OpenOffice Is Now, Officially, Apache OpenOffice 266
rbowen writes "Apache OpenOffice has graduated from the Incubator, and now is officially a top-level project at the Apache Software Foundation." From the announcement: "As with all Apache software, Apache OpenOffice software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Information on Apache OpenOffice source code, documentation, mailing lists, related resources, and ways to participate are available at http://openoffice.apache.org." (Download mirror on Sourceforge, too.)
who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
we all moved to LibreOffice
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It's true that those looking inward who refer to themselves as "we all" might have moved elsewhere. Me, I've still got all my users on OpenOffice. I'm willing to bet I made the right decision... (I already bet my reputation at work on it)
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Re:who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's much easier to just give them Open Office than to explain that LibreOffice is a derivative and the reason it forked.
Who would ever try to explain it like that?
Me: "LibreOffice is the new version of OpenOffice."
Co-worker: "Oh, ok."
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Re:who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Colours and words have a more tangible effect on the non-technical.
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Re:who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
Ethereal to Wireshark.
Or Windows 98 to Windows Millenium Edition. That was a kind of name change. Maybe not the luckiest one. XP to Vista to 7 and 8.
That was a suffix change, this (*Office*) is a prefix. Not so different but I understand your concerns. Just tell them the development team moved to a new "home" and changed name. If they want to know more, development on the original OpenOffice code stagnated for a while and eventually restarted this year.
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And people who were using ethereal, or windows, did the upgrade and were done with it. I don't think brand recognition is nearly as big a deal in the software world as you guys are making it out to be. Windows, Office, OSX... they sell because they offer features and usability nobody has rivaled, not because they're made by fortune 500 companies, well maybe a little bit of market cornering here and there, but the opportunity had to initially present itself. People upgrade to ME because it was better than
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Ethereal to Wireshark.
The people that used Ethereal were not tied to brands; further, IIRC there was a legal reason for the name change and the people that used Ethereal would have been aware of the reasons behind it.
Or Windows 98 to Windows Millenium Edition. That was a kind of name change. Maybe not the luckiest one. XP to Vista to 7 and 8.
While (as you admit) it's just a suffix change, people understood that those suffixes (95, 98, 98SE, ME, XP, Vista, 7) were just version branding. So they didn't think twice of it. The brand they were buying, however, was Windows and Microsoft.
That was a suffix change, this (*Office*) is a prefix. Not so different but I understand your concerns. Just tell them the development team moved to a new "home" and changed name. If they want to know more, development on the original OpenOffice code stagnated for a while and eventually restarted this year.
The OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice name change is quite a bit harder to insti
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I actually enjoy explaining the history.
I actively work to help the people around me use Open Source software when they can. And if they start using it, I also start giving them small lessons on the culture behind it.
I think understanding how a disagreement like this plays out is actually important for understanding why Open Source software is so fantastic for users. A lot of things like this would've resulted in a proprietary software product somehow becoming much less useful over time. One company buys an
Re:who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a single one of my co-workers would ever use the word 'gay' as a pejorative (well, aside possibly from one, and very likely not at work). None of them are gay either (AFAIK). They all just have an IQ higher than 90.
OpenOffice dot org? (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking of names, is it actually "Apache OpenOffice" now? That would be an improvement over calling an office suite by the name of its website, "OpenOffice.org".
I mean, did anybody ever call it "Open Office dot org"? Judging by the comments in this thread, no.
Same for Postgres / PostgreSQL ("post greh ess queue elle").
Re:OpenOffice dot org - Apache OpenOffice (Score:5, Informative)
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Not sure what users your referring to, you'd have to explain either or to most business users. Now as to for the reason it forked...
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So are you, a lot of people come from MS Office backgrounds, I've gotten questions before: how do you do this, I had it set up this way and that... in MS Office, deploying open source solutions risk mainly lies in this, a bunch of disgruntled users who can't do things the way they liked to in MS Office. For a new business with a small closed group of users that I know reasonably well, to provide a solution to office, I would deploy open source in a heart beat. For something more established, it gets a fe
Re:who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would you bet your reputation on an office suite?
The nature of software changes rather fast. A perfectly logical and reasonable choice 6 months ago, today may be a bad decision.
