Office: Alternatives since Collabora introduced nagware with possibility to track users

šŸ± Features & apps
63

Thanks everyone for the prompt replies.

@mmeeks Thanks for your openness to engage with the community. Yes please I would very much welcome the feature that you describe, and I would happily donate towards it. Would it help if I create an issue on your github?

Regarding your question, perhaps one nag is worse than another, but for me I simply donā€™t want nags at all. I would like to be free, and for that reason I am willing to spend my time and money setting up my own server. I will choose the best available software that fits my definition of free, even it that means sticking with the ā€œtextā€ app.

For me Collabora is just a component of my personal server alongside NextCloud with its various apps, apache, linux, php, the companies for hosting, domain names, certificates, etc. I simply donā€™t want all of these components calling attention to themselves and consuming the time of the circle of people I share with.

These people typically are non-technical, suspicious of my geeky ways and pretty quick to declare that they want to go back to using Google Docs. Likely everyone here can appreciate the absurdness of the idea that Google is less intrusive, but potentially you have also encountered it.

Also I am concerned about the privacy impact of mechanisms such as cookies to track the periodic display of nags. I donā€™t wish to own such data, maybe itā€™s even dubious under privacy law as I never asked for consent.

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64

You could pay for the regular license at $17 a user per year. Actually quite reasonable.

65

First I have to say Iā€™m not an expert, but I played around a bit with the dev tools in the browser:

  1. Welcome.html, welcome.js and welcome.css are served locally and donā€™t serve cookies. But! they contain etags that are also reflected in the URL, which to my understanding may be even worse than cookies. However (and again, Iā€™m not an expert), since the splash screen is served locally, I donā€™t think there are any privacy implications.

  2. More problematic is the feedback button. When you press it, it loads a feedback form from https://rating.collaboraonline.com/Rate/feedback.html However, this external resource will only be loaded if you deliberately press that button.

  3. I manged to block the welcome screen with the following Rewrite rule in apache:

    RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (welcome) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

    ā€¦but I have not tested it extensively, so I have no idea if it has any side effects. It may need refining if there are any.

I agree in principle, but you need to have at least 20 users to buy a subscription. So itā€™s not really an option for home users. Also, if you buy a subscription, it will almost certainly phone home to check the licence, so this might not be an option for @WhiteKnight either :wink:

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66

Thanks again for the replies. Iā€™ll try to sum up, all of these are IMHO:smiley:.

  1. A key principle of Nextcloud is to make free software available and it rings big alarm bells if someone proposes a ā€œsolutionā€ of paying. Any statement about reasonableness of the cost is obviously highly subjective and anyway not really relevant because I believe we are discussing the principle rather than the specific amount.

  2. The discussion about what Collabora does belongs in their issue queue and I will raise it.

The discussion about what NextCloud does in general about apps with a paid element belongs here. Itā€™s a delicate matter that needs to be handled correctly to allow a balance of freedom for users and income for developers. I will raise it as suggested and I am willing to sponsor towards the cost of it.

  1. I propose that Collabora should be categorised in the app store with flags something like this:
  • ā€œYellow alertā€: app requires payment for enterprise use. This alert is not in any way a criticism or suggestion things should be otherwise. Nevertheless it should be noted for transparency to allow people to make an informed decision.
  • ā€œRed alertā€: app is ā€œnag-wareā€. My definition of this term is that the app has mandatory UI features that demand userā€™s interaction and they can be removed by paying. This is a behaviour that should be strongly discouraged and potentially it means the featured status should be removed and the app becomes less easy to find.
  • Iā€™m also not an expert, but probably the privacy is OK. I guess the etag is just a neat way to re-show the welcome page for a new version.
  1. I see a clear risk that the two issues I raise will sit there and nothing will happen. There is a third option which is for a group of NextCloud enthusiasts to create a community build of Collabora with the nag removed. It seems a shame and it would surely be better to avoid it, as it potentially encourages enterprises to use it against the license conditions.
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67

It would make more sense for yellow flag to mean this. I donā€™t think the color system will be accepted unless it basically matches AI ratings.

Nag screen does not limit use, but cutting off the ability to edit at all on mobile (OnlyOffice) is in a worse flag score than a nag screen.

68

I seem to be a bit lost hereā€¦ about which version are you running exactly? @WhiteKnight

is it a collabora on itā€™s own or is it the so called NC-office? and which version number?

69

Interesting, it certainly sounds like a good idea to compare with the Ethical AI ratings and I see that they have 4 colours.

