read DocXs from MSO 2007, another for the 2010 and the 3rd for MSO 365. At the moment it would probably be best to have the 2010 one by default but if that could easily be swapped-out and replaced by the 365 one in a couple of years then we might retain a way of being able to read all of them.

I think such Extensions would need to be released on OpenSource licenses either BSD type licenses that need to attribute previous artists/authors/coders or GPL type ones that don't acknowledge previous coders. Then when the Extensions become outdated it might still be possible for people to update them so they work in whichever future version of LO we are on by that time.
Regards from
Tom

IMHO the real problem with archaic formats is the lack of available documentation forcing one to reverse engineer the format. I suspect this sounds much easier that it really is; particularly if you do not have a clue about the final text. Some of the very ancient formats may be accessible because they did not include any graphics/art/images in the file. They were all text with embedded codes for bold/italics, etc. For LO we need to make an intelligent cut and say these formats we will have the ability to import but others will not be supported. The selection being we already have the ability so updating/maintaining the code is required and others are so ancient that we do not have the resources to address the conversion. Note most ancient formats would probably only need an import filter not an export one.

Tom_Davies · November 26, 2012, 2:10pm

Hi
I guess i am more thinking about formats that LO currently supports that are becoming archaic or that might have already become archaic but still being supported anyway. If some of those could be stripped out into being just Extensions then wouldn't it make things a bit more streamlined? I agree about import filters only.
Regards from
Tom

________________________________
From: Jay Lozier <jslozier@gmail.com>
To: Tom Davies <tomdavies04@yahoo.co.uk>
Cc: "users@global.libreoffice.org" <users@global.libreoffice.org>
Sent: Monday, 26 November 2012, 13:59
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Good Article for LibreOffice

Hi

Arachaic formats (ie old formats that are almost never used

        nowadays but may have been popular once) might be something that
        Extensions could be used to deal with. We might not want legacy
        code retained in the main code to read ancient formats that
        'no-one' uses anymore but it might be nice to be able to add-on
        an Extension to read old love letters and such.

Also formats that kept the same name but went through many

        changes. So that one Extension might help people read Doc
        formats prior to the 1997 version and another reads the 97 one.
        That might be something to help our poor devs deal with the 3
        different DocX formats now in use. One to read DocXs from MSO
        2007, another for the 2010 and the 3rd for MSO 365. At the
        moment it would probably be best to have the 2010 one by default
        but if that could easily be swapped-out and replaced by the 365
        one in a couple of years then we might retain a way of being
        able to read all of them.

I think such Extensions would need to be released on OpenSource

        licenses either BSD type licenses that need to attribute
        previous artists/authors/coders or GPL type ones that don't
        acknowledge previous coders. Then when the Extensions become
        outdated it might still be possible for people to update them so
        they work in whichever future version of LO we are on by that
        time.

Regards from
Tom

IMHO the real problem with archaic formats is the lack of available documentation forcing one to reverse engineer the format. I suspect this sounds much easier that it really is; particularly if you do not have a clue about the final text. Some of the very ancient formats may be accessible because they did not include any graphics/art/images in the file. They were all text with embedded codes for bold/italics, etc. For LO we need to make an intelligent cut and say these formats we will have the ability to import but others will not be supported. The selection being we already have the ability so updating/maintaining the code is required and others are so ancient that we do not have the resources to address the conversion. Note most ancient formats would probably only need an import filter not an export one.

________________________________
From: Jay Lozier <jslozier@gmail.com>
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Sent: Sunday, 25 November 2012, 23:56
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Good Article for LibreOffice

Tom Davies wrote:

Hi
It's interesting that there has been almost no

posts about articles such as this one.

https://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/660608-libreoffice-a-continuing-tale-of-foss-success

There are some interesting stats that are very

well presented in there and it's worth using to spread
the word of how LibreOffice works.

For me one of the key things that no article

                seems to mention is that while many hefty companies are
                vanishing seemingly overnight it seems somewhat
                dangerous to rely on just one. It would be like not
                making back-ups of critical information!! If we can
                bear to think of LO and AOO as being similar enough that
                users can migrate from one to the other fairly easily
                and thus as being 2 prioducts supported by 1 community
                then that community is massive. Taken as being 1
                product it is so robust that even if 1 or 2 companoes
                the size of IBM or Google (or RedHat or SUSE) were to
                simply vanish overnight then there would still be a good
                product out there. By sticking with MS people are
                risking everything they have by being so heavily
                dependant on just 1 company and that company is losing
                market share to mobile devices. Perhaps Win8 might help
                them recover the OS battle but it might not.

