LibreOffice 3.3 Released Today

mikejuk writes "Only four months after the formation of the Document Foundation by leading members of the OpenOffice.org community, it has launched LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of its alternative Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. Since the fork was announced at the end of September the number of developers 'hacking' LibreOffice has gone from fewer than twenty to well over one hundred, allowing the Document Foundation to make its first release ahead of schedule The split of a large open source office suite comes at a time when it isn't even clear if there is a long term future for office suites at all. What is more puzzling is what the existence of two camps creating such huge codebases for a fundamental application type says about the whole state of open source development at this time. It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as."

Comments

What idealistic state?

[alexandre]

I'm pretty sure that we'll be stuck with Office suite for a long long time still...

But saying that this unmasks Linux as not being perfect is like saying your family is not perfect because you brought your kid to the hospital after he was hit by a car instead of hiding the fact...
A fork in this case is a wonderful solution to a death by stagnation caused by proprietary idiocy from Oracle.

Re:What idealistic state?

[somersault]

A fork in this case is a wonderful solution to a death by stagnation caused by proprietary idiocy from Oracle.

Exactly. If the source was closed, we'd maybe have to find a whole new Office suite, but this way we can just fork Oracle and move on.

Re:What idealistic state?

[xtracto]

I hope that this fork encourages the inclusion of Go-OO patches. In fact, it would be good if Go-OO and LibreOffice were merged .

Re:What idealistic state?

[vossman77]

I think this was already done.

Re:What idealistic state?

[ludwigf]

I hope that this fork encourages the inclusion of Go-OO patches. In fact, it would be good if Go-OO and LibreOffice were merged .

Actually Go-OO was discontinued in favor of libre-office which includes most of the patches already.

Re:What idealistic state?

[domatic]

The go-oo codebase was basically the starting point for Libre and Libre obsoletes go-oo.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the Go-OO website. They are in the process of moving to Libre Office.

Although Go-OO has the better name...

Re:What idealistic state?

[jo_ham]

It doesn't say "Linux" it says "open source" and they are not the same thing, although it is something of a non sequitur to call this a "puzzling or bad" move (which seems to be the inference) - the project was forked because the community didn't like where it was going, which is one of the major benefits open source code has over closed.

You seem to have fallen into the trap that any perceived criticism of open source is an attack on Linux, though. I have plenty of open source software on my Mac, including Open Office. If this (and future) releases of LibreOffice [seriously, they need to change the name] can offer a strong alternative to MS Office, then I'm all for it.

My first question, can it do graphs on new sheets yet? That was my one annoyance with the spreadsheet app in OO.

I should probably mention that I use MS Office for Mac all the time for writing reports. Word itself I can take or leave - it's a pretty poor and idiosyncratic word processor that drives you mental with its attempts to be helpful. Excel, on the other hand, really excels (ha) at what it does and makes the cost of Office worth it for me (and not just for the graphs on new pages).

Re:What idealistic state?

[commodore6502]

When Mozilla discontinued the Mozilla browser (codename: seamonkey), and the open source community picked it up, everything turned out a-okay. Seamonkey is a nice solid browser/email/newsgroups/composer application. I suspect Oracle's decision to "close" OpenOffice will spur a similar level of development for LibreOffice. In the long term it will all work out.

So: If I install LO work, how well will it work with DOC files? All my coworkers are using Word 2003 and I don't want to cause any disruption by sending them funky files.

Re:What idealistic state?

[GameboyRMH]

Yep the Go-OO patches are included in LibreOffice.

I'm going to remove Oracle OO.org and install LibreOffice on all my PCs when I get home.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

fork Oracle

'nuff said.

Re:What idealistic state?

[PeterBrett]

So: If I install LO work, how well will it work with DOC files? All my coworkers are using Word 2003 and I don't want to cause any disruption by sending them funky files.

Things interoperate pretty well, in my experience, particularly if you are using exactly the same fonts. In some cases, LO/OOo seem to manage to open .doc files more reliably than MSO, which seems bizarre; might be due to the way that the import/export filters are implemented in each.

Re:What idealistic state?

[tehniobium]

In my many years of using OpenOffice, and now ~6 months of using LibreOffice, since the first beta came out, I have never had any problem with converting to and from .doc.

Re:What idealistic state?

[krewemaynard]

Can they include a patch that improves performance? Things as simple as right-clicking are noticeably slower. I'm probably going to reinstall OOo on some computers because of that alone.

Re:What idealistic state?

[shentino]

I believe Micro$oft makes its file formats proprietary and obfuscated on purpose to prevent the competition from edging into its dominant market.

Re:What idealistic state?

[sorak]

Or it could be like replacing an air filter after you find it contains too much crap for anything useful to flow out of it.

(Does that count as a car analogy?)

Re:What idealistic state?

[HarrySquatter]

When Mozilla discontinued the Mozilla browser (codename: seamonkey), and the Mozilla Foundation picked it up, everything turned out a-okay.

FTFY. The reason why Mozilla does "okay" is because it's a business and they actually run themselves like a business.

Re:What idealistic state?

[sapphire wyvern]

Yeah, you're probably right.

I guess that's why the documentation for the 2007/2010 (transitional) and future (strict) versions of the .docx/.xlsx/etc Office formats takes 6,000 pages - it's all so obfuscated, vague, and proprietary.

(Overcomplicated, I'll grant you...)

Re:What idealistic state?

[ocdscouter]

Or it could be like replacing an air filter after you find it contains too much crap for anything useful to flow out of it.

(Does that count as a car analogy?)

You might want to make it an oil filter, just to be on the safe side.

Re:What idealistic state?

[zrbyte]

... but this way we can just fork Oracle and move on.

They didn't actually fork Oracle, they forked the office suite project. Although, I kinda wish we could just "fork" Oracle (in the a**) and move on. If you know what I mean ;)

Re:What idealistic state?

[kaiser423]

Please tell me how you've come about this Nirvana, because even the simplest of documents always gets messed up. Sure, it opens, but pictures are in odd places, headings are dopped or white, styles are lost, etc, etc.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Sockatume]

"Idealistic" doesn't mean "perfect" anyway. That word would be "ideal". "Idealistic" refers to ideals, and the fact that people are willing to go off and form an entirely different project to keep to those ideals speaks volumes.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Crudely_Indecent]

Go-LO - I like it!

I think your idea has already been considered by the Go-OO team. From their website:

Go-oo joins forces with LibreOffice

Go-oo shares much of its goals and philosophy with The Document Foundation's LibreOffice project, we're therefore supporting LibreOffice since it's inception, and are in the process of merging most of our patches over, as well as migrating to Document Foundation infrastructure. Going forward, the Go-oo project will be discontinued in favor of LibreOffice.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why docx is XML based and documented?

Re:What idealistic state?

[Crudely_Indecent]

Sorry, bad link:
The Go-OO website is located at http://www.go-oo.org/

Re:What idealistic state?

[Machtyn]

To give a real world example: see WordPerfect.

Re:What idealistic state?

[swillden]

Yeah, you're probably right.

I guess that's why the documentation for the 2007/2010 (transitional) and future (strict) versions of the .docx/.xlsx/etc Office formats takes 6,000 pages - it's all so obfuscated, vague, and proprietary.

(Overcomplicated, I'll grant you...)

And why that massive 6,000-page document is, in fact, incomplete and underspecified, including numerous directives to do things in whatever way various MS proprietary versions did them, without spelling out what those ways were, ensuring that no one but Microsoft can completely and correctly implement the specification, in spite of its apparent "openness".

But, just in case, Microsoft has also carefully avoided correctly implementing even what the spec does say, thereby assuring that no competing implementation will ever work quite the way theirs does. And of course theirs is the de facto standard implementation, no matter what the documentation says.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Machtyn]

I use OpenOffice and won't buy Microsoft Office. But if I needed a powerful spreadsheet, it would be Excel. (Fortunately, I'm no power user of spreadsheets.)

Re:What idealistic state?

[Ant P.]

Nothing bizarre about it, deliberate incompatibility between versions is part of Microsoft's protection racket. Wouldn't want companies skipping their annual upgrade payments.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Will.Woodhull]

Yes! The emergence of LibreOffice is an affirmation of the principles of FOSS and a resounding vote of no confidence in Oracle.

TFA failed to mention that LibreOffice has incorporated a number of significant patches that were available to OpenOffice but were blocked from inclusion by Oracle as they did not fit well with Oracle's agenda. LO appears to have done significant work on fixing what was a broken process for NIH patches and extensions. Good job!

I'm not in a position to migrate from OO to LO yet: my work is too dependent on documents received from others whose cleanliness is sometimes suspect. I look forward to migrating once LO is in the Ubuntu repositories and I can be sure of not missing any security patches. Not that I really trust Oracle to patch any security holes OO... I don't think the wait for LO in Ubuntu will be a long one.

Re:What idealistic state?

[drinkypoo]

Slashdot: Home of the hamhanded commentary.

Open Source has nothing to do with altruism, only pragmatism. The submitter has Open Source confused with Free Software.

I also note that both the Free and free versions are, well, free.

Re:What idealistic state?

[micheas]

docx is an xml wrapper around the doc format, which is mostly but not completely documented.

ooxml as submitted to the standards organization is not docx,

These two facts are why docx support in go-oo was a one plane flight project. It is just an extension of the doc import filter.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Bert64]

MS make assumptions about what they think the files should contain, whereas OO works on the assumption that MS might implement features they aren't aware of therefore when OO encounters corruption it just assumes it to be a new feature MS have implemented but which hasn't been reverse engineered yet.

Re:What idealistic state?

[S.O.B.]

Tee hee. He said "fork".

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it? last time this was mentioned on slashdot, MS didn't completely adhere to the ooxml spec in their products.

Re:What idealistic state?

[alexandre]

Woops!
I do make a strong difference between Open Source and Free Software though... it seems not so much before breakfest! ;-P

I just took for granted that must people used both interchangeably and ranted anyway...

So uhm, vi or emacs now that we're all awake? :P

Re:What idealistic state?

[somersault]

Yes, that was the whole point of the semantic nonsense of forking Oracle rather than forking OpenOffice :P

Re:What idealistic state?

[arth1]

gnumeric works well enough for my needs -- it's fairly Excel compatible (obviously except for Visual Basic and OBE hooks), and probably an easier switch for an Excel user than OO.o/LO calc is.

gnumeric also has a smaller footprint than OO.o/LO calc (and when run on a system with Gnome already running, a way smaller footprint).

Re:What idealistic state?

[jo_ham]

Would have to be vi, since my keyboard only has about 6 meta keys - clearly not enough for emacs.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

But it is a wonderful standard.

Miguel de Icaza

Re:What idealistic state?

[jshackney]

Exactly! I have had nothing but problems opening doc files. A recent 50-page doc sent to me clocked in at 84 pages when opened in OOo. Sometimes it's close, but never close enough. That's my biggest fear with switching to LO--is it likely to work, or is it dramatically improved?. Only the most ultra-basic doc files seem to have a chance. Now, don't get me started about saving in doc format. That's been an absolute dud every time for me. Images, watermarks, objects, it's all just a complete disaster unless the recipient can take a PDF (that is, assuming the recipient has no need to edit the document).

[disclaimer] I primarily deal with documents that are heavy on formatting and table usage with the occasional image spattered into the mix. [/disclaimer]

Then there's xls vs. ods. But that's another rant.

The fact is, almost nobody has standardized around ODF in any meaningful way in the (i.e. "my") workplace. The gold standard is MS Office. Cost is almost never a consideration for the company--but it is for folks like me who either can't afford or don't wish to discharge a bag of cash to get a fully-featured version of MS Office.

Re:What idealistic state?

[h00manist]

To give a real world example: see WordPerfect.

Example of what? WordPerfect is still around...
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1207676528492#tabview=tab0

Re:What idealistic state?

[h00manist]

The two words "fork oracle" carry such power, attraction and brightness that they are enough to obfuscate anything else that was written.

Re:What idealistic state?