When .NET started to get popular, I recommended that they if they are going to go with .NET they should do VB.NET not C#.NET because at the time more people knew VB over C# (in the current area). However after taking that direction in about a year C#.NET became more dominant. Mainly because colleges who taught Java liked doing C# more and didn't bother with VB any more.
OK I was wrong, but my reputation wasn't affected, why? Because I try to be right more than I am wrong, I had a good reasoning behind my decision. However this industry changes, we get factors such as change in college course changes, software delivery methods, Economic pressures, Mistakes made from other companies, unexpected success...
For Open Office vs Libre Office vs Microsoft Office. I wouldn't put my reputation behind it. Ok LibreOffice got popular but Open Office isn't that much better or worse so it may not be worth it to change.
Re:who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
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no wonder you post as AC, you chose the inferior software with less features that the smart developers left to go to LibreOffice. good non-move there, dumb-ass.
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I hope you lose that job. LibreOffice was clearly the better choice.
Not for me. I tried it but unfortunately the install routine fell on it's arse at the end of the install and just left me with a mangled installation.
At that point I walked away. Hopefully Apache will be able to dedicate the testing resource that seemed to be missing from LibreOffice.
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we all moved to LibreOffice
So who downloaded OpenOffice 20 million times?
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People moved from Open Office because of the insecurity of its future, I'd hazard a guess that as graduated from the Apache Incubator, there is a good chance that things will look up, especially because of the name.
OO will be around for a while yet. Personally I use LibreOffice.
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I used to. But LibreOffice (on OSX) STILL nags me occasionally on missing Java runtime although use of java is switched off in preferences. Mainly on keyboard shortcuts like cmd+s, cmd+c. It is totally random and annoying.
I now tried Apache OpenOffice, and this doe not nag me - so out goes Libre-, welcome Open-.
Re:who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
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We all switched from NeoOffice to LibreOffice Mac!
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20 million since when exactly?
Re:who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
20 million since when exactly?
You can see the details here: http://www.openoffice.org/stats/ [openoffice.org]
I find it interesting that Apache gives the details to support their download numbers while LibreOffice merely waves their hands and makes claims.
Re:who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
Since LO is bundled with many Linux distros, it's almost impossible to know the full user base of LO.
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Optimistic assumptions (Score:3)
But is it really accurate to say that 100% of Ubuntu installs are used for document editing? And that 0% prefer LO to Abi or KOffice or Calligra or Google Docs or anything else? Those are optimistic assumptions, don't you think?
That's why I focus on download numbers. Someone who intentionally downloads clear has the intent to use the product.
So if you want to know relative usage numbers, then focus on an apples to apples comparison that makes sense, like the number of Windows downloads.
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Sence that newbee who keeps on falling for the rm -rf / trick on the internet.
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People who didn't get the memo?
I'm not really sure it matters which is better if they're both open source and open development. OpenOffice would still be sucky if not for libre. There were contributers that tried for years to get things upstreamed only to be rejected and ignored by Sun/Oracle. Only after the revolt and the creation of Libre did openoffice actually open up their development.
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OpenOffice development was somewhat stalled for a while after the LibreOffice fork happened. If development is going to continue, I hope they pick up the improvements from LibreOffice
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Re:who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, not all of 'us'.
If they decide to stop copying the bad things about MS Office (cell selection navigation in Excel), and start copying the good things instead (dynamic charts), I'll happily give LibreOffice another shot. For now, I've moved back to OpenOffice.
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we all moved to LibreOffice
Who is "we"? Here's what I see:
Apache OpenOffice claims 20 million downloads of OpenOffice.
LibreOffice claims 20 million downloads of LibreOffice.
So they are equal, yes?
However, take a closer look. Apache had its first release just back in May, so they have 20 million downloads in *4 months*. Compare that to LibreOffice's 20 million downloads in *2 years*.
You bet on the faster horse. The one with the little head start was just passed.
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All of us who use whatever came with the Linux distro that we use on our desktop will only count as one download. Figures like this are always misleading.
Re:who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
But both projects claim that 80%+ of their downloads are for Windows users. So you can't really escape the numbers. Apache has then 80% of 20 million Windows downloads in *4 months* whereas LO has 80% of 20 million Windows downloads in *2 years*.
