toweringgoat

>> For that to be viable it would have to add a real benefit that people would be willing to pay for.

does not necessarily mean:

>> [I have little hope for a] commercial desktop office that is not Microsoft.

Companies (and consumers) might have no reason to pay for the actual software itself, but they will pay for:

- Support: where support is things like fixing bugs that are encountered, producing custom builds with cherry-picked bug fixes, etc. Also, more traditional support around getting it configured in your enterprise and/or migrating your enterprise to new software.

- Feature development: so that the software does what they actually need. (Some places might do this in-house, but usually you'd just contract out to one of the companies that has developers with expertise in the codebase.)

It's a mistake to think that money can only be made by selling a product. In the open source world you generally sell services (which is tough, but there are a few companies in this space).

Because OpenOffice is hugely outdated and gets barely any updates. That's a problem for various reasons:

- MS Office compatibility, which Libreoffice invests heavily in.

- Security: from what I remember OpenOffice struggled to ship fixes to various security issues in the past years. Meanwhile LibreOffice invest quite a bit: they're able to ship security fixes fast, and have spent time fuzzing and otherwise hardening code.

- Support: if you want commercial support, LibreOffice has that (not relevant for consumers, but important for enterprise).

OpenOffice hasn't even had a major release since 2014, only very rare point upgrades. That kind of cadence speaks for itself.

Oh come on, let's stop it with the CEO bashing. Especially around he salary. You need a CEO, and Bay Area salaries are high.

Just to illustrate the numbers: a fresh graduate with no experience will easily get more than 100k (even at Mozilla, who IME pay a bit less). A plain manager of a 10-person team at a big bay area company will be earning close to 500k (and most of their direct reports will also be in the 300k-500k range). Then you get your principal and distinguished engineers who can easily make 1M per year. 2.5M for someone leading a 1000 person company isn't expensive, and you do need someone to lead that company - to make tose strategic decisions.

You can quibble around whether or not a specific person made the right decisions (Mozilla aren't doing great, but they're also in a tough environment - maybe their CEO could be making better decisions that would boost usage - or maybe usage is entirely out of their control.) But you do need that person leading the company. And you need to retain them.

And her job definitely is needed, regardless of how well it's being done.

Honestly, it varies.

Rust seems to have a strong community of voluntary contributors, and could probably be run without company backing. Similar stories if you look at major FOSS projects such as KDE and Gnome - primarily dependent on a wide base of volunteers.

Then there are projects with a mix: plenty of volunteers, along with many commercial contributors - the commercial contributors tend to be more significant (certainly they add more code - but then they're the ones pushing new features for their customers) - but then there are enough volunteer contributions that the projects aren't dependent on the commercial entities. Linux Kernel, LibreOffice, Kubernetes, VSCode, come to mind. And with multiple commercial entities, it's not a tragedy if one drops out.

Then there are those projects with a single commercial backer, and fewer volunteers. Those are the ones that die off when the company drops out. The question is - is Servo in this category?

When it comes to Mozilla, "community project" is often equivalent to dead project. There are exceptions - Thunderbird appears to be doing OK - but my experience with Mozilla is that community is an afterthought - a place to hopefully get some free labour.

That said, Servo did seem to be one of the more lively places, so perhaps it will continue.

>> Thank you for being a patron of the Dallas Morning News. Unfortunately, our site is unavailable to European Union visitors

Please learn some basic geography. Norway (and Switzerland) are not in the EU.

That's actually how large parts of Switzerland count their votes. (Some areas count/weigh ballots.)

This e-voting system is optional, can't be used for more than 1/3rd of voters in a given district, and is only being used by a small number of regions.

Given what's happened here, the moratorium on e-voting looks like it could well happen after all (funnily enough, that will also go to a vote).

Using France as a representaiton of Europe isn't really sensible. And Europe as a representation of life outside the US even more so.

Travelling to France feels similar to travelling to the US to me. Horrible infrastructure (especially Paris IMHO). Similar feelings for some other European countries, Italy at the forefront.

Better models are places like the Nordics, New Zealand, Singapore. But more middlingly, Canada, Germany, Taiwan, all outclass life in the US or France. Heck, I'd even say China are doing a lot better in many regards (they have their own issues of course, but many aspects are strong).

You are completely wrong. Customs officials in most countries do not open packages, they use the customs sticker declared value. (Source: I actually receive international packages regularly. I've had one opened package.)

The courier/post office will generally validate that that sticker matches the value you told them for insurance purposes either way.

You don't need anything near as complex. You just need to give visa-holders (A) job mobility, (B) the right to stay in the country for some amount of time when not employed (this doesn't have to be unlimited...), and ideally (C) not lock the Visa to the employer beyond a year or two.

Some countries implement the above, some don't.

NIN is rarely used in the UK. You need one for student financing... and later for your employer to correctly relay your taxes to HMRC. Certainly it's not needed for banks/credit cards/phones/brokerages/etc.

Incorrect. You can open accounts as a non-resident. However if you're afflicted with USA citizenship they'll generally tell you to get lost unless you have a lot of money.

You will have to pay fees, correct, that's just the cost of compliance in today's world though. The fees are comparable to fees at US based banks FWIW (except the US banks will charge those even to residents in certain cases).

Schwab are great if you only want to keep USD. They're terrible otherwise, including the fact that they charge 1% currency conversion if you send them a non-USD wire.

And they're not a bank, meaning your cash isn't insured. (Unless you reside in the USA, in which case you can get a proper bank account with FDIC insurance).

Maintenance. Some countries invest a lot in active maintenance (Japan, Switzerland), some invest a bit (Germany, UK), some just don't or throw away their money (USA).