[alexandre]

See we can all agree! :D

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't think we'd see a car analogy on this thread.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ford vs GMC: What is more puzzling is what the existence of two auto makers says about the whole state of auto development at this time. It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as.
Microsoft vs Apple: What is more puzzling is what the existence of two Operating System makers says about the whole state of OS development at this time. It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as.
McDonald's vs Wendy's: What is more puzzling is what the existence of two burger makers says about the whole state of food development at this time. It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Tubal-Cain]

Although, I kinda wish we could just "fork" Oracle (in the a**) and move on. If you know what I mean ;)

Why the quotation marks? I imagine an actual fork would be worse than what you mean.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Bengie]

This is my take on opensource

I think the point was that the community didn't have enough say in the direction of OO in the first place. The only way to combat that was to fork. Forking is duplicated work and inefficient.

Forking is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing part is that it allows for a group of people to take the current code base and change it to the way they want it. The curse part is it causes code to sprawl in many directions and there is much wasted effort and even worse is the ever changing frameworks and standards.

Open source is like evolution. No unified vision, but very resilient and adaptive. An environment that thrives on diversity, but the end result is not "optimal", but good enough.

Closed source, *if* the producer has talent and is concerned about the customer, has a vision. The vision is created and is "optimal", but the much reduced diversity makes it less flexible. Also, any design flaws with the vision itself coupled with reduced flexibility makes the worst case much worse.

Overall, I think Opensource will win in the long run, but Microsoft's power/money and sheer programming/engineering talent will keep it afloat for a while before they have to specialize.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFY. The reason why Mozilla does "okay" is because it's a business and they actually run themselves like a business.

Mozilla does OK because its biggest funder is Google, it is a non-profit organisation (so doesn't have sponging capitalists leeching off it - though it has been created and shaped by the same to benefit them), and is turning out products to compete with IE (well known for being the shittest browser in the history of browsers, so once you can get a user to ignore the pro-IE PR and inertia to change selling them anything else is trivial).

Mozilla make one of the 2 advert delivery systems that Google fund, the other being the Chrome family. Because so many people are aware of MS's monopolistic history, Google probably proceed very carefully as accusations of monopolistic behaviour (founded or unfounded) are likely in an industry that has seen them before. So Google are careful when it comes to pushing products into the market that they really want people to use: the web browser.

Especially web browsers with features optimised for adverts and advertisers:
- geo-location, for more psychologically effective adverts.
- more local storage within the browser, for more effective and detailed tracking.
- video support. Video is one way, and very effective at influencing people.
- various features to make the user trust the browser, like 3rd party website verification, and hand-holding added to as many features as possible.

Plus of course, if you can get users into using web based applications the controller of the web based application has even more power and control than the author of a desktop based application. Google are pushing "webapps" hard, as they recognise that the lock in that MS had that made them uber rich can be even greater when the application and user data isn't even on the user's computer. The funny ideas in TFA that office suites are a dying breed is them trying to push people towards the potentially very profitable web application. i-programmer.info.... WTF do you think these people do for a day job? It ain't blogging!

But if you thought MS Office was a shitty deal, just wait and see what Google Office or similar become. Yeah, being able to use your application and data from any internet connected machine will be very useful, but sooner or later the industry will take advantage of their control of the application and data. Predicting what MS would do with future versions of Office when they brought out their first version would have been impossible, apart from the MS would clearly try and profit from future versions. Obviously Google will want to profit, and with capitalists being capitalists people will want constantly growing dividends, or greedy middlemen will promise constantly growing dividends. Eventually the "do no evil" will fully morph into "do only evil", and you'll be getting charged per letter you add to your Google word-processor.

Google's funding of Mozilla has put Google as the default for virtually every feature within every Mozilla browser, and as the industry knows, most users to not change defaults. Google services everywhere will definitely be the case in Chromium/Chrome too.

Just because something is run like a business does not mean it will automatically be successful, or even survive. What failed businessman who has moved into teaching taught you that?[1] Or was it a successful banker? The rich can't be rich without there being poor, and this is why the rich really lie and mislead.

[1] Don't get the wrong subtext here: teaching is a very noble job, and to be successful in business you either have to be a bastard or have little competition. The trite saying something like "the successful succeed, the rest teach" is just pure capitalistic philosophy. The rich need as many people as possible at the bottom to keep wages down. If people are choosing to not work directly for businesses then they are a wasted resource, from the businesses point of view. So businessmen are rude about these people, and is the root of why commerce always appears to prefer other commerce first.

Re:What idealistic state?

[silverglade00]

Although Go-OO has the better name...

Agreed. One of the things I don't like about the name is where it ends up alphabetically. It has been nice to skip past most of the L section in my package manager because it is all libs that will come in as dependencies. Now you have to wade through all of that to find libreoffice. Time to train myself to use the search, I guess.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Lumbre]

MS might implement features they aren't aware of therefore when OO encounters corruption it just assumes it to be a new feature MS have implemented but which hasn't been reverse engineered yet.

Don't you mean bug? =)

Re:What idealistic state?

[brainscauseminds]

I have not used any Excel recently, because they all tend to die when coping with larger datasets. R (www.r-project.org) has always worked better for me. And, o yeah, plotting .. no excel can stand against R plotting capabilities, it is just superior.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just dont try to embed excel sheets in a word file, and expect it to render the excel part, in LO/OOo. (useful if creating a quote for a client, for example)

Re:What idealistic state?

[jbengt]

I like gnumeric better than OO.o calc, but I need custom functions, and I personally find it easy to write them in OO.o macros , so I'm sticking to OO.o / LO.

Re:What idealistic state?

[xtracto]

Some time ago (2 or 3 years) I had to do some calculations and statistics in a spreadsheet. I found Gnumeric to be better than the OpenOffice version at that time.

Re:What idealistic state?

[xtracto]

Agreed...

I thought that docx files (which are open and basically XML that anyone can see) would be opened fine with Open/LibreOffice but the last one I tried to open (about 1 month ago) was a complete crap. The problem is that there are several features that OOo and LO do not have and are used in docx (e.g., commenting and document changes tracking)

Re:What idealistic state?

[Unequivocal]

Here's an honest question: Why? What's wrong with the Oracle version of OO right now? Or is this a preemptive move in anticipation of silly licensing nonsense from Oracle in the future? Like I said this is an honest question. Thanks.

Re:What idealistic state?

[tobiah]

I've been wondering the same thing.

Re:What idealistic state?

[GameboyRMH]

Or is this a preemptive move in anticipation of silly licensing nonsense from Oracle in the future?

Mostly this, although I also look forward to trying out LibreOffice's new features.

Re:What idealistic state?

[gstrickler]

So: If I install LO work, how well will it work with DOC files? All my coworkers are using Word 2003 and I don't want to cause any disruption by sending them funky files.

As long as they're just documents, it should work well. If they require macros, particularly VBA macros, you're likely to have difficulty.

Re:What idealistic state?

[MaskedSlacker]

OO Calc has come a long way. Four years ago it was a pile of crap. Now it's sufficient for most users (anyone doing finances, or semi-complicated calculations). At this point, if you can't do it in Calc you should probably be using something like Matlab anyway. Excel is still better than Calc, but only in places where Matlab or Mathematica would be vastly superior to Excel.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Almost-Retired]

I'm not in a position to migrate from OO to LO yet: my work is too dependent on documents received from others whose cleanliness is sometimes suspect. I look forward to migrating once LO is in the Ubuntu repositories and I can be sure of not missing any security patches. Not that I really trust Oracle to patch any security holes OO... I don't think the wait for LO in Ubuntu will be a long one.

<b>While this version has not reached the repos yet, LO is in fact part of some distributions right now. PCLOS stays about as current as any, at the cost of not supporting a lot of legacy stuff unless there is nothing to replace it. I'll be curious to see when this version makes the update queue. Your remark about others cleanliness I can't address as I'm now retired and don't have to put up with the crap clueless windows users on the 2nd floor send me, with 5 megs of doc wrapped around a 20 word memo.

Cheers, Gene
</b>

Re:What idealistic state?

[gad_zuki!]

This makes me wonder what the best management for large open source project would be. From what I can tell it goes like this (in order of best to worst):

1. Benevolent dictator (Linus). Seems the best route. With proper delegation you can have a 'mastermind' in charge without all the baggage the other two have.
2. Democratic bureaucratic (Mozilla). Generally slow-moving and cautious.
3. Corporate control (OO). Just like #2 but with also the detriment of worrying about profits, beating competitors, justifying to shareholders, etc.

Makes me wonder why so many geeks are so fiercely corporatist/libertarian.

Re:What idealistic state?

[drolli]

I guess its not the best solution to find a single "best management for large open source projects". That expression is so vague, its meaningless. Linux has other structures and interest groups than apache and that is different from an office suite....

Re:What idealistic state?

[camperdave]

There are those that contend that the saying "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" should be reversed to "Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice" where Microsoft is concerned.

However, this view assumes a corporate level of competence within Microsoft.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Lennie]

That is the first thing they did after they created their source repository.

Re:What idealistic state?

[petit_robert]

I have no problem doing it, even on a linux machine with files generated on windows.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Physics Dude]

The two words "fork oracle" carry such power, attraction and brightness that they are enough to obfuscate anything else that was written.

Now I just need to start selling T-Shirts with that phrase on them. :)

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

THats great. I'n sure we all wanted to know that

Re:What idealistic state?

[rjstanford]

I have had nothing but problems opening doc files ... The fact is, almost nobody has standardized around ODF in any meaningful way in the (i.e. "my") workplace. The gold standard is MS Office. Cost is almost never a consideration for the company--but it is for folks like me who either can't afford or don't wish to discharge a bag of cash to get a fully-featured version of MS Office.

If you're billable, think about your hourly rate. If not, divide your salary by ~1000 to get your loaded cost to the company. Now look at how many hours you spend every 3 years dealing with Office incompatibilities, and you'll see why cost is a concern for your company, and why they chose to stick with the same suite that, like it or not, almost everyone outside the company uses.

Re:What idealistic state?

[kainino]

The main problems are with weird 'features' MS added (outside of the specification), probably as intentional feature bloat to thwart other office suites importing the files. OO/LO is perfect, I believe, with Word 2000 and older .docs, while slightly lacking in some of those newer 'features.'

Word 2004, though, as I have discovered, has a horribly broken implementation of the .doc format. Any OO/LO-saved .doc will lose all of its formatting in 2004. I call this a Word 2004 bug (and it may have been fixed—my teacher may have an old version; I don't know), because it works fine with 2003, 2007, and 2008, and I know OO/LO follows the standard.

Re:What idealistic state?

[metamatic]

Only on Windows. They used to have Linux and Mac versions. It's obviously in death spiral mode.

Re:What idealistic state?

[metamatic]

Why? Well, for me the SVG import functionality is reason enough.

Re:What idealistic state?

[magus_melchior]

I've had some problems with text alignment and margins before*, so if you need to verify your LO-generated .DOC files, you can download and install Microsoft's free Word viewer. They only have the latest one based on Word 2007, but it should render 2003 files okay.

*This was four years ago, so I'm sure OO.o/LO has made improvements to the generating code.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Just Some Guy]

Here's an honest question: Why?

For me, it's for the same reason I switched from XFree86 to X.org pretty quickly: most of the real talent has already made the leap. By all accounts, there were a lot of potential XF86/OOo developers who really wanted to contribute but who were turned away by the primary "owners". When X.org/LibreOffice came along, those devs suddenly had a welcome home for their efforts. Sure, it's inevitable that a few solid, experienced devs will stick with the original project, for a while at least, but there's a much larger wave of patches and updates washing into the upstarts.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA failed to mention that LibreOffice has incorporated a number of significant patches that were available to OpenOffice but were blocked from inclusion by Oracle

To be fair, most of those patches were already blocked by Sun. Oracle merely did a coup de grace by excluding ODF members from the OO board.

In my view, LibreOffice is the first Free (as in free-range) iteration from the staroffice lineage.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Blakey Rat]

The format is the product.

A full file format specification would also be a specification to duplicate Excel-- in fact, going a step further, if Excel were required to share the same format as other apps, it would by necessity also require sharing the same feature-set. If Excel wanted to add a feature, they'd either become incompatible, or would have to wait until all other spreadsheets using the same format added the same feature.

