The ChatGPT desktop app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
a month ago by inari to c/technology
I've been waiting for all the new software that is going to displace the expensive incumbents.
Pretty much every industry has specialist software that is really expensive so there's plenty of choices for a competitor to make.
I've done this for a game I play. I've no interest in learning unity, but had a bunch of mods I'd like to make that are more than config edits. I was able to vibe code about 5 of them in an evening or two that do exactly what I want. They're probably terrible code, but nothing else is built on top of them, I'm not distributing them and if they break they break no big deal. So pretty happy with it.
The number of old mods that don't work after an update that the author has long since stopped supporting that take 10 mins to fix with a llm. But I've tried and couldn't figure out how to fix my self after weeks of trying is wild.
I'm not a smart man. I just want my stupid mod that I've been using for half a decade to keep working.
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.
Weird. I would have expected them to rather illegally bundle a pirated Microsoft Office with it.
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.
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.
It's the whole issue with copyleft licences.
EDIT: non-copyleft
Yes, are you including extrajudicial consequences in your answer?
... 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...
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
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?
ahhh, the trick has been dispelled. it isn't as magical as i thought it was.
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why didn’t they just ask chat peepee to write an office suite for them? i heard it’s really good at code 🫣
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