Not everyone has the money for a copy of Word. There once was a time when free rich text editors were valuable. But at this point I agree it isn't needed anymore. There are plenty of FOSS alternatives to word that hit that market. Microsoft has probably kept it around this long to prevent people from looking, but now they've put their bet on cloud services.
There are plenty of FOSS alternatives to word that hit that market.
Plenty? I know one and its fork. That's about one and a half.
EDIT: Oh, you probably meant the rich text editors like Wordpad, not text processors like Word. My bad for misunderstanding.
ScintillaTE is an old-ass one. Most people have never heard of it, and those that have have only heard of its variant, UniSciTE, which came bundled as the default text editor for Unity, something like 15 years ago.
I didn’t know Joeffice had a fork. What’s it called?
Knowing the Internet, it would be Joemom, I presume? :)
Assuming you are talking about OpenOffice and LibreOffice, there's also CollaboraOffice (although this may be counted as another half one, since it's a online fork of LO) and OnlyOffice in the FOSS sphere. Probably more out there I'm not aware off.
I think AbiWord is still around, which used to be the FOSS simple, WordPad-like word processor of choice.
Not everyone has the money for a copy of Word. There once was a time when free rich text editors were valuable. But at this point I agree it isn't needed anymore. There are plenty of FOSS alternatives to word that hit that market. Microsoft has probably kept it around this long to prevent people from looking, but now they've put their bet on cloud services.
Plenty? I know one and its fork. That's about one and a half.
EDIT: Oh, you probably meant the rich text editors like Wordpad, not text processors like Word. My bad for misunderstanding.
ScintillaTE is an old-ass one. Most people have never heard of it, and those that have have only heard of its variant, UniSciTE, which came bundled as the default text editor for Unity, something like 15 years ago.
I didn’t know Joeffice had a fork. What’s it called?
Knowing the Internet, it would be Joemom, I presume? :)
Assuming you are talking about OpenOffice and LibreOffice, there's also CollaboraOffice (although this may be counted as another half one, since it's a online fork of LO) and OnlyOffice in the FOSS sphere. Probably more out there I'm not aware off.
I think AbiWord is still around, which used to be the FOSS simple, WordPad-like word processor of choice.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/free-office-online-for-the-web
Word is available for free now