In short, I think requiring a particular application to use a particular format stinks to high heaven.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless the doc file contains tables. In which case, certain cells are randomly, irrevocably made to be read only. Right clicking in the cell in LO gives you rather than the proper Cell menu.

Re:What idealistic state?

[swillden]

if Excel were required to share the same format as other apps, it would by necessity also require sharing the same feature-set.

Nonsense.

First, most features don't require format changes. This is why Microsoft Word's format didn't change for more than a decade, in spite of the fact that several new versions were released. This is also why we can have a feature war among browsers even though they all consume and display the same formats.

Second, a well-designed format -- like ODF -- is extensible. Applications can add new structures to the format without impeding the ability of other applications to read and operate on the resulting files. The other applications simply ignore the part they don't understand, ideally saving it unmodified.

In short, I think requiring a particular application to use a particular format stinks to high heaven.

Yeah, because interoperability now, avoidance of monopoly rents and the ability to actually read your documents later are just terrible.

Re:What idealistic state?

[lennier]

Excel wanted to add a feature, they'd either become incompatible

There is this little thing called 'backward compatibility' which makes that statement wrong.

Compatibility works two ways, see. That's the genius of standards. You can always do more than the standard requires, but not less. The crushing conformist jackboots of socialist government regulation will still let you implement api.i.am.a.beautiful.genius.snowflake() - just as long as you remember to implement api.pay.the.bills() and api.feed.the.cat()

Re:What idealistic state?

[Jason Earl]

If you are using a Linux version of OO.org then chances are very high that you are already using the go-oo.org patches that make up the bulk of the new LibreOffice changes. The fact of the matter is that the go-oo.org people basically just gave up trying to push patches upstream and became LibreOffice.

If you were using OpenOffice.org on Windows then you probably got it from Sun, in which case the reason to switch to LibreOffice is that LibreOffice is better than Sun's version of OpenOffice.org. Whether it is little things like SVG import, or bigger things like much better OOXML support LibreOffice is what OpenOffice.org could have been if Sun/Oracle would have been more willing to accept code from outside sources.

LibreOffice is already substantially better than OpenOffice.org, and the difference is probably only going to accelerate. After all, LibreOffice can still poach code from OpenOffice.org, but OpenOffice.org can not poach code from LibreOffice and still re-license it for use in its proprietary OpenOffice.org products. There was a pretty large pent up demand for changes to OpenOffice.org, and LibreOffice has already received far more developer support than was anticipated.

In short, while it might be a little premature to switch all of your OpenOffice.org installs today, chances are very good that when you do upgrade the version you want will come from the folks working on LIbreOffice. You are probably going to switch to LibreOffice eventually, so why not start now?

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

Graphs on new sheets?

Of course it can. If you don't know how to perform this simple operation, then you really have no business commenting on Open/LibreOffice.

Re:What idealistic state?

[plover]

Benevolent Dictator is fine for a while, but it's not scalable and it's not maintainable.

With luck, a successful product can have enough of a following to grow a foundation that will keep it open. It's worked well for Apache and Mozilla, but of course those are two of the most successful open source products ever.

But a benevolent dictator can get spread so thin that his or her actual control is all but gone. A benevolent dictator can abdicate (or die) at any time, leaving a power vacuum that may never get filled before the product dies, or can result in a struggle between senior maintainers. And sometimes they just get tired and sell out for the profit.

Linus has been a golden exception. But how long will he be around? This is his third decade of Linux. Will he remain devoted for 20 more years, or will he step in front of a bus tomorrow? And who would take his place, Shuttleworth?

If you want to see how this goes down, watch what happens to Apple now that Jobs' health is on the wane again. They very much run well only under his benevolent dictatorship, and, while I'm not wishing ill on him, his health problems sound insurmountable. There's no mini-Steve Jobs waiting in the wings; but I bet there are a dozen neo-Gil Amelios all champing at the bit, waiting for their chance to ride that pony all the way to the bottom. And next time, there will be no Turtlenecked-One to save them from their swan dive.

Re:What idealistic state?

[jo_ham]

OOo could *not* do this the last time I used it, and googling for a solution turned up several discussions about how it was not possible.

Thus, I stopped using it and went back to Excel.

My suitability to comment remains unaffected. You seem to have failed to log in though. If you don't know how to perform this simple operation you really have no business commenting on this discussion.

Re:What idealistic state?

[snilloc]

Why, as an end-user, switch? Libre is first out with a final release for version 3.3. Oracle is on Release Candidate 10 of their 3.3 suite. However, I tested my word-doc resume (which is heavily formatted) in OOo 3.2 versus Libre 3.3 (final) (on Ubuntu, under Virtualbox), and Libre butchered the rendering. OOo 3.2 did fine. I haven't tested the OOo Release candidates.

Re:What idealistic state?

[commodore6502]

>>>When Mozilla discontinued the Mozilla browser (codename: seamonkey), and the Mozilla Foundation picked it up

Dear Harry(toilet)Squatter:

If you're going to correct somebody, maybe you should check your facts FIRST before opening your mouth and showing everyone you know nothing. Even a quick search of wikipedia would have led you down the correct path. Your comment simply isn't correct. When the Mozilla Browser Suite was dropped ("The 1.7.x line will be the last set of Seamonkey products released and maintained by the Mozilla Foundation"), it was picked-up by the community calling themselves the Seamonkey Council. So my original statement was correct as stated:

"When Mozilla discontinued the Mozilla browser (codename: seamonkey), and the open source community picked it up, everything turned out a-okay."

Re:What idealistic state?

[dannys42]

I recently purchased the iWork suite for Mac. And I gotta say I absolutely love it. If we should be taking any hints on UI design, it should be from that office suite.

One of the things I like is they *finally* blended the best of word processors and graphic design. This always seems to come up, even if you're doing reports... you want to put an image somewhere or flow text in a slight different way on one page. It's not necessarily often, but when it happens it's always frustrating.

The other thing I really like is their spreadsheet package. For quite some time, I had been using spreadsheets, creating little mini-tables for my data, but formatting and graphing was always a bit of a pain. They managed to incorporate this in a way that was extremely natural to the way I already use spreadsheets, but make it easier and more beautiful.

Re:What idealistic state?

[angus77]

I just installed the debs. When you download and untar the package, there's a desktop-integration directory inside DEBS. If you want it to show up under Applications on Gnome, you have to install the package in there as well.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

Possibly. But don't expect this for other Office formats. The PowerPoint support in O2003 and the O2003/7/10 PowerPoint Viewers cannot render PPTs saved in "PowerPoint 95" format by Ppt95 and/or in "PowerPoint 97" format by Ppt97. The interoperable 95/97 format works fine and can be read, modified, and rendered in O2003 and rendered in the O2003/7/10 viewers.

And don't get me started on Visio formats 4.x and earlier.

Re:What idealistic state?

[angus77]

If you don't use the JRE (I don't) you can turn it off (Tools->Options->LibreOffice->Java->Use a Java runtime environment) to improve performance. You can also adjust memory usage (Tools->Options->LibreOffice->Memory) which helps, too.

Re:What idealistic state?

[angus77]

I've found Calc is able to do what I need it to do. The problem is, whenever I actually need to make a spreadsheet, I also have to share it. It's the compatibility issues that forced me to use Excel on the company's computer (fortunately I switched jobs a year ago and haven't had to deal with spreadsheets since).

Re:What idealistic state?

[angus77]

Well, in emacs you can do spreadsheets.

Re:What idealistic state?

[angus77]

Is this with your own sensibly created files, or with files that others have somehow hacked together so that they just barely display "properly" with MSOffice itself?

Re:What idealistic state?

[kmoser]

Some would argue there's no need to fork Oracle, and that Oracle should just go fork themselves.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the name Libre Office and the new and improved green theme.

Re:What idealistic state?

[DaVince21]

Doc file compatibility has never failed me, and that keeps being true in LibreOffice.

Re:What idealistic state?

[Anonymous Coward]

More over the product maturity at the time of the fork was far superior to the microstuff .
The real culprit in our SENMACE controlled society is grants of pieces of the public domain made by those holding the public powers of government to private persons or entities that end up in SENMACE hands. Copyrights and patents and fcc [failures of corporate control] licenses of public resources converted from public freely available or accessible open source to private price gated enterprises. This conversion of the commons served to reestablish "the people abusing" feudal system: either you are one of the feudal lords or you must, if you can, work for them, if they will let you, lest you starve to death.
Open office and now LibreOffice have found ways to superpower the copyrighted products offered by the monopoly holding SENMACE. Linux itself made clear just how powerful worldwide cooperative open source programming efforts could be to fend off the SENMACE pay-first or do-without stuff. What remains now is the need to provide for the continuance of long term development and deployment of international cooperative developed, open source software and to expand it both vertically and horizontally so that every house-hold in the world that has a computing machine can enjoy "free paid" good software.
A new problem is emerging. This time the monopoly attack is aimed the the school markets.. Public schools are being down graded in quality and private schools (charter schools) are rising in their place together with profitable management company contracts. More important is the instructional content and software is being price and admissions gated. Privatize the commons to widen and broaden the income gap, create an environment where only graduates can get jobs, and where only the wealthy can afford to school their children to graduate. Monopoly is like the citric acid cycle all inputs are converted for the benefit of but one.
We need a new international cooperative open source software development project which can defend as a human right complete, competitive and affordable access for every one to all or "equivalent to all that is available" education. This worldwide cooperative project should seek to produce quality instructional software, quality instructional content, and to deliver the best in instructional and assessment technologies that can favorably compete because of its excellence with any and all Copyrighted or Patented educational products or services that can be offered for profit. The world of the human learner should have no boundaries. Each person should interact with all other persons. No part of the assets of any government should be permitted to be privatized in to commercial or special interest monopoly holding gating enterprises.

 

Re:What idealistic state?

[Will.Woodhull]

True. Sun was screwing up before Oracle gobbled them up.

Yet calling Oracle's actions a "coup de grace" seems like an overly euphemistic phrasing. It seems more like Oracle managed to shoot itself in the foot. With a large bore shotgun. Leaving it with one less leg to stand on, as well as a bloody mess of a trail as it zombie-staggers forward.

link

[Anonymous Coward]

link to main site http://www.libreoffice.org/ instead of lame-ass blog talking about it

Re:link

[tverbeek]

Speaking of links, the LibreOffice installer still links to OpenOffice.org when it finishes.

Not a good sign of attention to detail in this fork.

Re:link

[Baseclass]

To keep LibreOffice installed concurrently with OpenOffice, run the included open-libre-together.sh script saved in the /usr/doc/libreoffice-(version)/ directory to patch the .desktop menu files.

Re:link

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of links, the LibreOffice installer still links to OpenOffice.org when it finishes.

Not a good sign of attention to detail in this fork.

So fix it.

Re:link

[Anonymous Coward]

Uninstalling LibreOffice as I am typing this. Was excited that finally inmpovements are coming to OpenOffice but what came out is an abomination: it's much slower, it does not handle fonts correctly, it can not read OpenOffice document!

Attention to details?!Ha! There is a mountain of problems in front you.

Re:link

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha!

Re:link

[Risen888]

Attention to details?!Ha! There is a mountain of problems in front you.

Yes,theresure is!Ha !

Re:link

[Anonymous Coward]

Patches welcome.

Tried it today

[nicholas22]

I tried it today for the first time and I must say, I am impressed :) The UI seems much better than the last time I used OpenOffice (maybe v2) and the graphics seem to have been created by professional designers, as opposed to the developers themselves. I had a DOC that was crashing my Word 2007 and I got it opened with ...LibreOffice. Probably has to do with Microsoft not even keeping up with their own standards (and I'm honestly not trolling).

Re:Tried it today

[PeterBrett]

Did they finally ... give us a ribbon?

Why would anyone want one of those? Surely having an interface consistent with 99.9% of the other applications running on your system is more useful than keeping up with the Jones's latest patent-encumbered different-for-the-sake-of-being-different UI fad?

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you can tell me... What is different in this LibreOffice 3.3 from the LibreOffice 3.3 I installed back in September?

