When You Are Justified in Complaining About FOSS

LibreOffice 4.0 has recently been released, and has received a lot of unfounded criticism over its new ability to be themed using Firefox Personas. Now would be a good time to go over when it is acceptable or not to complain about FOSS, as there seems to be quite a lot of confusion about that.

Most of the time, you should not complain about FOSS like this because:

• You got it for free.
• If you don't like it, you don't have to use it.
• You are encouraged to fix the things that annoy you.
• You did not do any work.

However, there are a few cases where you are allowed to complain about FOSS:

• When the product destroys your data.
• When there is no way to contribute to the project other than forking it. (e.g. Android)
• When you have contributed code/patches that are widely desired, but the maintainers will not accept them.
• When you are paying the developers to make changes, and they are not.

Back to Personas!

All of the complaints the LO team have received over this issue are unfounded because the software is free, does not force you to update to the newest version, has a remarkably open ecosystem (1500 merges from 3.0 to 4.0), and the product still works without ever using that feature.

Not only does LO 4.0 work better than the 3.X branches, it is vastly superior in speed, supported formats, and code maintainability.

This whole issue will seem silly in two months when Ubuntu releases a branded LO using a theme that adds subtleties to the document editor that perfectly integrate it with the platform, but until then hopefully these guidelines will suffice for indignant posters.