Old and busted:
Running your badly written bullshit on a bundled Chromium instance.
New hotness:
Running your badly written bullshit on a bundled office suite.
Future:
Running your badly written bullshit on an office suite running through Wasm on a Chromium instance inside of a virtual machine.
Whatever it takes to not have to make developers have to learn to write code again.
Wow! If only I could get LibreOffice for free without ChatGPT.
Sorry, they are a bundled package now.
Weird. I would have expected them to rather illegally bundle a pirated Microsoft Office with it.
It’d be legal if they just claimed it was part of the training data
Is that legal?
Yes. LibreOffice is licensed under the MPL, which permits redistribution. Assuming that they noted it contains LibreOffice and where to get the source, anyway.
I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding is that MPL is weak copyleft, so libreoffice can be distributed alongside proprietary software as long as they make the source of their libreoffice build available.
The duality of Lem
Hey he said binaries only, not the licence and source reference 😢
No! Will there be consequences?
Libreoffice is MPL, which allows distribution alongside proprietary software.
That’s interesting and distressing.
On what basis did you proclaim “No! Not legal!” if you’re now surprised by the license? Misunderstanding of the license?
Why? The authors of the software have specifically allowed it to be used in ways like this.
I didn’t think they were distributing it correctly, no mention of the licence or source attribution
It’s the whole issue with copyleft licences.
EDIT: non-copyleft
What issue are you talking about?
BSD licenses, the MIT one and such allow proprietary redistribution, which I find repugnant.
Also yeah I wrote this in sleep-deprivation, I should have written “non-copyleft”…
No! Anymore questions?
Yes, are you including extrajudicial consequences in your answer?
No, do you think guillotines, or is that too old school?
Maybe, I think guillotines can be impersonal, which might not elicit an appropriate level of emotional investment into any acts that are intended to be carried out.
Edit I broke the line of questions I’m so sorry
No forgiveness.
… But why?
Surely there are openxml packages for their platform that dont need a full office installation/redistrubution. Like how with c# there is the openxml package. Hell, worst case you have it do word tasks on the server via api. Api already can do it for the online chatgpt…Well, pulling in unnecessary dependencies is something ai-written code tends to do, so…
Tbh, not only ai written code. Many people do too.
I know. It would just be funny if the claude desktop app was made by claude.
Looks like it’s some kind of dependency… seems very odd though, why is this included? Are they using it to handle .docx, .xlsx, etc files? I remember being tempted to do that once years ago when I ran into one of those Really Hard Problems that would take weeks to solve. I spent the weeks instead
I think they’re used so agents can make changes to Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. It seems to be using the headless version of LibreOffice.
Yeah… I didn’t want to include 430MB of bloat in my bundle to each end user though for one feature, so I did it the hard way instead: Manually editing document files using XPATH. Maybe I’m too old school, if everyone’s shipping 1GB+ apps like it’s nothing nowadays.
I didn’t think LibreOffice supported the latest versions of office formats though, so wouldnt it potentially break existing files if used?
Maybe not for advanced function (resulting in re-arranged objects) but the common stuff should still be parsable.
parseable sure, but if it mis-parses something, the saved file will also have the mistake
ahhh, the trick has been dispelled. it isn’t as magical as i thought it was.