Re:Tried it today

[sapphire wyvern]

Doesn't look like it.

I'll install this thing over the top of OpenOffice 3.2 on my home computer. But I suspect it won't stop my secret, shameful lust for Office 2010 (which I've been using at work).

Re:Tried it today

[Missing.Matter]

different-for-the-sake-of-being-different UI fad?

This is hardly the case with the ribbon. More functions of the program are brought out to the forefront. This means that not only on average there are less clicks to access the equivalent function, but these functions are actually used instead of hiding away forever. Second, there is a shortcut for absolutely every function, not just a few. So while the shortcuts are different, you have better control of the program.

So if you aren't adverse to change (for the sake of improvement) then you can actually be more productive with the ribbon. I know I am.

Re:Tried it today

[Iceykitsune]

The one you downloaded in sep was the beta, this is the stable relase

Re:Tried it today

[tverbeek]

No I think they went with the give-the-users-what-they-want mindset, and gave us a familiar UI.

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

Bull. Simple hierarchical menus that present all functions are much easier to understand than multiple toolbars that scroll off-screen etc., and even toolbars are much better understood than ribbons, precisely because they are familiar. Don't get me started on the stupid app button thing that hides the most necessary functions like a print dialog.

The ribbon serves ONE purpose: to differentiate Office from OpenOffice/LibreOffice by patents alone, because it it was largely equivalent in features.

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used a program which had a checkbox in it's options: Use Ribbon ( ) Yes ( ) No. If you checked "No", you got menus. And that seems like a trivial thing to implement to me if you are going to do ribbons anyway, since the menu infrastructure is already there (so you just have to dump your data structure into it to make menus). Why doesn't everyone do this, so that everyone can get what they prefer?

Re:Tried it today

[theaveng]

Sounds like a mess.
Similar to the annoying Start menu that only displays HALF the options, and hides the rest (like the "add table" that I need right now).

Re:Tried it today

[HarrySquatter]

Bull. Simple hierarchical menus that present all functions are much easier to understand than multiple toolbars that scroll off-screen etc., and even toolbars are much better understood than ribbons, precisely because they are familiar.

That's funny because the actual user testing that lead to the Ribbon showed otherwise.

Re:Tried it today

[biojayc]

Agreed. On the mac it igs even better because they have the ribbon AND the menus, since you can't really get rid of menus on a mac. The user has more choice here, and if he chooses he can his the ribbon altogether.

Re:Tried it today

[melikamp]

We already can bring useful functions to the forefront by dragging them into toolbars. I worked with ribbon, and I fail to see how taking three times as much space is better for anything. With the amount of screen they waste, I could drag every button I will ever use out there. We couldn't even customize ribbons via UI until 2010 (seriously?), and now MS is back to configurable tabbed toolbars, just like Delphi and Maya had long before them, but BIGGER! You can be sure of who things: if LibreOffice eventually implements tabbed toolbars, they will be regular size, and we will have an option to use the old interface.

Re:Tried it today

[Digicrat]

+1

The worst thing about the Ribbon is that half the time it seems like there's no logic what-so-ever in where items are placed in it, and even worse you can't customize it in any meaningful way.

A good UI should be intuititive to use and allow you to find a feature quickly if you know what it is. In comparison, Google/Help-docs is often the only way to find a newly hidden item in the MS Ribbon that was once easily found in the menus . . . /rant

Re:Tried it today

[OzPeter]

... Second, there is a shortcut for absolutely every function, not just a few. ...

I have Excel 2007 open in front of me (I know, not a true comparison) with its ribbon. I can see all the lovely options, but how do I see all the shortcut keys? With a menu system at least you could look at a menu and associate an action with a shortcut. This sort of learning seems to be lacking from every program I have used that has a Ribbon interface. Yes I know in Excel I can see the short cuts in the help system, but that is not the optimal place for me to see them when I using the program.

Re:Tried it today

[Missing.Matter]

Press alt.

Re:Tried it today

[snookiex]

I installed Linux to my brother a couple weeks ago (he's an accountant). The next day he said he hated OO (the old "I can't find what I need" argument). He's the kind of user who is not afraid of playing around with new things, but he told me that the GUI just wasn't attractive enough to make him do it. So I decided to install Lotus Symphony it's less powerful (in terms of features, since they're stuck in a not-so-new version of OO, but release fixpacks periodically) but my brother felt in love with the nice icons and the general layout (he opens many windows at a time, so SDI mode is just fine for him).

PS.: Yes, pasting in the /. 2.0 sucks

Re:Tried it today

[Missing.Matter]

It's not about bringing useful or commonly used functions to the forefront, it's about bringing EVERY function to the forefront. Like I said, I can probably access 90% of Word's functionality with 3 clicks. If there's an option I use a lot, I have the option of adding a shortcut to the top of the screen, or memorizing the shortcut.

Honestly, the only people I know who complain about the ribbon have invested a lot of energy memorizing shortcuts. It seems everyone else who is a casual user of Word, or never used it before love the Ribbon. They use more functions (because they know they're there) and their documents look better because of it.

Re:Tried it today

[Missing.Matter]

Simple hierarchical menus that present all functions are much easier to understand than multiple toolbars that scroll off-screen etc., and even toolbars are much better understood than ribbons

And yet this lead to a product where 80% of users only use 20% of the functionality. I can't tell you the amount of times I've heard people say "I didn't know Word could do this!" after switching to 2007, when the function had been there all along.

Don't get me started on the stupid app button thing that hides the most necessary functions like a print dialog.

How difficult is it? It's the same thing as the "File" menu, but a graphic. This is common in Windows 7 in many programs including Worpad, Paint, and the Live suite. Nothing is "Hidden". If you want the print button on the top of the screen you have that option too.

Re:Tried it today

[Missing.Matter]

Pray, tell what exactly is hidden in the Ribbon that was easily found in menus? I hear this argument so often, but I just can't fathom why the ribbon is so confusing to some people.

You want to insert something? Go to the 'Insert' tab. You want to change your document layout? Go to 'Page Layout.' Where would you go if you wanted to add a bibliography? References! It's so simple my mother can figure it out, and yet it foils scores of computer nerds who swear by a drop down menu.

Re:Tried it today

[OzPeter]

Press alt.

OK .. but still .. how is this obvious?

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

It may bring the less-used functions to the forefront, but it does so by hiding the functions that are actually used in non-logical places.

Less searching for the features you don't use, and more searching for those you do.

Re:Tried it today

[StuartHankins]

The ribbon reduces productivity on those who need to work with full-page presentations (because the ribbon reduces the vertical working area), forcing you to work at a reduced magnification or with partial pages.

The ribbon also reduces productivity for those of us who use keyboard shortcuts extensively. If I have to use a mouse to do something it's considerably slower.

Make it an option. I don't want 20% of my screen taken up with clickie buttons and other useless garbage. It's a dumbing-down similar to McDonald's cash registers -- give them pictures they can click on so they don't have to remember any menu structures.

A clean interface without clutter is a joy to work in. Every item that takes up space should be important. Menus are a very simple, effective way to hide most of the junk so you can concentrate on the document rather than the tools.

On one extreme you have buttons and widgets and crap all over, looking like some kid just got VB. On the other extreme you have a spartan two-button interface. Now which companies came to mind when you read that?

Exactly. Now aim for somewhere in the middle.

Re:Tried it today

[gr8_phk]

More functions of the program are brought out to the forefront.

No. Open a presentation and try to view it. The button you want is more clicks away than it used to be, and this is the most common feature. The new UI puts everything on a toolbar but then makes you select from different toolbars - er ribbons. And OMFG the file menu is now that big stupid circle. I thought that was a logo for a long time and couldn't find save or print...

Re:Tried it today

[Missing.Matter]

It's not entirely obvious, but shortcuts never are. A user advanced enough to desire shortcuts should be advanced enough to click "Help" and type in "Keyboard Shortcuts"

Re:Tried it today

[Grizzley9]

I tried it today for the first time and I must say, I am impressed :)

The UI seems much better than the last time I used OpenOffice (maybe v2) and the graphics seem to have been created by professional designers, as opposed to the developers themselves.

Professional designers? It looks exactly the same as OpenOffice. This is little more than a repackaging under a different name and some bug fixes.

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

on average there are less clicks to access the equivalent function

Says you. Before the ribbon I was able to customize my toolbars any way I wanted. Since I knew exactly which functions I needed (as opposite to whatever user stats have told MS that the average user needs), that means my toolbars were both minimalistic and super-complete. Nowadays I have to chase around a bunch of different tabs for any function I might need. No way I can be more productive than I was before. And even then, the ribbon takes up 300% to 400% more screen real state than my toolbars used, which pisses me off to no end.

I heard the latest Office gives you some degree of customization of the ribbon, which means that whenever corporate decides to pay for Office again we might get some control back. I'm not the average user; nobody is.

Re:Tried it today

[Missing.Matter]

The ribbon reduces productivity on those who need to work with full-page presentations (because the ribbon reduces the vertical working area), forcing you to work at a reduced magnification or with partial pages.

Get a bigger monitor or double click to hide the ribbon. Its size does not scale with resolution, so the larger the screen, the more document space you have. I compose a presentation every day using a 14" 1600x900 screen and have no troubles.

The ribbon also reduces productivity for those of us who use keyboard shortcuts extensively. If I have to use a mouse to do something it's considerably slower.

There is a keyboard shortcut to every function in Word. What's the keyboard shortcut to add a top header in open office. What about changing spacing before a paragraph? These are all easily accessible and discoverable by pressing the alt key.

give them pictures they can click on so they don't have to remember any menu structures.

Making something easier to use is not dumming down. Why should people have to remember menu structures? It obviously doesn't work, as no one used any of the functionality in Word 2000 and prior. So even if you have all these features in your perfect hierarchical menu structure, if no one uses them what good are they?

On one extreme you have buttons and widgets and crap all over, looking like some kid just got VB. On the other extreme you have a spartan two-button interface. Now which companies came to mind when you read that?

I'm guessing you're referring to the iPad? I have one, and it's a toy. I use it to read ebooks, surf the web, and watch movies. I get exactly 0 work accomplished with it. By contrast I teach classes, conduct research, and write papers with Microsoft's Office suite. If you want to see how useful a minimalist Office application is, try iWork for iPad. It's next to worthless at actual productivity, even though it looks real good.

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

More functions to the forefront.. which is why I couldn't find the print function? Once it was explained that this was moved to the system button (where Windows programs practically never had anything), it popped up a message that I can't print, because "the script" could not be run. What script? I have no idea, but I was told to reopen the document with scripts enabled. I never found that at all. Thanks for the improvements!

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

I hated the ribbon at first, but after I learned how to use it every other word processor UI feels old and clumsy.

Re:Tried it today

[Missing.Matter]

No. Open a presentation and try to view it. The button you want is more clicks away than it used to be, and this is the most common feature.

It's at the bottom right corner, exactly 1 click away. How much easier can it get?

And OMFG the file menu is now that big stupid circle.

ctrl+p or ctrl+s still print and save. Regardless the first time you start the program, a big arrow points to it and says "THIS IS A MENU." Anyway, they changed it in 2010 because people apparently had trouble with it, and made it look more like the menus you see in Firefox 4, Wordpad, Paint, Opera etc.

Re:Tried it today

[Will.Woodhull]

Let's see, that was user testing with users who showed a preference for Microsoft products, right? I doubt that Microsoft added any ribbon patches to any FOSS products or anything like that.

So there was self-selected sampling bias.

Re:Tried it today

[Nemyst]

Because Alt is the universal shortcut display button? Pressing Alt in any program will highlight the menu bar and underline the letter to use to access each menu.

The ribbon's mechanism blends in very well with the expected behavior of the rest of the OS.

Re:Tried it today

[Nemyst]

I'm sorry to say but there's a good chance what you're saying won't be heard around here. The ribbon might be just too different for it to catch on people who have already been used to menu bars and toolbars. Humans are averse to change.

I for one find it one of the most interesting and nice UIs currently available.

Re:Tried it today

[Missing.Matter]

Before the ribbon I was able to customize my toolbars any way I wanted.

