[mikl]

That’s the nice thing about Open Source. Nothing’s stopping you from organizing this yourself.

[neepi]

This is the standard voice of someone who's never had to deal with a badly maintained or managed open source product or an asshole maintainer or had to run a fork for 6 years because no one will merge a trivial fix in. Or had a LibreOffice bug open for a decade.

Yeah I can really get in there and spend 2 years ripping the horrible UI out, then have to run a fork because it's not of interest to the maintainers and will never be merged.

At that point I'll just use MS office. Costs me 10 minutes salary a month.

[mmooss]

I don't understand these stories: Do people talk to the maintainer before they work on the change? If not, why not? It seems necessary and obvious to get people on board before you invest in something.

[worthless-trash]

But you can't fix that one either.

[adamors]

Not everyone has an extra 20 hours a week to contribute to open source, and I'm assuming a project as big as LibreOffice has a lot of non-technical hurdles in place for anyone new. It's perfectly reasonable to donate to people already working on it tho.

[ForHackernews]

He didn't want to do work himself, he wanted to contribute monetarily and have the desired outcome provided to him. That's the not-nice thing about Open Source.

[WindyMiller]

The comment said 'organizing this', not doing the development work. That could mean crowdfunding to fund development of the desired outcome.

A faff, of course, but perhaps a better deal than contributing monetarily to Microsoft to have Copilot shoved in your face instead of the features you actually want.

[grues-dinner]

Laughs in Wayland.

Sometimes no amount or organising or doing the work yourself can move things forward appreciably.

[LadyCailin]

Opportunity cost can’t be ignored, and that is absolutely a huge cost.

[kwk1]

The converse of this is the bad thing about open source. Although seemingly nothing's stopping people sometimes, somehow stuff still tend not to get done.