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One of the comments on the announcement of LibreOffice 26.8 was a simple question: “So, no AI is now a feature?” LibreOffice does not reject artificial intelligence out of hand, but an office suite used by tens of millions of people – in schools, hospitals, public bodies, law firms and thousands of other organisations – will not add a feature to its default configuration until that feature can be delivered under the conditions defined by the project in accordance with its principles. User-controlled execution. The user must be able to choose where inference takes place: on the local computer, on an infrastructure directly controlled by the user, or on a service chosen independently by the user. A default setting that silently redirects to a single provider is not a choice. No content may leave the computer without authorisation. The content of documents is a user’s asset and, in many implementations, is also legally protected material: medical records, case files, tender documents and student data. Transmission must be the result of a user’s decision and not behaviour carried out in the background by the application. No telemetry of any kind. LibreOffice does not collect usage data, and this must also apply



It certainly is. If you wanna feel like you’ve rewound 10 years in the past, you gotta pony up. And even still everything feels wrong.
But in the interim, before the bubble pops, I do see the value in having no AI as a feature, especially when the immediate alternative is “go fuck yourself”.
One payment for actual slop removal, priced by devs properly to allow them somewhat equivalent revenue compared to if you were being data harvested - that’s basically the only good way to do it if we’re gonna do it.
No micro transactions and no double or triple or quadruple or quintuple or sextuple dipping on larger payments either.
When did everything become a fever dream?