You can put commonly used functions on the title bar. You can't possibly use too many functions if the ribbon takes up so much room compared to your old setup, so this should work fine.

Re:Tried it today

[micheas]

There are people who have spent many thousands of hours in front of their word processor. When you change it they hate you.

See vi vs emacs for the programmer equivalent of of ribbon vs menu.

Re:Tried it today

[gparent]

It's only obvious because we've been using the alt key for a decade if not more. Most users do not use shortcuts, and those who do usually know about the alt key.

Re:Tried it today

[Bert64]

Ubuntu is so simple that my mother (and grandmother) can figure it out yet it foils scores of long time computer users...

Why? Because those users have preconceptions about how they think things are supposed to work, and they try to apply those preconceptions to something different which either results in it working badly or not at all. People hate learning anything new, wether the new option is better or not is largely irrelevant.

My grandmother has driven manual shift cars for over 50 years, she can't drive an automatic, despite the fact that an automatic is undeniably easier (simply less to worry about)... She instinctively goes for the clutch with her left foot, and hits the brake instead.

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm more productive with a customized toolbar that takes up maybe 34 pixels of height.

Re:Tried it today

[Missing.Matter]

http://bsix12.com/the-story-of-the-office-ribbon/

It's a lot of watching, but the team who designed the ribbon explain how it came about. You'll be shocked to know they didn't just come up with it out of thin air and ask a bunch of microsoft fanboys if it was good.

Re:Tried it today

[Martin Foster]

I can come up with at least one example of the old user interface providing something ribbons were not making as easy to find. Under older versions of MS Word you double-click on the Header or Footer and you would be shown a toolbar that gave you options to insert Page Numbers, Total pages and so forth.

So if I wanted to, I could quickly do: Page/Total to get a 1/2 to show up at the bottom of the document.

Now under 2007, that toolbar dissapears and now I can insert Page numbers, none of which matched that exact format and none of which were simply a macro fill in. Hence, I had to dig through in order to find what I wanted. Go to Insert, and look about its not necessarily obvious. But eventually you can click on Quick Parts and Field and then select from a large list of macros.

Now that you do it once, you can create a template and never repeat the procedure. However, how was that any easier or more obvious then the old method?

Re:Tried it today

[smbarbour]

One feature that I eventually had to resort to Help to find was the Autocorrect settings (specifically to add context-specific abbreviations to the list that would automatically be expanded to the full text). This was very easily found via menus and damn near impossible via the ribbon.

Re:Tried it today

[Beetle B.]

Surely having an interface consistent with 99.9% of the other applications running on your system is more useful than keeping up with the Jones's latest patent-encumbered different-for-the-sake-of-being-different UI fad?

As an Emacs user, I beg to differ.

Re:Tried it today

[kiwimate]

Because of prior experience? Culture? Context?

Something that is "obvious" is usually only obvious if you consider it in the context of shared social knowledge or prior experience. I remember when I first moved to the U.S. and was buying a car, and the salesman pointed to the bottom of the sheet and (very happy because he'd just sold me a new car and was counting his commission) invited me to "just put your John Hancock right there".

Obvious to him what was needed - probably obvious to the majority of adult Americans. I had zero clue what he was talking about. Even when he realized I was stumped, he didn't know what to do to make me understand. That's not some peculiarity of the car business or mechanical talk - it's shared cultural expertise which I didn't know because I'd only been in the country for two weeks.

Re:Tried it today

[tehcyder]

Once the ribbon becomes the standard office interface (i.e. when most businesses have moved to Office 2007+) it will become necessary for Libre Office to follow suit, or they will lose the crucial ability to say "it looks and works almost exactly the same as MS Office".

Re:Tried it today

[slim]

My grandmother has driven manual shift cars for over 50 years, she can't drive an automatic, despite the fact that an automatic is undeniably easier (simply less to worry about)... She instinctively goes for the clutch with her left foot, and hits the brake instead.

The solution to this is to put your left foot on a "virtual clutch pedal" somewhere to the left of the brake pedal, and leave it there. As long as you're not tempted to use one foot for each pedal, you'll be fine.

The first time I hired a car in the US, I fell into the same trap as your grandmother: within a few tens of metres from starting, I slammed in the "clutch", and jolted to a sudden halt, such that the car behind nearly rear-ended me.

The analogy with an office suite... erm...

Re:Tried it today

[tehcyder]

Do you seriously think Microsoft chose to piss off their customers by producing a harder to use interface in the face of real evidence, just to harm sales of OpenOffice?

Re:Tried it today

[tverbeek]

When I first encountered the MS Ribbon, with no one to explain it to me, it took me a full minute to figure out how to print. That's a pretty basic function, but it was unclear how to do it. I resorted to poking at things at random because there was no intuitive place to look for that function. (As I recall, I eventually found it by clicking on the unlabeled logo in the corner.) In principle, the ribbon might be a good UI design (especially for people who have no prior knowledge of how to use an office app). In practice, Microsoft's ability to hide the print function from me was a pretty big turn-off.

In fact, Microsoft's fondness for hiding things is chronic problem with their approach to UI design. In recent versions of Windows, they hide filename extensions by default, making it difficult to change/correct them when needed, and obscuring them as clues to the user (like ".EXE" on a piece of malware disguised with an MS Word icon). They have "personalized menus" that actively hide menu functions that you haven't used recently, which defeats much of the purpose of an explorable pull-down menu, by not letting the user remember "oh, I remember seeing that under View...", and even hiding from them the fact that these features exist. Instead of actually simplifying the software, they keep it complex but try to sweep that complexity under the rug.

Re:Tried it today

[tehcyder]

It takes about ten minutes to get used to the ribbon interface, it really isn't that much of a big deal. The only awkward thing is when you have to keep switching between the ribbon and older Office/Open Office programs and back again.

Re:Tried it today

[tverbeek]

I can't tell you the amount of times I've heard people say "I didn't know Word could do this!" after switching to 2007, when the function had been there all along.

...hidden from the user by Microsoft's broken approach to pull-down menus, which takes things off the visible menu if the user doesn't use it right away.

Re:Tried it today

[tehcyder]

Fair enough, but most users don't use keyboard shortcuts, I get fed up telling people to use ctrl+c and ctrl+v for copy and paste, they'd rather do it with the mouse...

Re:Tried it today

[tverbeek]

Features should be easily discoverable by people who don't know they exist.

Please stay away from UI design; you clearly don't have a clue how to do it well.

Re:Tried it today

[tehcyder]

And OMFG the file menu is now that big stupid circle. I thought that was a logo for a long time and couldn't find save or print...

In the process of trying to prove a dubious point, you are simply making yourself sound like a noob.

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

"The ribbon's mechanism blends in very well with the expected behavior of the rest of the OS."

It crashes and throws up cryptic warnings a lot?

Re:Tried it today

[tverbeek]

Is it a good idea to hide from new users the fact that these shortcuts exist?

Re:Tried it today

[tverbeek]

In other words they botched the design. Please stop making excuses for Microsoft's UI design incompetence.

Re:Tried it today

[Lumbre]

And I just assumed MS was being a b**** by removing shortcuts in 2007 ant 2010. Good thing I use OpenOffice (and soon LibreOffice) for everything. Though it was annoying not being able to save simply by pressing Ctrl+S

Re:Tried it today

[PeterBrett]

Surely having an interface consistent with 99.9% of the other applications running on your system is more useful than keeping up with the Jones's latest patent-encumbered different-for-the-sake-of-being-different UI fad?

As an Emacs user, I beg to differ.

You misunderstand. 99.9% of the other applications running on my system is GNU Emacs. It's the best editor, after all!

Re:Tried it today

[richlv]

i wouldn't expect it to be much different from latest development versions of oo.org, which are notably faster except for the patchsets from go-oo - which was already distributed with several linux distros, thus it should be even less different from that one.
there's too little time passed for such a huge codebase to differ in a significant way.

what i'd hate to see, though, useful development at oracle not to pass up to libreo... the opposite direction already seems to be sealed.

Re:Tried it today

[Man Eating Duck]

It's so simple my mother can figure it out, and yet it foils scores of computer nerds who swear by a drop down menu.

As (probably) opposed to your mother I've been (ab)using Excel for more than twelve years for a large variety of purposes, there are not many features I haven't used at one time or another. The ribbon hampers me, it doesn't foil me :)

If I haven't used a feature for three years I probably never knew the shortcut for it, but on previous versions I'd know where to look. It would also be a lot quicker to scan dropdown menus without all the 'helpful' icons. If I spend twelve seconds finding an arbitrary entry it is about ten seconds too long.

It's far slower to scan a mess of icons and text horizontally than to look for text vertically in text-only dropdown menus. Finding the 'search commands' plugin from MS labs was a help (if it was instant/dynamic and didn't place results horizontally it would be perfect (seriously, what is the fucking problem with placing obvious list items in... well, vertical lists?)). The fact that MS themselves felt the need to make this plugin available at all leaves me thinking that other power users as well find that the ribbon is a huge leap backwards.

It seems to me that the ribbon is aimed at people who don't know how to use Office in the first place, but I fail to see how it will help them all that much. For the rest of us it is a relatively minor annoyance, but one which seems quite unneccesary. In my experience novice users of for instance Excel have a lot more trouble understanding the concept of a spreadsheet than finding how to insert a sum formula once they do understand the concept.

Re:Tried it today

[The Moof]

I'm not using the latest greatest MS office (and probably never will), but I thought that this was an OS-level setting. At least, it used to be in XP under the display properties.

Re:Tried it today

[demonbug]

The ribbon serves ONE purpose: to differentiate Office from OpenOffice/LibreOffice by patents alone, because it it was largely equivalent in features.

Bull. If you approach it with even a slightly open mind (difficult, I know, what with it coming from evil Microsoft) the benefits are immediately apparent. Tools are organized in a far more logical manner than the old system, grouped by task so it is very easy to find what you want. It succeeds in making the powerful tools that actually justify a full-fledged office app over something like wordpad (or whatever your text editor of choice might be; I don't think vi runs on Windows) visible to the user.

I really don't understand the complaints about the app button. Although it probably could have been executed better, once you see it you know what is there. I actually think it makes a lot of sense with the ribbon interface. On the ribbon, you've got all of the options and tools for creating a document. In Word, you've got tabs for layout, formatting, etc. All the stuff you use when working in the document, organized by task. The App button basically gives you the file handling options, sort of a meta-menu - Save, print, etc. - the things that you do with the document, but that are not really part of creating or editing the document (okay, that may be too much; it is basically the File menu, which for unknown reasons they decided needed to be obfuscated). Once you know it is there, which requires all of being shown once (I know, pretty extensive training) it is pretty much indistinguishable from a File menu.

Of course, I switched jobs and now I'm back to using Office 2003, so no ribbon for me. I do miss it, and think it is a better solution than the menu system (although not enough better for me to buy a new version of Office for home just to get it - I'm using whichever version of OO was the last one before Oracle took over, and may switch to Libre if there are any actual improvements).

Re:Tried it today

[pnutjam]

how do I protect and unprotect a form? quick, I'm waiting...

Re:Tried it today

[xtracto]

it's about bringing EVERY function to the forefront. Like I said, I can probably access 90% of Word's functionality with 3 clicks.

Using traditional menus you can access 90% of Word's functionality with 3 clicks:
Click 1: Select one of the menu-bar options and show sub-menu
Click 2: Select one of the options of the newly shown submenu. The majority of times that' all you have to do but if not...
Click 3: Select any option from the sub-menu displayed after click-2.

Honestly, the only people I know who complain about the ribbon have invested a lot of energy memorizing shortcuts. It seems everyone else who is a casual user of Word, or never used it before love the Ribbon.

I have used the ribbon (Office Live ) in a daily basis and use the menu interface in Office 2003 also daily. For me, the ribbon is just a different way to present menus (tabs) and sub-menus (inside the ribbon "toolbar") after shuffling the grouping and order of the tools. At the end, they had to resort to the ugly "office icon" hack to provide "miscelaneous" features.

blah.

