There are really two, almost entirely separate, points there - one is about missing interpretability of LibreOffice, and the other is about the author's inability to install Microsoft Office on Linux.

I'd like to articulate a case why supporting the the author's use cases is likely uneconomical.

With respect to the LibreOffice interoperability with Microsoft Office: the author works in publishing, which requires almost pixel-perfect equivalence between how a document is displayed between them and their collaborators. Faithfully reproducing almost 40 years of evolution in the layout engine (some of which co-evolution with the Windows OS and the font system) necessitates a development program of mind-boggling proportions. It is absolutely no surprise to me that no entity, either commercial or open source can finance such an endeavor. (Even Microsoft does not exhibit 100% interop between the native Office and the cloud Office 365)

A similar argument applies to being able to install Office on Linux, with the added nuance that the major driving force behind Wine etc are game distributors, whereas Office compatibility is not a major priority, especially given the VM and Office 365 alternatives.

Lots of things that just don't smell right here. First of all, every experience I've had trying to get GDocs to play ball with DOCX has led to the same misery that comes with LibreOffice. It works fine until you use an unsupported font, or tables, or precise image layouts, etc etc etc.

DOCX is a proprietary format. Perfect support is categorically impossible. A best-effort attempt is the best we'll ever get, and IME LibreOffice tries a lot harder than other office suites do.

Also, for what it's worth... you know what GDocs and Word won't open? A document written in WordStar on a TRS-80 in 1983. You know what will open that document? LibreOffice. LibreOffice checks all the boxes for my spreadsheet/document writing needs, and it has also been an irreplacable tool in my data archival efforts.

> With a free price tag, it could easily do that. But, it first needs to provide the required functionality, and today, it stubbornly refused to that, for ideological reasons.

Very confused by the article, even after re-reading it. The author keeps bringing up ideology throughout the article, but is there any arguments or evidence given that this is a factor? The simplest explanation to me is that OOXML is a de-facto proprietary format, and implementing full compatibility with it is simply a large technical undertaking that LibreOffice doesn't have the resources to effectively achieve right now. They even hint at that themselves: "From what I've been able to decipher, no non-Microsoft Office program implements the full specification and follows it to the letter."

In this modern age of .md and similar files why not try for "blue water sailing" and instead create an office suite which specifically plays to only open standards?

A word processor which supports the same style options as Google Docs and used pandoc to import/export would be as much as most users need.

That said, I'd really like to see an office suite put together out of the various opensource tools which try to approach documents/graphics in new and striking ways:

- LyX --- a "What You See Is What You Mean" document processor, it can offer quite professional capabilities (when I was doing STEM composition, the book which came in as LaTeX exported from LyX was the cleanest and most straight-forward manuscript I ever worked on)

- PySpread --- (or maybe Flexisheet if someone can get it to a usable state) Way more than most folks need, this Pythonic spreadsheet where every cell can be either a Python program or the output of a Python program could revolutionize what folks do w/ spreadsheets and data

- Jupyter Notebooks --- almost a de facto standard, getting wider adoption would be a good thing

- ipe --- https://ipe.otfried.org/ --- this, or TikzEdit or maybe xasy for Asymptote would be more drawing tool than most users would ever want, and able to make anything anyone really needs

Microsoft really doesn't want anyone to reliably copy their formats. Their standard is purposefully complicated and convoluted, it was almost rejected by ISO for this reason and it took heavy lobbying before it passed (I know of this personally as the ISO vote went through national ISO bodies).

I've worked with the Java implementation for writing Office files, the Apache POI. The internal package names for these classes are "hssf", "hwpf" and so on. It's not very obvious why until you Google it and, well, "hwpf" stands for "horrible word processor format", "hssf" is "horrible spreadsheet format" and so on. Implementing these things is often difficult for good reason, and sometimes for not so good reasons, but this is the first time I've encountered developers expressing such direct hostility towards what they were trying to implement.