Similar for Mac at around 15%.. No doubt that LO has the advantage on Linux desktops. But all reports indicate that is 3% or so of the desktops. Even 100% of 3% is still only 3%, That doesn't look like a growth play to me,
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One thing, when working in the FOSS community a certain amount of political correctness is required to ensure no communities are insulted. Whilst s web server is reasonable obscure as far as the wider community is concerned. When it comes to an office suit that ideally would be used in all environments, this means it pushing into schooling environments. I'm not sure how appropriate the 'Apache' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache [wikipedia.org] name and that it is very likely appropriate to ensure those people approve th
Re:who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
LibreOffice had a long-running bug on documents with wrap set on certain objects that rendered my invoices almost unusable, so I'm still on OpenOffice. I do appreciate the work they've done, though.
If I were going to do coding work on one of the suites, I might pick OpenOffice for the more permissive license.
Re:who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
Because there was an un-broken version of the software?
I submitted the bug, provided sample documents, and ran tests that they asked me to. I don't think anyone wants me submitting C++ code...
Re:who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, I'm getting really tired of seeing people say this, although it doesn't happen as much nowadays.
Just because someone has found a bug doesn't in any way, shape or form mean that they have the time, energy, or the skill to fix it.
Just because the source code is available for anyone to tinker with does not mean everyone wants to, so please stop being such a knob. Nobody likes an uppity holier-than-thou nerd.
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What's the difference? Why is one better than the other?
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we all moved to LibreOffice
I give people OpenOffice. While my Linux computers (Gentoo and Kubuntu) have LibreOffice on them for the time being, I'll be moving them back to OpenOffice once an AOO package is available.
LaTeX (Score:5, Informative)
we all moved to LibreOffice
My main document producing software is now LaTeX, using TeXShop on my Mac. It does everything I need, and the documents look pretty. Most especially, I love the ability of LaTeX to typeset equations seamlessly. Perhaps there is a slight learning curve, but it wasn't bad. And when I need to do something unusual, I use the google manual.
Ahh, the ASF... (Score:2, Insightful)
Where one-time promising projects go to die.
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The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with F/OSS office suites is that their audience tends to be uncritical, so much as in the fairy tale "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" (but in inverse), professionals have stopped listening.
I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents. Their main strength was that it was often easier to export data from them than it was in certain commercial products.
The point of this is that in order for one of these FOSS office suites to survive, people who are critical and have use requirements beyond short documents get involved. For these packages to be competitive, they need to rise to a higher standard than Grandma's recipes, Son's book report, a weekend memo to the boss, etc.
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People will settle for less, when they get it for free, the question really is, how much less are people willing to settle for?
That said, often less is more (no pun) and F/OSS is the superior alternative.
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"F/OSS is the superior alternative"
How does your license make a crappy product any better? There are thousands if not millions of F/OSS apps out there that just suck. There are a few real Gems, but a lot of cheap crap. There is also a lot of Crap Closed Source apps too. But at least those companies in general will go out of business.
Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps you should follow your own advice and post the failing test cases so we could see what's broken. Then some enterprising developer could figure out how to fix them. Complaining without specifics, as you are doing, is not practically different from being "uncritical".
Posting test cases (Score:2)
That's a great idea! Let's think it through, however. I don't own the data; that belongs to the client. Thus, I have to be somewhat vague. Further, I'm available for consulting at my usual rate -- my contact should be on my user page. I give very specific reports (not written in OO, LibreOffice or Word) to clients.
Re:Posting test cases (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a great idea! Let's think it through, however. I don't own the data; that belongs to the client. Thus, I have to be somewhat vague.
You couldn't modify the example enough to use the documents already examined in your tests? Or, if the problem was a missing feature instead of a bug, you couldn't explain it without that specific set of spreadsheet data?
I'm available for consulting at my usual rate -- my contact should be on my user page.
So you're saying that you don't volunteer your time to someone's project. Pay to play, right?
From your journal post earlier today:
Despite having other demands on my time, I've begun spending a half-hour or so every day making submissions to Slashdot and trying to write quality comments. I am doing this because I think Slashdot is an important part of the internet, which like other forms of media, for good or ill is a part of our "culture."...It's not perfect...I've been modded -1, Flamebait for a post I thought was insightful too. Nothing is perfect...Support Slashdot. With your energy, time, money, whatever. It's worth it.
