why didn’t they just ask chat peepee to write an office suite for them? i heard it’s really good at code 🫣
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2026
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They can't catch it to do it
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.
The only scene I see flourishing is game modding.
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.
(slash s !!!)
... 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.
Wow! If only I could get LibreOffice for free without ChatGPT.
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.
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. 
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.
ahhh, the trick has been dispelled. it isn't as magical as i thought it was.