Re:Tried it today

[clickety6]

Pray, tell what exactly is hidden in the Ribbon that was easily found in menus? Print

Re:Tried it today

[xtracto]

There is a keyboard shortcut to every function in Word. What's the keyboard shortcut to add a top header in open office. What about changing spacing before a paragraph? These are all easily accessible and discoverable by pressing the alt key.

Ugh, and they are different in each language...
E.g., Bold Face font
- English is CTRL+B
- German is ALT+SHIFT+F
- Spanish is CTRL+N

I fucking hate Ms Office...

Re:Tried it today

[PitaBred]

The worst part about the ribbon is that it took me a week to figure out that the circle in the upper left of the window was actually a fucking menu that let me change the settings and such I wanted. There's no clue that it's a menu or that it'll expand.

Re:Tried it today

[Grishnakh]

Your grandmother is right; I learned on automatics, but after driving a stick for 17 years, it's very disconcerting to drive an automatic (which happens rarely: rental cars). Automatics suck, and it's not because of the lack of a clutch and gearshift, it's the fact that they roll forward when you take your foot off the brake. If it weren't for that giant difference between the two, going from stick to automatic wouldn't be such a shock. The right pedal is called the "accelerator", not the "accelerate even more" pedal; the car should not move until you press on the accelerator. What's really lame is that they seem to be copying this stupid behavior, for no good reason, in cars with newer drivetrains (hybrids, CVTs, etc) that have no technical need for this behavior, just because legions of dumb automatic drivers expect it.

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't have to be presented like some kind of paranoid conspiracy, but if your question is binary (which it appears to be, as it is so obviously loaded), then the answer has to be yes.

Every single feature in every single MS product is designed with MS's profitability in mind primarily. What the user wants and needs is further down the list, and whilst that can correlate with what MS's profit motive, it does not have to.

If MS decide that they will make more money by hobbling one of their products and spending on a marketing/spin campaign, rather than actually competing, then they will. And MS internally know much more about the market and how they sit in it than most people outside.

Take for example the multiple copies of Windows that are available: everything short of Windows 7 ultimate is crippled to suit MS's business model (and ultimate is still crippled in the form of DRM, and limits so that what they sell as a workstation OS won't compete with their server OSes), yet most users of 7 Home SomethingOrOther will gladly parrot that they don't need the fancier features - as the salesman told them. Right up to the point where they buy something like an XBox that might need features that aren't in 7 Home SomethingOrOther. And the user will not like having to spend more on another version of Windows 7, but they probably will - as they don't know any better, because MS products (like nearly all proprietary products, and many FOSS products that copy proprietary paradigms) are very much geared up to hold the user's hand so that the user doesn't figure out what is going on. If the user was guided such that they gain and understanding of what the computer is doing, the user becomes empowered, and then doesn't need middlemen (eg Windows, and a raft of closed applications) to help them. They then may move away from MS or other proprietary products, and that isn't good for business.

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about bringing useful or commonly used functions to the forefront, it's about bringing EVERY function to the forefront. Like I said, I can probably access 90% of Word's functionality with 3 clicks.

Most people do not and will not ever use more than a handful of the functions available in Word or Excel. I would bet that most couldn't even tell you what half of the buttons on a default install of Excel are, let alone what they do.
I want to maximize the screen space of my spreadsheets. The first thing I do with a new install is customize the toolbar, removing all but the few buttons I regularly use. Options readily accessible with a right-click, like cut and paste for instance, come off. Anything else I can find in the drop down menu. Almost all of this is accessible in 3 clicks or less.
The day Libre Office forces that horrible ribbon on me is the day I search for another alternative.

Re:Tried it today

[gstrickler]

Professional designers? It looks exactly the same as OpenOffice. This is little more than a repackaging under a different name and some bug fixes.

Reading fail. Apparently, you ignored the part where he said the last version he used was v2.

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with things like the ribbon (not that I have used it) is that when someone understands what the computer is doing, these interfaces might not correlate with how the computer works. And so the more advanced user find the change a step backwards, at best.

When someone comes along with no understanding or a faulty understanding (that has come from years of salesmen misrepresenting personal computers, and people wanting to think they are some kind of magic box as a faulty magic box is the perfect excuse for not having done some work - no one understands the magic box), the ribbon might be more intuitive because it fits better with the faulty view the n00b has.

And of course there is a difference between knowledge and understanding. Someone who knows how to use something can still not understand it, yet due to that ignorance will assert themselves as correct when they may well not be.

There is a difference between knowing your times tables and understanding multiplication. And I'm sure you can imagine how someone could be capable of learning their times tables, yet still not recognise that they don't understand multiplication. Proprietary software vendors take advantage of this discrepancy in the world of computers, and rely on the ignorance of people not understanding what they are using. They also need to maintain that ignorance, and constantly shifting the goals is part of that. No doubt the ribbon will go away, or change significantly, over the next 5 versions of Office or so.

Gotta keep that user unempowered.

You have learned how to use the ribbon for whatever reason, and when you are advocating it with a 1.8mill ID it makes me think that you haven't used non-ribbon interfaces much - or have used shit-for-a-business-reason interfaces too much, and the ribbon seems to be great in comparison. Don't worry, there will be another revolutionary interface along at some point. Perhaps you'll like, perhaps by then you will have recognised how the constant fiddling with things is just to keep the user unempowered, and to sell new versions of the same product.

Re:Tried it today

[gstrickler]

The ribbon reduces productivity on those who need to work with full-page presentations (because the ribbon reduces the vertical working area), forcing you to work at a reduced magnification or with partial pages.

While I dislike the ribbon, your statement is not accurate. The ribbon takes (within a few pixels) the exact same vertical space as the standard toolbars in Office 2003. I still find the ribbon poorly organized, slower to use, and non intuitive, but it doesn't actually take up more room unless you were in the habit of turning off toolbars in previous versions, and you can hide the ribbon to accomplish a similar capability in O2k7 and later.

Re:Tried it today

[timeOday]

It's not just a matter familiarity. If nothing else, the ribbon is an atrocious waste of screen real estate. Look at "Page Layout... Size." Do I really need a picture of a piece of paper with arrows along the horizontal and vertical axes to explain "size"? No! You can minimize the ribbon, but it still re-appears when you access it, with all the visual clutter and disorganization making it slower to find and move your mouse to what you need. And for what?

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

More vertical space WASTED.
In case you haven't noticed, widescreen is now the norm. Your 3:4 and 4:5 monitors are out. 16:9 and 16:10 are in. The ribbon takes up far more room than the old menus did. I basically see it as non-editable, non-dragable toolbars for fucking morons.

Re:Tried it today

[Grizzley9]

Professional designers? It looks exactly the same as OpenOffice. This is little more than a repackaging under a different name and some bug fixes.

Reading fail. Apparently, you ignored the part where he said the last version he used was v2.

Experience Fail.

Re:Tried it today

[spitzak]

Alt shows the *accelerators*, not the shortcuts.

Accelerators only work when the menu is displayed. Shortcuts work all the time.

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

The first and last time I got stuck doing that was finishing a summer course during my second to last semester of college. The college in question had only begun rolling out XP->Vista/7 installs in the past year, meaning most of the Office setups were still Pre-Ribbon. I ended up in one of the labs for a printed writing assignment and spent about half of my time at the end working on formatting/printing over the actual time spent typing and proofreading my paper.

Even after being explained that the 'circle' was the file menu replacement I couldn't understand what sort of idiot decided that was a smart move over a 'document' icon, or disk icon, or any one of the many dozens of previous used icons for the same sort of menu.

First and last time I used a modern version of Office, and thanks to Abiword I have yet to find a technical reason to go back. (Not many professors actually used any features of Office that give libwmf issues, so both OO and Abiword seem to open them find. Business users YMMV and all.)

Re:Tried it today

[camperdave]

the car should not move until you press on the accelerator.

I would expect any vehicle that is in gear to move when the engine is running, automatic or manual. In fact, if any vehicle were to not move when the engine is running and the feet are off the pedals it would be the automatic, since there's going to be a minimum point where the fluid in the torque converter is simply going to flow around the turbine/impellor blades instead of having the energy to move them.

Re:Tried it today

[Will.Woodhull]

Actually, yes, I do think that Microsoft will piss off its customers as it pursues a larger market share or sales of other MS products. I have nearly 30 years' experience with Microsoft products, with the first 15 or so involved in sales and support software written for their operating systems. I have personal knowledge of how they screw over customers going back to Win3.1, where they deliberately failed to fix the bug from Win3.0 in the included calculator applet because salespersons demonstrating its errors in simple division were able to sell more copies of WinExcel.

At the time, this was considered a clever marketing ploy.

Only a fool would regard Microsoft as having anything more than a passing interest in the end users. They are entirely profit driven and explicitly motivated to reach and retain dominance in their chosen markets. The quality of the end user experience is only important to the extent that it supports their efforts toward those goals.

Re:Tried it today

[stefski66]

ok, I copy a previous message I wrote about ribbon (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1379697&cid=29527359):

In short: Microsoft (which I do not support usually) people has done a lot of work usability-wise (see the end of this msg): no it's not eye-candy.

It's ok for some people used to the old interface to complain: they have to learn new ways of interacting, it's costly, but the designer's bet is that it will pay off in terms of efficiency at the end. ALL interfaces need users to learn before (hopefully) becoming efficient. Changing for changing will only oblige users to forget what they've learnt. But changing for more efficiency is valuable, and that's what Ribbon designers claimed they have done, and it seems the processus they have used to design the thing is good. I think you can't blame them for that.

A link about the story of the Ribbon: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon.aspx

In summary:

word 1: 50- menu items Word 2003: 250+ (not counting toolbars, small property windows etc)
something has to be done
design took five years

Designers have:
Visited people at their workplace
Visited people in their home
Invited people into our labs for freeform working and discussion
amassed over 10,000 hours of video of people using Office, Over 3 billion data sessions collected from Office users ~2 million sessions per day
Over the last 90 days, theyâ(TM)ve tracked 352 million command bar clicks in Word
tracked nearly 6000 individual data points

Analysis:
Which commands do people use most?
How are commands commonly sequenced together?
Which commands are accessed via toolbar, mouse, keyboard?
Where do people fail to find functionality theyâ(TM)re asking for(in newsgroups, support calls,etc.)?

They also iterate a lot to find new solutions, and they evaluate the solutions until they were satisfying.

Re:Tried it today

[camperdave]

They're different in each language because the word is different in each language. Take "Bold" for example. In English it starts with a B, so the shortcut is [CTRL]-B. In Spanish, it's "negrita" which starts with an N, so the shortcut is [CTRL]-N.

Re:Tried it today

[camperdave]

Do they have an equivalent to OneNote? That's still keeping me tied to windows on my laptop. (Well, that and the fact that I paid for windows as part of the price of the laptop.)

Re:Tried it today

[gparent]

Well in this case, I think so, yes. Because in the end, users tend to learn clicks better than shortcuts. And ribbon makes that easier, since everything is placed upfront and you end up navigating less menus. Ribbon with shortcuts would look like shit.

However, on older interfaces, where showing the shortcut is unobtrusive and easy, I disagree with hiding them on purpose.

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they finally ... give us a ribbon?

Why would anyone want one of those? Surely having an interface consistent with 99.9% of the other applications running on your system is more useful than keeping up with the Jones's latest patent-encumbered different-for-the-sake-of-being-different UI fad?

As long as they don't also decide to go with the "orb" i'll be happy. That orb is so stupid. I have no idea why it glows sometimes. For several weeks I didn't know where they'd hidden the save and print options, until I decided to see what happened when I clicked the orb. Stupidest interface decision since BOB.

Re:Tried it today

[Bertie]

Training.

Don't forget lots and lots of revenue from selling people training in new ways to do things they already knew how to do.

Re:Tried it today

[melikamp]

ctrl+p or ctrl+s

This is the worst possible way to vindicate the ribbon. OF COURSE keyboard shortcuts are the fastest way to communicate with a word processor, and anyone who actually cares about performance has already created a shortcut for every feature in use and reclaimed the screen by disabling GUI elements. But this has NOTHING to do with the ribbon vs. menus + toolbars discussion, doesn't it?

Re:Tried it today

[Grishnakh]

Um, have you ever driven a car at all?