Hold on now. If you're willing to take that stance regarding Slashdot, why not just be honest about F/OSS office suites? You don't care about them and have no interest in seeing them succeed. There really is nothing wrong with that position.
Don't confuse disengagement for opposition (Score:2)
No, absolutely not. But in this case, I'm full up with projects and so this should be pay-to-play. As you can see, I give a lot of my time to free projects.
Not really. But having an audience that can't tell "doesn't work" from "works" means I wouldn't waste my time on that particular product.
Further, my belief is that having more different types of word processors is
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Don't confuse disengagement for opposition
I didn't claim you opposed anything; in fact, I specifically suggested that you be honest about your "disengagement". However, your posts would certainly lend themselves to assuming that you are trolling. You hand wave about supposed specific problems but provide no specifics, then when asked to contribute the specifics you suggest that you might if someone pays you for your time. For testing and reporting problems with a F/OSS project. This certainly looks more like opposition, not apathy. But I also
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I had one of those. Boiled it down to the smallest possible test case (AFAICT), even.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35664 [freedesktop.org]
Couldn't tell you why it's still marked 'new', though.
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Define "larger documents"? For example, I've created 500+ page legal documents in OpenOffice Writer with no issues - including lots of graphics. So what's the tipping point?
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I'm not sure about now, but several years ago MS Word exasperated me with its inability to handle large documents that Word Perfect had no problem with. I wrote The Paxil Diaries in Oo without any problems at all.
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professionals have stopped listening. ...
a weekend memo to the boss, etc.
See how I can tell you're a professional? You write memos, to the boss. On the weekend!
Who writes memos anymore? And who sends .doc files when email suffices for short documents just fine and works way better on mobile devices.
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who sends .doc files when email suffices for short documents just fine and works way better on mobile devices.
Everyone. It drives me crazy.
Sometimes it's worse. Occasionally, I get a document that has been printed out and scanned to a pdf and sent as an email attachment.
If that wasn't enough, often those copied on the email will have a discussion over email and include the original attachments with every reply. That might be tolerable in the age of broadband, except the conversation usually goes like this: "Got it, thanks" followed by "Okay, great -- did everyone else get this?", "Yep, just hit my inbox", "Not s
Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:5, Informative)
I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents.
Quite to the contrary, LibreOffice deals better with long documents than the proprietary alternative, and also it never
corrupts complex documents like the proprietary alternative.
The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite
files. Complexity which is fairly common, given the proprietary suite deficiencies in structuring documents.
Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:5, Informative)
I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents.
Quite to the contrary, LibreOffice deals better with long documents than the proprietary alternative, and also it never
corrupts complex documents like the proprietary alternative.
The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite
files. Complexity which is fairly common, given the proprietary suite deficiencies in structuring documents.
From your comment and his comment I suspect that his test involved getting huge documents from different MS office versions and loading them. Then deciding that OO can't handle big documents in general. This is a very skewed test. For people moving completely to OO that's a non issue.
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Strangely enough, I've had better lucking importing huge documents ( > 400 pages ) into OO and formatting for print than in Word itself.
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The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite files.
I think it's pretty clear that this is a fundamental shortfall of those files and formats, not of LO. The latter would have no problem opening and saving them if they were not obfuscated and undocumented. Just as with the nouveau driver, it's Jesus- worthy miracle that it works at all.
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The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite
files.
I think it's pretty clear that this is a fundamental shortfall of those files and formats, not of LO. The latter would have no problem opening and saving them if they were not obfuscated and undocumented. Just as with the nouveau driver, it's Jesus- worthy miracle that it works at all.
That was my point.
But I actually think it is not only the proprietary file formats being bad. It is also that the proprietary suite falls short
in organising documents with styles and templates, so people use very complex direct formatting.
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Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if the problem isn't more that people are failing to recognize that there are different audiences with different needs. For example in office suites, there are loads of people who just need a decent work processor for typing up simple documents, and then there are people who really want integration between their word processor, spreadsheet editor, and groupware client, and groupware server. The latter audience may be well served by going with the full MS Office/MS Exchange combination, and that keeps a lot of people using MS Office.
