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Open365 Is An Open Source Alternative to Microsoft Office 365 (open365.io)
Martin Brinkmann, writing for Ghacks: Open365 is an open source Office 365 alternative that allows you to edit or create documents online, and to sync files with the cloud. The service is in beta currently but you can sign up for it already on the official website. You may use it using a web browser, download clients for Windows, Mac or Linux desktop machines, or for Android. An iOS client is in the making currently and will be made available as well soon. Open 365 offers two main features that you can make use of. First, it enables you to synchronize files between devices you use and the cloud. Second, it allows you to view, edit and create documents in the cloud using the technology provided by the Open Source Office suite LibreOffice Online for that.
If there's one thing that should be clear by now, it's that normal users and advanced users don't want to use web-based UIs! They always give an inferior experience to native apps, regardless of the platform.
Most of mobile's success is because of native apps, not because of web apps. And the native apps that have been implemented as wrappers around locally-running web apps have generally been disliked by users.
People don't use services like GMail or Google Docs or Office 365 or Dropbox or Facebook because of the web UIs. They use them in spite of the web UIs! They want the unlimited email storage, or the ease of sharing files, or the ease of sharing private/personal info with advertisers.
This is where the web technology advocates really strike out. Users don't use web apps because they want to; they use them because they want the back-end service, and there's often not a native client provided. When native clients are provided, we typically see users opting to use them instead of the shitty web front ends.
I pay $99 for 5 instances of all of that and consider it well worth it. 5 installs of Office. 5TB of cloud storage. 5 hours of Skype minutes. etc. I consider it the second best deal in tech....Amazon Prime being the first.