Sticks don't move until you press the gas, and if you're not pressing the gas and the car isn't moving, you have to hold the clutch down (or be in neutral) or it'll stall.

Automatics DO move when you're not pressing the gas. It's called "creeping".

Re:Tried it today

[pclminion]

How is it NOT obvious? In order to invoke the menu from the keyboard, you begin by pressing Alt. The first thing that happens when you do this is that the shortcut characters get underlines beneath them. Am I misunderstanding your complaint? Because you seem to be complaining that it works the same way it always has since Windows 3.0. The recent difference is that the underlines aren't shown if you aren't navigating by keyboard, which to me is a good thing.

Re:Tried it today

[rjstanford]

One feature that I eventually had to resort to Help to find was the Autocorrect settings (specifically to add context-specific abbreviations to the list that would automatically be expanded to the full text). This was very easily found via menus and damn near impossible via the ribbon.

As it should be. As something that's accessed never by most people, and rarely by the rest of us, it doesn't belong in the toolbar/ribbon at all. Is it no longer in the menus, by the way? If so, that would be a problem.

Re:Tried it today

[lennier]

Google/Help-docs is often the only way to find a newly hidden item in the MS Ribbon that was once easily found in the menus . . . /rant

Don't even get me started on how bad Office 2010 Help is. The times I've tried and failed to do a simple function keyword search in Office Help - yes, usually to answer the question 'where the heck on the Ribbon is Alt-My-Old-Menu'- which would have worked just fine in older Office Helps, but draws a complete blank on 2010.... and then, I put the same keyword into Google, and up it comes.

Usually not from a Microsoft website, either.

Outlook 2010 Contact Groups, I'm looking at you particularly. When I search Help for 'Contact' 'Group' I do not want a hundred pages telling me about the 'Business Contact Manager' and none telling me about ordinary Contact Groups.

Re:Tried it today

[rjstanford]

Yup. Most will never need them, of those who do many will never remember them. Throwing them in the face of every single user is unnecessary.

Not everyone is a power user. Most people don't even want to become one.

Re:Tried it today

[lennier]

There are people who have spent many thousands of hours in front of their word processor. When you change it they hate you.

Yes, and even if the Ribbon wasn't a classic example of a bad user interface design change (it violates about 25 years of WIMP HIGs), this woudl be an important reason to avoid change for change's sake.

Change is trauma. This is something we need to understand in computing, and don't yet. Change always has a cost, because it breaks things, and that cost needs to be less than the benefits of change - otherwise we're constantly hurting ourselves, destroying our memory, losing information, each time we change.

Is this why the IT industry seems to often have the memory of a goldfish? We should be smarter than that. We've had, what, fifty years or so of computers now? We should be able to understand the whole broad sweep of the industry. But so often, we don't, and get swept into the fad of the moment, only to drop it five seconds later like a hyperactive ferret with a shiny toy.

Change, in itself, is not good, it is in fact a net negative. Change is only justified if it produces benefits that far outweigh the trauma.

But often, it doesn't.

Re:Tried it today

[Missing.Matter]

Ah true, that's in the developer tab, which is disabled (and by definition hidden). In order to access it you just need to enable it in options, and it's right there with VB macros, etc.

Re:Tried it today

[Missing.Matter]

Correct, the office menu is a separate issue from the ribbon. In fact the ribbon enhances the discoverability of shortcuts from the previous versions.

Re:Tried it today

[Wintermute__]

The problem here is not with the car.

As the driver, you should always be in control of the vehicle. Taking your feet completely off the pedals in either type is a failure. If you want the car to not be moving you should always have your foot on the brake. Always.

Your left foot operates the clutch in a manual or stays on the floor in an automatic, but the action of the right foot is the same in either. On the accelerator for accelerating or on the brake for decelerating or at rest.

And many cars with manual transmissions will move forward when in gear without touching the accelerator. It depends on how much torque the engine has at idle vs. the rolling resistance. Diesels usually have plenty of torque to not stall out on level ground, but even many gas trucks (for example) will do this.

Re:Tried it today

[camperdave]

Put the automatic in neutral if you want to compare apples to apples. Either that or put your manual in first and let off the clutch.

Re:Tried it today

[Grishnakh]

No, it's not the same.

For instance, look at backing out of a parking space, or other really slow driving situation. In an automatic, you control your speed with the brake; you let up on the brake to speed up, press it more to slow down. Then you have to switch to the gas if the "creep" speed isn't fast enough for you. In a stick, you take your foot off the brake entirely, and press the gas to move. The stick is much simpler, because there's one pedal to stop, and one to go, and that's it. In the auto, there's basically two "go" modes, a slow one (releasing the brake), and a faster one (using the gas). And yes, there are times you aren't pressing either the brake or the gas pedal, though you should always have your right foot covering one of them.

And many cars with manual transmissions will move forward when in gear without touching the accelerator. It depends on how much torque the engine has at idle vs. the rolling resistance. Diesels usually have plenty of torque to not stall out on level ground, but even many gas trucks (for example) will do this.

I'm sorry, but this is completely wrong. I've driven small cars, sports cars, diesel pickup trucks, and tractor-trailers, all with manual transmissions. I've never seen a vehicle where releasing the clutch, in gear, will not stall out the engine. You can frequently get the vehicle to move forward a little by slowly releasing the clutch partway (my small car does this when the engine is cold and it's in "cold idle" mode), but that's it; releasing the clutch entirely will stall it.

Re:Tried it today

[plover]

Change, in itself, is not good, it is in fact a net negative. Change is only justified if it produces benefits that far outweigh the trauma.

And maybe it did.

Do you know for an absolute fact that the ribbon negatively impacted the vast majority of users of Office? Or is that your opinion, based on your samples of friends and family and/or Slashdot comments?

I learned a long time ago that while I may have a strong opinion on design choices, my opinion rarely meshes with the vast majority of the population. I am not a representative sample, and my peer group doesn't consist of too many people who are representative samples, either.

Remember that stupid talking dog assistant thing that infested Office (Office XP or Office 2003, I never remember which)? I thought since every self-respecting nerd thought it an abomination that the whole world also would hate it. Well, turns out they didn't. I was stunned to learn just how many people loved it and complained bitterly when it was turned off.

In this case some people didn't like the ribbon, or having to learn something new, but it turns out most of them love it. They really don't care about the academic arguments of screen real estate, or pure menus, or large icons, or learning something new. They spent a few minutes getting used to it, discovered that it's actually a very useful tool, and they moved on.

I'm willing to bet that, like me, you spent more time complaining about the forced change than you actually did learning the ribbon. It turns out that our assumptions about what's collectively "good" and "bad" are not always correct.

Re:Tried it today

[EasySteam]

Have you ever watched a Dyslexic person using Word? I have - I think they were using Dragon Dictate to write a document and have it read back to them. It was a bit of a eye opener - hierarchical menus with words are not good for every one... Ten percent of the population is dyslexic in some form, and how many more people are legally blind or partially sighted? Do they find the ribbon better? cheers...

Re:Tried it today

[Grishnakh]

You obviously are clueless. If you put your manual in first and let off the clutch, the engine will stall.

Re:Tried it today

[shutdown -p now]

Sticks don't move until you press the gas

That's plainly not true. I won't speak for all sticks, but I have learned to drive on a car with one, and it did move when in gear and with gas pedal not pressed, creeping along slowly. Exactly the same as my automatic today does.

Re:Tried it today

[shutdown -p now]

That's a valid complaint - it's precisely why they've changed the round Start-like button with the one labeled "File" in Office 2010 - and made it look more like the expanded version of the old "File" menu.

Re:Tried it today

[Grishnakh]

This is definitely unusual behavior for a stick-shift. Exactly what kind of car was this? Was it a Suburu with the "hill-holder" feature?

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously are clueless. If you put your manual in first and let off the clutch, the engine will stall.

So, when the engine is running, and the car is in a forward gear, an automatic will move forward but a manual will stall? Doesn't that just demonstrate the superiority of the automatic transmission?

Re:Tried it today

[Grishnakh]

Uh, no, as I've already explained. If I want the car to go, I'll press on the gas. If I'm not giving any gas, it shouldn't go anywhere. It's really quite simple.

Re:Tried it today

[shutdown -p now]

It was a Russian car, and a fairly old one at that - Lada Samara (model 21099, specifically - that was designed in 1990).

Re:Tried it today

[Anonymous Coward]

Actual user testing at our facility showed several things:

1) Completely nebbish Office users were able to accomplish their trivial tasks about as well with the ribbon as with a bag over their head, or effectively any other impediment.

2) Moderately capable Office users were impeded by the ribbon initially, gradually improved, but never reached the throughput they had with menus. Principle reasons were that the ribbons reused exactly the same screen real estate so their path and visual context memory was useless for finding features that lived in only one place in the menus and which place always looked the same and distinctly different from all other places. I.e. the mouse path through the menus and overlapping boxes were a powerful cue to help locate menu items successfully. Placing multiple items in exactly the same place with no context of boxes to differentiate those functions created functional confusion.

3) Users of more obscure functions were never able to reach their throughput achievable with menus. This group included power users who still navigated primarily by mouse for the obscure functions. The reason was more of the same as above, but more acutely since their expectation was that the options they needed were always reachable from the ribbon they were presented. That is, they had carried the mental invariant that the menu-y thingy had the function they needed; they just needed to hunt for it more. As a consequence, clicking on the ribbon selectors was a last chance effort to hunt further for the function. In effect, the ribbon had reduced them to the menu analog of hunt-and-peck typing. After six months, the situation improved slightly, but productivity never reached pre-ribbon levels.

4) The last group in our testing were "power users" -- users who barely (if ever) touched the mouse, operating primarily through accelerator keys. Although they were not slowed by the ribbon, they frequently complained about the screen real estate lost to the useless ribbon (which they never used).

In short, in our testing, the ribbon was neutral to completely inexperienced and hyper-experienced users. It was a net negative for all other categories of users.

I don't know what selection bias led to the testing you cite, where for whatever reason only completely novices or past masters were included for testing, but I claim it is at odds with our own results. And I know exactly how we selected candidates for our own testing -- it was forced on us by the complete inability of Microsoft to provide a choice in UI, regardless of what the users wanted.

Re:Tried it today

[camperdave]

The "no gas" method seems to be a standard (if you'll pardon the pun) technique for teaching manual transmission shifting. The Youtube video clearly shows the car moving with the driver's foot off the accelerator. In fact, the vehicle's speed is much greater than an automatic's creep.

http://www.standardshift.com/faq.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAJr7LTv_Qc
http://www.howtocar.org/how-to-drive-a-manualstandard-car/

Re:Tried it today

[Digicrat]

If you've never used an Office application before and only need to access basic functions, then yes the Ribbon is a nice, simple interface.

However, if your looking for a rarely used feature and don't have the icon layouts memorized, it can be quite frustrating to use. Yes, the icon may be placed in a very logical place on one of the ribbon tabs, but that doesn't do me any good if it's a bizarre icon that I can't spot on first glance. Using a traditional menu, you can tap the first letter in the command your looking for to jump to it - for the Ribbon you have to randomly mouse-over every icon to see the tooltip before finding what you want. Further, at least with the old toolbar you could move icons around to locations that seem more natural to you, but the Ribbon offers no such customization (hiding a few icons doesn't count)

Note: I switched to a Mac at work last year (when IT is proud of an 8-minute boot time, switching becomes necessary to preserve sanity and while I prefer Linux, Mac has slightly better support for Enterprise applications), so I can't think of any specific examples offhand.

Unfortunately, I hear that an Office 2011 Mac upgrade is near at hand which brings the Ribbon interface to the Mac ... go LibreOffice (which does sometimes have better MS-backwards compatibility than MS)!

Re:Tried it today

[Grishnakh]

Did you even watch the video or read the author's commentary?

"*NOTE: The "no-gas method" is NOT intended to be used in everyday driving. It is simply to determine (indicate) the friction or the catch point of your clutch. You MUST apply gas as you release the clutch to accelerate otherwise, you WILL stall! Hope this clears everything up. =) *"

You've never driven a stick, have you?