It reminds me of an argument between a GIMP fan and a Photoshop fan. The Photoshop user was saying, "GIMP is terrible because it doesn't have good support for CMYK." and the GIMP user responded by saying, "Well nobody actually uses CMYK, but GIMP lets me script things easily, so GIMP is much better!" These two users were talking past each other, failing to recognize that each had probably chosen their solution well.
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As a small aside to your experiences, I found that when using LibreOffice and I want to use the following as a separator:
______________ (that's holding down Shift to get the underline)
in LibreOffice, it creates an entire line across the page whereas in Word 2010, it creates the line exactly as shown. If I try to delete the extraneous lines, the entire line is deleted in LO.
I did do some looking, but did not find a way in LO to stop this "feature" from occurring.
This is why everything except the bare essent
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The automation *is* sometimes annoying. But for that on in particular the FIRST thing I'd try is an underlined tab, with the tab positioned where I wanted the underline to end.
OTOH, as another answer said, you can just turn off the automation. I have some of it turned off already, as it was just too annoying. Other parts I find quite useful, and I would bet that which parts annoy different people is quite different. (I don't like it's automatically correcting capitalizations, as I find that most of it's
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I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents.
One would think, after reviewing them 3 times, you could be more specific. Can you name one fundamental way in which LO fell short? Define "large document" and "disaster"? No, of course not, because LO is strictly better than MSO: it doesn't spy on you, doesn't hold your data hostage, not a significant malware vector, has simpler, more familiar, and highly customizable interface, can be fully supported (including adding features and bug fixes) by a third party, runs natively on every major consumer OS, stre
Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:5, Interesting)
OTOH, I have "saved" several Word/Excel documents that had become too corrupted to be used in Microsoft Office. All I had to do was load them in OpenOffice and then save them with a different name, and they suddenly worked again in MS Office.
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I've found LO spreadsheets to be easier to work with that the Microsoft counterpart. We programs that output information on product, I cannot tell you the number of times I've foamed at the mouth by Excel converting the UPC into scientific notation. LO seems to understand that the column is text, but no matter what we do with Excel, it always wants to turn UPC, EAN, GTIN-14 into a number.
Additionally, we find that working with large documents to be easier and more fluid with LO than Word or Excel. If som
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What are you talking about? Word is famous for crashing on huge documents, especially master documents. OO is great for large documents.
OO has fundamental advantages over MS Word for large documents, including the fact that it has page styles while Word does not.
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This. I can't name a single feature that I need for business use that is not included in LO. I really wonder why parent is rated 5 Interesting.
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OK.
1) I want better support for indexes. And in specific I want to be able to maintain several DIFFERENT indexes in the same document. (Think Alphabetic index, index of dates, index of places, etc.)
2) I want bettersupport for tables of contents. And in specific I want to be able to have several different tables of contents in the same document. (Think Table of contents, list of figures, etc.)
The difference between tables of contents and indexes is that indexes are sorted by name. Tables of contents by
Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:4, Insightful)
try this with MSO2009 and MSO2007 and see if it works
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I've got the same background and needs... and I've found more and more that Google Docs seems to work pretty well 98% of the time. It keeps getting better and better and for most interoffice stuff just works. Sometimes it hits a macro or something that it doesn't get and I have to download it, but the last time I did that was about 2 years ago (and it's improved a lot since then anyway).
I'm quite happy that I'll be able to completely ditch office software installs soon.
(Disclaimer, we have gmail for busines
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Soooooo......... (Score:3, Insightful)
The big news with OO over the past couple of years have been a fork and a name change? Great.
Merge Libre and OpenOffice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Providing the OpenOffice (OO) and the LibreOffice(LO) developers can get past the bad blood of the past, they could merge their to projects back together and focus their efforts.
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no point, LibreOffice was a necessary un-merge,forked and has the good developers and features. OpenOffice serves no purpse and is a fringe project now
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What do you work for Oracle?
Why choose OO over LO? (Score:3)
For those who know more about this than me, why choose OpenOffice over LibreOffice (or vice versa.)