Regards from
Tom

Greetings,
My primary goal is to reduce, or preferably

                eliminate, risk to my data. I learned the hard way many
                years ago that depending on M$ and other proprietary
                software suppliers was way too risky. I then decided to
                switch to Open Source software and take back control of
                my computer. I have never regretted that decision. Even
                if LO/AOO go away, there are still other applications,
                such as Koffice, that will still allow me to
                read/maintain my documents & data. And, if it comes
                down to it, I can always unzip my LO/OO files and get
                the data from the file(s) inside. That allows me to
                sleep at night.

Girvin Herr

+1
I prefer the FOSS / open formats model better for the

reasons you noted.

From a general user perspective; open formats are

probably more

important for long term accessibility. Most long term

                users can remember proprietary formats for software that
                were very popular 15+ years ago that are unreadable by
                any software in current release. To make matters worse
                you may even have files you would like to read in these
                formats. You may find a conversion software that claims
                to accurately convert the obsolete format to a currently
                used format - I can not vouch for anyone's claims.

The problem with any proprietary format is whether

                someone will continue to provide software that can edit
                it in the future or will it eventually become an orphan.
                Amipro and Wordstar come to mind and I am sure others
                can be named.

-- Jay Lozier
jslozier@gmail.com

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Steven_Bradley · November 26, 2012, 6:44pm

I totally agree with all this--but in a pinch, as everyone I'm sure knows,
one can open a document (most of them at least), and go back and "decode"
it with a text processor like Notepad or Notepad++; come to think of it,
I'm actually surprised that Sourceforge doesn't offer a converter for all
those old documents--not to mention all the documents written on Apple
II's, etc. All of us have them. I have many documents written in Wordstar,
Wordperfect, and so on. There IS a Wordstar converter (google it), but I
don't know how it works on the early versions--I had version 3.3, and it
works fine for me. I STILL think that the way to go is to separate text
and formatting, rather than embedding it, if that's possible. It might not
be possible with Calc and other similar documents. Also, and not to be
forgotten, is Google Drive; Drive has never failed to upload and convert
any of my Word documents, although I admit I've not gone below Word 2000 in
my attempts. I don't think I have any Word 97 docs to try, since I was
still using a combination of Word for Windows 3.1 and Wordperfect (I loved
Wordperfect, but it was rapidly being "eaten" by the MS behemoth). I also
used a program called askSam (pretty much defunct now, and pretty
primitive), which was a textually-oriented database; that has given me the
most satisfaction, since the newest version gives me a choice of export to
a number of common formats, and will import most Word versions, and also
html--however, it's been pretty much supplanted by the Google products,
since one can search any text across documents. I think that some of my
greatest challenges are going to come from the documents I put together in
Publisher and similar programs over the years, not thinking I'd want them
again--but of course I do. I am still thinking, "Text Processor with
external formats added on top for retrievability/interoperability." I
can't imagine what these issues must be like for a corporation with
terabytes of data, or a government with similar quantities of data. I have
megabytes, but my problems are small compared to say, Germany.
--Steve Bradley

anne-ology · November 27, 2012, 6:42pm

well said.

Hi

Steven_Bradley · November 27, 2012, 7:25pm

That is really unfortunate. In Windows/DOS, we have problems with
unrecognizable characters, and characters that are part of the formatting,
but not so much the difficulties you are talking about--although at least
one program (the old Ashton-Tate solution known as Framework) DID have
quite a mess of confusing characters in it, and scattered throughout in
some sort of order, so I'm not sure if this is the same thing you mean. It
is really frustrating to realize that if you had written everything by
hand, you might be better off than with a computer that stores your
information....I picked up some of my old grad school notes (1970's), and
they were quite readable--because they were typed and annotated on PAPER.
This is something that has to be fixed for the future. That's why I said
that it's important that there be a single standard, and that the various
regulatory authorities demand that it be so (think if we had multiple
voltages and amperages, and frequencies in our electrical systems, and if
DC current was used by some, AC by others--in the same country...the
preservation of data is at least as important.).

