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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5092 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Markets have internal feedback systems to prevent them from upsetting you too much, you can just walk away and go somewhere else.

Exactly where are you going to go instead of Office 2019?

What issues do exist is generally in the legal aspect of hosting. Or rephrased, because of the government making rules on what you can and can't do.

Are you suggesting that people opposing this should demand that the government repeal DMCA and copyright laws, and that you won't accept a solution where the government does something other than repealing laws?

You should know very well that getting the government to repeal copyright and DMCA is infeasible. If you can't accept less optimal solutions, you are telling people that because the solution doesn't involve maximal restrictions on government, they shouldn't have a solution at all.

Furthermore, even libertarians are supposed to permit the government to enforce laws against fraud. Microsoft claiming it's perpetual and then walking that back should be considered fraud, and even with your anti-government stance, you have no grounds to oppose forcing Microsoft to actually provide what they said they would.

Exactly where are you going to go instead of Office 2019?

People have listed alternatives even in this very thread! So they aren't hard to find. Seems like there's open office, WSOffice, onlyoffice, libre office, and of course Google docs that will fulfills most things you'd need.

Are you suggesting that people opposing this should demand that the government repeal DMCA and copyright laws, and that you won't accept a solution where the government does something other than repealing laws?

Copyright laws can have some value but "I can't legally host this server" is inherently an issue from government because the problem is about what is legal.

You should know very well that getting the government to repeal copyright and DMCA is infeasible.

Because there's not enough political demand for reform. Lots of unpopular ideas that will never happen are objectively the right ones while unpopular ideas of rent seeking regulations consistently win. See basically everything in the housing market space for proof of that.

Furthermore, even libertarians are supposed to permit the government to enforce laws against fraud. Microsoft claiming it's perpetual and then walking that back should be considered fraud, and even with your anti-government stance, you have no grounds to oppose forcing Microsoft to actually provide what they said they would.

If they claimed it would be available forever and they're actively making it not available and it's not one of those lifetime guarantee type things where the specific details clarified it to something more reasonable then yeah that does seem like an issue that should be solved.

But can it not be solved through already existing fraud statutes?

People have listed alternatives even in this very thread!

If they were useful alternatives, people would be using them instead already.

Because there's not enough political demand for reform.

I repeat: If the only solution you will accept is the government getting rid of (or even reducing) copyright and DMCA, you are saying "I will accept no solution that's practical, and if you do come up with a practical solution, tough."

But can it not be solved through already existing fraud statutes?

Microsoft has a binding arbitration clause. I'm not going to win in Microsoft-approved arbitration.

I suppose you are going to say "well, you shouldn't have agreed to the arbitration clause when you bought and used the product".

People have listed alternatives even in this very thread! So they aren't hard to find. Seems like there's open office, WSOffice, onlyoffice, libre office, and of course Google docs that will fulfills most things you'd need.

And which of those Just Work, aren't horribly slow and don't have garbage UI (the reason I absolutely refuse to use Google Docs)?

If you're really all-in on UI (and don't hate post-2007-Microsoft), OnlyOffice. It's pretty explicitly trying to emulate Microsoft Office and to minimize on-boarding issues. Performance is comparable to MSOffice, one of the better PowerPoint equivalents.

LibreOffice is the most powerful and performant, but the UI looks like it came straight from 2003. That can be a plus, and is for me, but most won't like it. It does have the strongest Excel competitor if you're doing a lot of spreadsheet work.

I will generally discourage OpenOffice (effectively dead since Sun abandoned it, minimal updates) and Google Docs (usable for basic collaboration, but Google will bite you and it struggles badly as use cases get complicated). WPS Office had some trouble (Chinese ownership, censorship scandal), but I haven't used it so I can't comment deeper.

Suppose I have legacy VBA macros in Excel. Are there any that let me just directly use them? Last I had looked at LibreOffice, I think, and I was going to have to do some significant rewriting.

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