Mike Conlon on the Apache OpenOffice fork

In particular I would hope that the superiority and leadership role of LibreOffice will change many of the developers' minds regarding their original impulse to eventually re-merge the two projects and acquire the rights to the name OpenOffice.org.

For legal reason, OpenOffice.org cannot drop the cumbersome .org from the name. I am liking LibreOffice as a name more and more on its own. I would be happy to see any correlation with the slow-to-develop image of OpenOffice.org vanish from the minds of users as LibreOffice becomes the standard and OpenOffice.org is forgotten.

"A rose by any other name still makes me sneeze."

Quoting:Within the bad there exist the good. Just like roses have thorns, we can't always look at the thorns, we must gaze at the rose - even if it makes us sneeze.

-- from the A Choo.

Quoting:I would be happy to see any correlation with the slow-to-develop image of OpenOffice.org vanish from the minds of users as LibreOffice becomes the standard and OpenOffice.org is forgotten.

...and I would be equally happy if Apache OpenOffice becomes the standard and LibreOffice is forgotten.

Seriously, why all the hate for OpenOffice I'm reading lately? When it was an Oracle product that was understandable. Oracle no longer has anything to do with it. Let the two forks compete and may the best office suite win.

In terms of mindshare, the better of those two office suites has probably already won.

There's a disconnect between the Linux and Windows versions. All the Linux distributions are going to LibreOffice for the obvious reasons.

But out there in the enterprise where they just want a free office suite for Windows, I expect OpenOffice.org to continue to dominate only because they're already there. There's really no compelling reason to change and have to explain to managers and then users why their office suite looks and works exactly the same but now has a different name.

When the two projects diverge enough that one has more/better features than the other, then we'll talk, but at this point it's all just stuff us geeks care about. End users on Windows desktops have no dog in this fight.

And judging from what I see, the number of Windows installations of OpenOffice/LibreOffice is many orders of magnitude larger than the number of Linux/BSD installations.

The question I have is: Can Apache/IBM keep the project going? I have a feeling they can.

As far as I can tell, LibraOffice has actually worked better than OpenOffice for asome time, bact to the days when it was called Go-OO.

I have a strong suspicion that this underlies some substantial part of the differing perception of OpenOffice between Linux and Windows users -- Linux users were often using Go-OO without realizing it (it came with the distro) and maybe not even knowing there was a difference (I didn't) and Windows users knew even less about the matter.

@caitlyn --

I'm with you.

From a group that can live with a bazillion desktop environments, umpteen gazillion development tools, and eleventy jillion distros, a couple of office suites would seem to be manageable.