Tom_Davies · November 27, 2012, 8:02pm

Hi
MS keeps claiming that is what their new format is all about. They claimed it with Rtf which they no longer develop which fits their pattern for gradually dropping completely and they are claiming it again with their DocX and all.

Given that ODF 1.0 and 1.1 still open in LO, AOO and all the rest it looks like ODF might achieve the promise, especially given that "contents" written in Xml can be opened and read.
Regards from
Tom

Virgil_Arrington · November 27, 2012, 8:04pm

For any document that I think I may need well into the future, I have learned to save a copy in plain ASCII text. Yes, I lose all my formatting, but I at least have a version of the text itself that can be read by any word processor or text editor. It's at least better than pen and paper.

Virgil

Steven_Bradley · November 28, 2012, 5:36am

I sure hope so. I haven't got much faith, since every company strives to
keep customers, and the best way to do that (they think) is to have a file
format that others can't read or easily convert. However, every company
also recognizes the need for interoperability, so there are limits. My
frustration with the present system is boundless. It's an idea that's often
repeated in the business world--who ever heard of "standard car parts?" Or
"standard prescription drugs?" or... (fill in the blanks). It's much better
to promote competition by being the best, and challenging the world to beat
you at your own game. I thought that might be what Apple was doing with
the iPad, until they sued Samsung for "infringement." It's sort of like a
competition in which everyone keeps changing the way the judges judge, or
moving the goal, or altering the rules slightly so that you can't play.
Steve Bradley

Pedro_Lino · November 28, 2012, 2:05pm

Hi Tom, all

Let me be the "Devil's advocate" for a moment...

Tom wrote

MS keeps claiming that is what their new format is all about. They
claimed it with Rtf which they no longer develop which fits their pattern
for gradually dropping completely and they are claiming it again with
their DocX and all.

RTF is plain text with format codes. So it is true that you can open it even
in a text editor. Even if it is discontinued, it is not encrypted.
Docx is exactly the same as ODT. A Zip container which stores objects such
as images, formats and the actual text in a XML file.

Tom wrote

Given that ODF 1.0 and 1.1 still open in LO, AOO and all the rest it looks
like ODF might achieve the promise, especially given that "contents"
written in Xml can be opened and read.

The same applies to MS Office. You can always open previous MS files in a
newer Office version.

As explained above ODF follows the same logic as OOXML
In both cases you need to have some program that opens the zip container in
order to have access to the XML file which contains the text.

Cheers,
Pedro

planas · November 28, 2012, 2:25pm

Hi Tom, all

Let me be the "Devil's advocate" for a moment...

Tom wrote

MS keeps claiming that is what their new format is all about. They
claimed it with Rtf which they no longer develop which fits their pattern
for gradually dropping completely and they are claiming it again with
their DocX and all.

RTF is plain text with format codes. So it is true that you can open it even
in a text editor. Even if it is discontinued, it is not encrypted.
Docx is exactly the same as ODT. A Zip container which stores objects such
as images, formats and the actual text in a XML file.

Tom wrote

Given that ODF 1.0 and 1.1 still open in LO, AOO and all the rest it looks
like ODF might achieve the promise, especially given that "contents"
written in Xml can be opened and read.

The same applies to MS Office. You can always open previous MS files in a
newer Office version.

Up to a point, there are some very old MSO formats not supported. They are very old so presumably one updated the format to a newer format at some point. The problem with this is that some documents were generated and later never reopened after a few months of circulation and thus never converted

As explained above ODF follows the same logic as OOXML
In both cases you need to have some program that opens the zip container in
order to have access to the XML file which contains the text.

Cheers,
Pedro

The problem is not that OOXML or MSOX formats are structurally similar to ODF formats but most users are completely unaware of the fact you can get the text out of them. On a more philosophical and practical note - why should users need to be unzipping these containers to retrieve their data? What should happen is that there is a firm, open, international standard (ODF) that is used by all.

One should remember that computers are primarily tools for most people that allow them to do something useful. Most do not wish to muck around in the details of container structures or worry about opening files. They just want to do something with these details abstracted into the background.

Virgil_Arrington · November 28, 2012, 2:56pm

This is utterly maddening.

Based on Pedro's post, I ran a simple test. I created a document in Word (.docx) and an identical document in LibO (.odt). I saved them both and then extracted their contents using 7-zip Manager. I was amazed at how similar the two document contents were, and yet how different. Neither document had any of the binary smilie faces I've come to expect by opening a .doc document in a text editor. All of the individual files contained formatting codes in simple text. And, yet...