I used OO until my distro (Debian/Ubuntu/Mint recently) switched to LO and I just went with it. I'm not familiar in detail with the reason for the fork and whether the issues persist. Nor am I aware of the status of each fork and what is the benefit of one over the other.
Thanks for any clarification.
Re:Why choose OO over LO? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, maybe I can clear this up. You see, they're both Open Source, but OpenOffice.org required code writing contributors (like me) to jump through hoops and assign my copyright over to the OpenOffice.org folks (Oracle), or else my contributions were denied. LibreOffice doesn't require copyright assignment to accept my contributions. So, that means it's easier to contribute to LibreOffice, and it gets updates faster. So, OpenOffice.org is missing some things that LibreOffice has. Bonus, because they're both from a common code-base, LibreOffice can just pull in anything that OpenOffice has -- The requirement of OO.o's copyright assignment meant that they could not incorporate LO code though. When Oracle decided to kill off the development of OO.o, instead of just gifting the name / trademark over to the newly forked LO folks (where most of the developers went) they gave us all the finger one more time for good measure by making OO.o an Apache project. I don't know if the Official Apache oversight of the project now means they're doing away with copyright assignments, nor do I care at this point. The name itself brings back infuriating memories of frustration and wasted efforts squandered on bureaucracy. LibreOffice already exists, so if it weren't for the older install base, it would be complete waste of time to re-do the work of merging the code back into OpenOffice.org... From a developer's perspective it IS a complete waste of time. That and there's the trademark issue where OpenOffice is owned by someone else, so you have to say OpenOffice.org when you're talking about it.
TL;DR: Stay with LO, it's actually better and not a waste of time like OO.org is.
Re:Why choose OO over LO? (Score:4, Informative)
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Which world seems like it would be a larger set of developers?
There are two different underlying questions here which could potentially have two completely different answers:
A) Which project will have the larger set of developers using its code in some manner
B) Which project will have the larger set of developers contributing back to it?
OO and LO are similar enough that... (Score:3)
I'm just using Libreoffice now since that is what our distros support out of the box (CentOS and Ubuntu). Since they are functionally the same, I haven't found any reason to cling to OO once all the noise started and resulted in the fork to LO. I haven't had any complaints.
Best,
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Exactly.
For me: I had to read the comments to get a quick refresh of what happened. My first thoughts were in the lines of "oh, LibreOffice got a new name again?".
One of the reasons I like to use Linux is the completeness of a distro. You install a distro, and you get pretty much any application you can think of with it (try than with Windows...). Free, maintained, virtually guaranteed virus free as long as you stick to your distro's repositories.
Now my distro comes with an office suit. It used to be StarOf
I'm not much of a fan of the Apache foundation (Score:3)
Their projects have a strong tendency to be bloated in code size and kind of bureaucratic in the way they engage the development community. I think, given the history of OpenOffice that this is an excellent home for it. But I don't really think much of the development methodology of the original OpenOffice project either.
But, time will tell. If the OpenOffice people reach out to LibreOffice and actually try to convince that community to come back, they might have a chance of moving forward in a positive way. The LibreOffice fork was brewing a long time before Oracle dropped the ball on the OpenOffice project. I think that was just the last straw.
Where is their solution for mobile users? (Score:2)
More and more people work on mobile platforms. Is OpenOffice going to provide them with a solution?
Re:Where is their solution for mobile users? (Score:5, Informative)
most of the openoffice devs are now libreoffice devs, so most of the recent development happens there. libreoffice is working on an android version.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/libreoffice-for-android-advances-document-viewer-is-on-the-way/ [arstechnica.com]
Calc killed my spreadsheet, my OOo love died (Score:2)
StarOffice (Score:2)
Before Libre, Open, it was a Star, who was my office suite on linux back in y2k. I want my StarOffice back !
Time for OpenOffice to Climb on the Dead Cart (Score:2)
whOracle bought a company, and could have had their name well in the brainshare of the world, but instead, they were greedy, and that greed and disrespect for the open source community has come home to roost. Instead of trying to shake a well-earned bad reputation, I think that OpenOffice should climb on the bring out your dead cart.
I am not so sure whOracal should be inhibit the Librieoffe steering committee, because that cannot be trusted, and they will wedge proprietary technology into it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)