Perhaps the answer is orange for nagā€¦

  • ā€œScalability limit for freeā€ seems like a yellow. This encourages funding the project from enterprises (who are making money and would otherwise pay the likes of Google), which is probably the most desirable from a user perspective.
  • ā€œOccasional nag for freeā€ seems like an orange. This is targeting ordinary end users (who could get a free, but-non-private service from Google), but itā€™s still usable.
  • ā€œSignificant feature limitation for freeā€ seems like a red. This is targeting end users and making the product unusable for many use cases. Perhaps these should cease to be ā€œfeaturedā€ apps?
70

I installed Collabora 23.05 as a standalone deb file. However I believe that my comments are fairly general, they arenā€™t really tied to a specific version.

71

thanks for clearing thatā€¦
well from my understanding there clearly shouldnā€™t be any nagging with nc-office, which you donā€™t have installed apparently.

in general I am with you about the nag concerning the official and standalone-version of collabora. I consider it fair and great that mmeeks offered to change it for the better.

so my question here is: why donā€™t you use nc-office instead?

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72

Also, are we clear on the differences between nc-office and collabora? Asking as I do not use either (Pi is too slow).

73

Thatā€™s a very good question, and itā€™s all quite confusing. Iā€™ve done some brief research and it looks like there is no ā€œinsteadā€.

Thereā€™s a lot of publicity about NextCloud Office, but it seems to refer to the same thing that weā€™re already talking about: NextCloud plus a Collabora Online server. See installation instructions and blog post.

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74

Apsolutely correct:

Nextcloud Office serves as WOPI Host
Collabora Office serves as the WOPI Client

In cleartext, Nextcloud Office is only the Host for Collabora Office.

ernolf

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75

Youā€™re of course correct. :slight_smile: But @JimmyKater probably refers to the built-in Collabora server: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/richdocumentscode

@WhiteKnight ā€¦which, by the way, is not marked as ā€œfeaturedā€ :wink:

ā€¦and they also seem to have removed/disabled the welcome screen on that one. Or at least I could not get it to appear in a quick test.

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76

I have some good news. I discovered a configuration settings home_mode.enable that seems to disable the nags. Thereā€™s not much documentation however you can see it working in the code.

Please can anyone else confirm? Is there any way we can document this to spread awareness within NextCloud?

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77

I raised an issue for FOSS rating for apps

78

Nice finding :slight_smile:

I just pulled the latest CODE Docker image and added home_mode.enable as an environment variable when starting the container, and voilĆ , no nag screen :slight_smile:

So Iā€™d say things are looking good, letā€™s see if they stay that way. Iā€™m cautiously optimistic. :wink:

79

Great thanks for confirming.

I raised another issue Explain the free installation options for Collabora

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80

Well Iā€™m not so sure anymore whether passing the environment variable had any effect at all. In the meantime I have tried all possible combinatons likeā€¦

"home_mode_enable"
"home_mode_enable=false"
"home_mode_enable=true"
"extra_params=--o:home_mode.enable=true"
"extra_params=--o:home_mode.enable=false"

etcā€¦

ā€¦and I could not get the nag screen to appear, even without passing the variable at all. So maybe they finally removed it for goodā€¦?!? :slight_smile:

But letā€™s wait and see if we get an official response to your GitHub issue.

81

But it should be

home_mode.enable instead of home_mode_enable

and if you host it as a standalone server, you have to set this from false to true in your /etc/coolwsd/coolwsd.xml:

	<home_mode>
		<enable desc="Enable more configuration options for home users" type="bool" default="false">true</enable>
	</home_mode>

and I can confirm that it suppresses the nag screen. As soon as I set the value back to false and restart the coolwsd, the nag screen reapears the next time I call it up.

Much and good luck
ernolf

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82

I use the standalone Docker container: collabora/code

I have passed the environment variable in all possible ways, and I still have no idea if it does anything.

Last time I tried, I started the container as follows:

docker run -t -d -p 127.0.0.1:9980:9980 --name=collabora \
-e "aliasgroup1=https://cloud.mydomain.tld:443,https://cloud\\.mydomain\\.tld:443" \
-e "username=admin" -e "password=super_secret_password" \
-e "lang=de_CH" -e "dictionaries=de_CH de_DE en_GB en_US" \
-e "extra_params=--o:home_mode.enable=true" \
--restart always collabora/code

Anyways, my point was that no matter how I start the container, I donā€™t get the nag screen, even if I donā€™t pass the extr_parms environment variable.

Ah and the coolwsd.xml in the container always says the following:

  <home_mode>
        <enable desc="Enable more configuration options for home users" type="bool" default="false">false</enable>
    </home_mode>