LibreOffice – The Likely Future of OpenOffice

And it is good.

@tracyanne I think LO is probably good enough for Linux. I can replace my AbiWord and Gnumeric with this heavier office suite on my Linux machines whenever I wish. OTOH, LO still a ways away from Production capability on M$-Lo$edoze. I'll stick with the stable OOo for my Lo$edoze and Mac machines for now, even though the F/OSS-unfriendly(?) Oracle now manages OOo. Naturally YMMV. 2c

I installed it... But I don't really *need* it... It's just my little act of rebellion ;)

Way to stick it to the man, jezuch!

@flufferbeer, I don't use any Office product on my copy of Windows, which I run on a Virtual machine (VirtualBox). I run only the stuff that i absolutely must... a Microsoft .NET development environment and any additional tools I need to assist my work. But after reading your comment I decided to install LibreOffice on Windows.

LibreOffice, it's good. It even has bug fixes for the Numbered and Unnumbered list functions. Life is good. I can't imagine why anyone would call it unstable, It's really the same as what was already available on Ubuntu and derivatives, if not most other Linux Distros, as the Ubuntu build was based on Go-oo and that's what LibreOffice 3.3 is basically, plus a few bug fixes, and some logo changes.

Like the build of OpenOffice.org that was available in Ubuntu it has better support for Microsoft's crappy document format, than Oracle's version, due to the Go-oo fork.

I still have OpenOffice on my install of Ubuntu. How does Libre differ?

@Helios: I doubt that you have OpenOffice.org on Ubuntu. Ubuntu and Debian have always shipped with Go-OO, the Novell version of OpenOffice.org. Not with the OOo version from Sun/Oracle. In that case, there is probably not much difference between your OOo and LibreOffice (since LibreOffice is built on Go-OO).

I'm going to switch to LibreOffice soon. They have fixed a very annoying window manager bug that made OpenOffice nigh impossible to use with alternative window managers like Awesome, AWN, etcetera. Basically OOo tried to out-smart the window manager in order to make sure that it was the top window. Very annoying!

@Sander, on the ubuntu computer in my house, the startup screen of Open Office clearly shows the Oracle logo, so I think its the Open Office from Oracle.

so I think its the Open Office from Oracle.

And so it is.

I suppose I was meaning to ask others to gaze into their crystal ball and tell us how Libre is going to differ mechanically from OpenOffice....aside from fork prongs.

h

@jim: Really? In that case, I think Ubuntu is grabbing OOo from upstream and not from Debian (just like they do with Gnome).

I was under the impression that the Ubuntu version incorporated Go-oo changes that bwere't available to the Sun/Oracle version of of OO.o. I must have been mistaken. In any case one of the advantages of the Go-oo fork was improved OOXML support. There are apparently other code forks that can'/won't be included in the Oracle version, due to copyright assignment issues.

Libre Office is like to improve faster and in ways more useful to the majority of people, as opposed to what Oracle considers useful. And due to the fact that the Document Foundation is not a corporate body, making LibreOffice open to all interested players, in ways OpenOffice.org could never be, due to the controlling body being, for many potential players, a business competitor, LibreOffice is likely to receice code and input that will make it outstanding, rather than merely a potential competitor to that very large companies proprietary offering.

My view is that Oracle has done us all a big favour.

@Tracyanne: True. And to boot, license wise, code can flow from OOo to LO but not the other way around. That because OOo requires copyright assignment and LO does not.

Just a side note, and this relates to this http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/146548/index.html article. Rather than trusting corporations to do what's right by or for the community, the community needs to ensure that community interests are served (and in the process competing corporate interests) by creating and supporting community based foundations as the oversight and controlling bodies for Free Software/Open Source projects.

The oracle purchase, if nothing else has, demonstrates very clearly that while some corporations may be supportive or even neutral to the aims and desires of the community, others can be quite destructive, and at times that can be the same corporation... This has nothing to do with conspiracy theory, it is simply the reality of the reason corporations exist.. to make money.