The maddening part is how two programs can create the same type of documents (xml files saved in a zipped format) and yet remain so completely different.

I found similar results when I tried saving .rtf files with different word processors. They all claimed to be .rtf, and in fact, were .rtf, yet they were all different.

But, MS knows how to market its products. Programs need something to set them apart from other similar programs, and office suites are getting to the point that any decent suite will be able to perform the same tasks as the others. LibO is set apart by being free (both in $ and in license restrictions). MS can't compete head to head with that model, so the only way it can set itself apart is by maintaining some uniqueness in its file format. The only reason people buy MS is because everybody else buys MS. If it fully adopted the .odt format, there would no longer be a reason for people to buy MS. Unless it had some killer feature, it would die and LibO would win.

I sense that a similar future lies for either Apache OO or LibO. Right now, the two programs are very similar and use the same file format. I use both programs interchangeably, sometimes forgetting which one I have open. My guess is that, at some point, either Apache or LibO will become different enough and so clearly superior that the other will fade away. That may be the hazard of having a truly open and standard file format. It eliminates a program's ability to survive.

Virgil

Miroslaw_Zalewski · November 28, 2012, 3:14pm

This is far from truth.

Take a look at e-mail protocols: POP3 and IMAP. Do we have only two e-mail
server apps and two e-mail client apps, one for each? No. We have plenty of
servers and tons of clients.

Take a look at XMPP messaging protocol (this is what Gmail and Facebook uses
for their chats). Again: plenty of servers, tons of apps.

Take a look at BitTorrent file sharing protocol. There are many clients for
every platform.

We have standards for HTML and CSS, yet there are at least four competing web
browsers out there (although there was time when market was monopolized).

This list can go on.

Standard file formats are pretty much irrelevant to program's ability to
survive. It's number of features, availability on certain OS, UI, branding,
number translations and other things which are around standards that matters.

planas · November 28, 2012, 3:38pm

This is utterly maddening.

Based on Pedro's post, I ran a simple test. I created a document in Word (.docx) and an identical document in LibO (.odt). I saved them both and then extracted their contents using 7-zip Manager. I was amazed at how similar the two document contents were, and yet how different. Neither document had any of the binary smilie faces I've come to expect by opening a .doc document in a text editor. All of the individual files contained formatting codes in simple text. And, yet...

The maddening part is how two programs can create the same type of documents (xml files saved in a zipped format) and yet remain so completely different.

I found similar results when I tried saving .rtf files with different word processors. They all claimed to be .rtf, and in fact, were .rtf, yet they were all different.

But, MS knows how to market its products. Programs need something to set them apart from other similar programs, and office suites are getting to the point that any decent suite will be able to perform the same tasks as the others. LibO is set apart by being free (both in $ and in license restrictions). MS can't compete head to head with that model, so the only way it can set itself apart is by maintaining some uniqueness in its file format. The only reason people buy MS is because everybody else buys MS. If it fully adopted the .odt format, there would no longer be a reason for people to buy MS. Unless it had some killer feature, it would die and LibO would win.

Actually MS would need to adopt a different commercial model. The model could possibly be similar to Canonical's model with Ubuntu - the software is free or very cheap but you pay for professional support/training/certifications. The issue is providing value to the user. I have used Ubuntu and derivatives and other than donations to a project never spent any money.

The real problem for MS in the hypothetical market is that they would need to adopt a different attitude towards users and their user community. Currently they do not have an MSO community similar to LO/AOO or Ubuntu.

Another model that Oracle uses with MySQL is there is a community edition (free) and an enterprise edition (pricey). The enterprise edition includes more support options and features than the community edition.

MS does have options if the ODF formats became the international standard. Whether they would adapt quickly enough is another story.

I sense that a similar future lies for either Apache OO or LibO. Right now, the two programs are very similar and use the same file format. I use both programs interchangeably, sometimes forgetting which one I have open. My guess is that, at some point, either Apache or LibO will become different enough and so clearly superior that the other will fade away. That may be the hazard of having a truly open and standard file format. It eliminates a program's ability to survive.

Product extinction is inevitable for many reasons. I can name old standards equivalent for Writer and Calc that have not been available for years/decades. I suspect LO and AOO will diverge somewhat with each having particular strengths and weaknesses.