Comment 21 for bug 782406

Key points ... (continued from #19)

(3) LibreOffice Compare Document is badly in need of fundamental overhaul, radical improvement and proper fine-graining, and this also includes the removal of its implicit exclusion of frames, footnotes, headers, fields and other essential items of information contained in documents.

I am attaching (see #20) a single random document which once more illustrates these three points I am making. Since LibreOffice Document Compare is so bad that it in fact makes even this short document crash, I can only salvage it in the form of three screen grabs. I have compiled these in a single png image with added explanation and comments. It very much saddens me that this presentation (#20) is by no means an advertisement or recommendation for LibreOffice.

Open source software is an invaluable phenomenon. However, it can only make true and broad inroads beyond hobbyists and servers if the developers, on the one hand, and those like us, on the other, who promote it and actually put it in the workplace -- often in key production-critical contexts -- work hand in hand and in sympathy to effectively and efficiently resolve the issues reported by actual users of the systems and applications. We resolve almost all such issues in-house, but some are elusive, defying practical work-arounds, and often systemically rooted in key core components and applications.

We do our very best to support open source and to get it deployed wherever suitable. But when the effort proves one-way and when positive feedback sincerely aimed to improve matters routinely falls on deaf ears and is left unattended or, as in this case of LibreOffice, simply bumped and dumped, then, I am very sad indeed to say, we are clearly on the wrong track.