Sure, in some cars, you can use the car's idling to get it moving by carefully and very slowly releasing the clutch, but it's a stupid and unsafe thing to do because it's so slow. As the author of the video stated above, it's only useful for determining the friction point of the clutch, which can vary a lot from car to car (family cars and trucks have a low point, with lots of clutch travel, sports cars have a high clutch with very little travel). It's not something you'd ever do in traffic, and in fact, it's not something you ever need to do, all you have to do is see where the rpms start to drop, and that's your friction point.

Re:Tried it today

[DaVince21]

No, but we don't exactly need it. Also, I guess almost all other software ever has a Y2000 mindset for not using an element that might not even be appropriate for its purpose.

Oracle

[Rik Sweeney]

Sometimes I think Oracle won't be happy until they've completely destroyed Java.

Re:Oracle

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Sometimes I think Oracle won't be happy until they've completely destroyed Java.

I believe Java has matured enough under Sun to not be as vulnerable as some of the much younger languages. To be honest, I haven't seen any instance where Oracle is mortally screwing up the language.

If your thinking about the Oracle v. Google lawsuit, I'm siding with Oracle on that one. As much as I like to side with Google, the fact that they did the equivalent of ROT13 to the bytecode generated by the javac makes it hard to ignore what Google was doing. It would have been different if Google attempted to get a license to make there own mobile JVM or used the code from the OpenJDK base and challenged Oracle in court on the definition of a phone during 90's versus the much powerful mini-tablets of today. That didn't happen. Instead Google got caught doing what everybody thought was a poor attempt to hide the fact that Java is the basis for the Android OS.

Re:Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

You should look into the Google case more. While the obvious stuff about Dalvik being a shameless rip of Java is true, it's not illegal, and the actual copyrighted code being sued over is not used in any way for a production Android system -- it's just the sort of testing cruft that builds up in a code repository if nobody's careful. Google's certainly liable for damages, but those damages will not be much, and the success of Android is in no way affected by any possible outcome.

Re:Oracle

[HarrySquatter]

Sometimes I think Oracle won't be happy until they've completely destroyed Java.

Good. Maybe we can stop being sidled with bloated "enterprise" apps written by barely competent programmers who only know Java (and usually badly at that).

Re:Oracle

[TheSunborn]

Well, I really don't think Android uses java bytecode code generated by the javac compiler.

I am pretty sure that Eclipse(And thus the Eclipse compiler, which is not javac) is used in most Android applications and most of Android itself.

Re:Oracle

[knarf]

Well, the JVM is as much the base of Android as it is the base of, say, Parrot or LLVM. Canonical Java is run on a stack-based virtual machine - the JVM - while Dalvik (and the other examples I mentioned) are register-based VMs. It is the virtual machine that matters here, not the language which itself is a member of the C family and stands on the shoulders of many giants.
And yes, if you wanted to get Java code to run on the Parrot VM you might want to use some of Java's own test routines to ascertain that you're doing it right. That would not mean you'd be calliung your implementation 'Java' of course, just that you implemented the capability to translate Java source code to (eventually) Parrot byte code.
In other words, I am not siding with Oracle on this one. As to the validity of the software patents referred to in this case I will just say that software patents are invalid where sanity prevails.

Re:Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead Google got caught doing what everybody thought was a poor attempt to hide the fact that Java is the basis for the Android OS.

Give me a f**** break. LINUX is the basis for the Android OS. Android = Linux Kernel.
Now, you can write applications in Java (the language) for the Android platform because there's a VM similar to the Java VM.

Re:Oracle

[chdig]

If you mean matured enough that it's become the one of the main entry points for malware on PCs and still tries to insist I install an annoying Yahoo toolbar every time we update it, then I would have to say it's not mature enough for me.

Re:Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

So what exactly is wrong with implementing modified packaging of the bytecode with a clean-room VM?
There are things that they did modify and their implementation of Dalvik has significant differences that make it more suited for its use.

Sun's original purpose, and what I would say might be their qualm, was that Dalvik would be an incompatible version of the JVM. Which Sun seemed to hate.
And wasn't this Sun's original intention? Isn't this why they were so upset about the MS JVM?
So they didn't include the base libraries in the JDK, and tried to separate themselves from being the same as Sun's Java.

But now that Oracle has taken over, instead of just wanting "purity" like Sun was asking, they seem to have other ulterior motives.

Re:Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

I am lost as to the point where Google tried "to hide the fact that Java is the basis for the Android OS." As far back as I can remember that was touted as one of the major benefits of Android...

Easy Hacks

[Enderandrew]

Now that they don't have to worry so much about maintaining compatibility with Sun/Oracle's version (like they did with the go-oo fork), they can fix a lot of old cruft. If you want to get involved, there is a list of easy hacks that should provide a starting point for people who want to contribute.

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Easy_Hacks

Re:Easy Hacks

[Enderandrew]

And here are 187 OpenOffice bugs and feature requests that received at least 25 votes.

Some of these are already addressed in LibreOffice, but I think it would be a nice starting point in a community fork to address the things the community obviously wanted, but Sun didn't prioritize.

http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/buglist.cgi?resort=1&Submit%20query=Submit%20query;issue_type=DEFECT;issue_type=ENHANCEMENT;issue_type=FEATURE;issue_type=PATCH;issue_status=UNCONFIRMED;issue_status=NEW;issue_status=STARTED;issue_status=REOPENED;issue_status=RESOLVED;email1=;emailtype1=exact;emailassigned_to1=1;email2=;emailtype2=exact;emailreporter2=1;issueidtype=include;issue_id=;changedin=;votes=25;chfieldfrom=;chfieldto=;chfieldvalue=;short_desc=;short_desc_type=allwords;long_desc=;long_desc_type=allwords;issue_file_loc=;issue_file_loc_type=fulltext;status_whiteboard=;status_whiteboard_type=fulltext;keywords=;keywords_type=anytokens;field0-0-0=noop;type0-0-0=noop;value0-0-0=&order=issues.votes%20desc%2C%20issues.priority%2C%20issues.issue_type

Re:Easy Hacks

[Qubit]

And here are 187 OpenOffice bugs and feature requests that received at least 25 votes.

Oh, cool. That must have taken a bit of time to put a link to each one of those bugs in your commen.... dear sweet-n-sour sassafras!!! are my eyes deceiving me or is that just one fu*cking huge URL in your comment there?

You know, slashdot does have support for the A-HREF tag...

(battle/2 == knowing)

Re:Easy Hacks

[swillden]

And here are 187 OpenOffice bugs and feature requests that received at least 25 votes.

Oh, cool. That must have taken a bit of time to put a link to each one of those bugs in your commen.... dear sweet-n-sour sassafras!!! are my eyes deceiving me or is that just one fu*cking huge URL in your comment there?

You know, slashdot does have support for the A-HREF tag...

What you don't realize is that he's using Chrome, so pasting doesn't work. It was a lot of work typing that URL, character by character, double-checking each one to make sure that he didn't make a mistake, and he wanted you to KNOW how much effort he'd put in on your behalf, so you could just click it.

Why the negative spin?

[xnpu]

The fork is good news, the new stable released is better news and the hundreds of devs is great news. Why is the OP insisting to put a negative spin on this?

Re:Why the negative spin?

[Peter (Professor) Fo]

I can't think of a better example of the resilience of open source.

Also, once you have a lot of devs around they may take the 'application' to 'other places'. I'm thinking that word processing has only really ever addressed the 'front-end' of documents when there is a huge need for the back-end document management (what we old-timers once called office automation).

Re:Why the negative spin?

[SoumyaRay]

Its the article, not the OP, who's putting a spin on this. But I agree with you.

Open source is developed in very different ways than proprietary systems, and we should expect that they progress very differently as well. We expect top-down proprietary software to advance annually in solid leaps from version to version - any sidestepping or pussyfooting is seen as weakness. But the nature of open source is to fill in gaps and explore alternatives. The development of LibreOffice suggests to me that the movement has found a weakness in the openoffice approach and is rerouting. This is good news!

Getting better on OS X

[vossman77]

I find LibreOffice much more usable than OpenOffice.org on the Mac, but it still not to the point of reliable. Especially when it comes to mouse clicks.

I have also found that when I file a bug report on OpenOffice.org I get a response to clarify the bug or reject my bug, but with LibreOffice, I feel like my bug just sits there unread.

Oh, well perhaps they will get better in the future. At the LibreOffice community is will to make patches that improve the package, OO.org seems to reject any Mac based usability improvement patches, so NeoOffice was formed (but has been stuck at version 3.1 forever)

Re:Getting better on OS X

[sapphire wyvern]

The Windows 7 taskbar integration is... idiosyncratic at best.

I started out by launching Writer and Calc and pinning both to the taskbar. When I open a document, the taskbar shows a task with the appropriate app. When I open another LibreOffice document, a second window is added to whichever program I started - even it's a Calc document and I launched Writer the first time.

That's what happens if I launch an app first and then load documents.

If I just cold-start an app by opening a document when nothing's running, a third, new icon that I haven't seen before will be added to the taskbar *in addition* to the two that I pinned after launching the Writer & Calc earlier.

It's not a very nice experience when you can't predict which taskbar icon a given document will be associated with - or pin an app in a reasonably standard way. :(

This is the same behaviour as OpenOffice.org. It sucked then and it still sucks now. It probably works OK with Windows XP/Vista taskbar behaviour, but it's terrible on Win 7 - and Win 7's awesome taskbar is one of its best features.

Re:Getting better on OS X

[MagicFab]

Which bug report ? Let me know and I can get more eyes on it. Optionally just come to #libreoffice on IRC and ask someone to take a look.

Re:Getting better on OS X

[jimicus]

Try NeoOffice.

Arguably it shouldn't need to exist - Mozilla seem to be able to write an app which runs just fine on OS X without feeling like an X application that's running under OS X under protest - but there you go...

Re:Getting better on OS X

[domatic]

NeoOffice generally does a better job of bringing the OOO suite to OS X than OS X branch of OpenOffice. They've had an OS X interface for OOO years before Sun got started on a non X Window port.

Re:Getting better on OS X

[Blakey Rat]

but with LibreOffice, I feel like my bug just sits there unread.

Ah! So now it's a true member of the open source community!

Actually

[ErichTheWebGuy]

I think it makes a prefect case for open source ideals. The fork from the original OOo demonstrates a commitment to the values that open source encompasses. If a company scoops up a project and will likely destroy it, just fork it and make it better. You can also look to Mambo (and countless others) for a similar story.

Re:Actually

[dkleinsc]

It doesn't even have to be a company scooping up a project and destroying it. It could be a non-profit organization such as XFree86 that had allowed a system to stagnate.

The real advantage of easy forks is that it prevents organizational issues from standing in the way of technological progress. If the fork is significantly better than what it had forked, it will get developers and usage and become dominant. If it's not, it will die, the main trunk will live on, and many valuable lessons are learned. Either way, the users win.

Biased Summary

[Ltap]

Somehow, the news that LibreOffice is right on track is spun into a negative diatribe against FOSS. We should be happy that we dodged a bullet and ditched an Oracle-controlled project. As well, this is another piece of proof that a major project can be forked without too much trouble. To me, this is nothing but positive, yet it's been spun into something else.

Re:Biased Summary

[Minwee]

To me, this is nothing but positive, yet it's been spun into something else.

Positive spin doesn't generate page-views or encourage outraged linking and redistribution.

Please rename it to FOO

[Wolvenhaven]

Free Open Office. Then you guys can release a "Ribbon" like MS did, only you can call it the "Bar". That way we can discuss about things the "FOO Bar" can do.

Re:Please rename it to FOO

[louic]

Call me old fashioned, but I will be looking for alternatives as soon as a ribbon appears (even if it is called a FOO Bar).

Re:Please rename it to FOO

[sapphire wyvern]

That would be kind of awesome actually.

Re:Please rename it to FOO

[carou]

Even if it was optional?

Re:Please rename it to FOO

[VGPowerlord]

Also, when it pops up an error, you could say "Whatchu talking about, FOO?"

Re:Please rename it to FOO

[Qubit]

Do you really want to use an office suite that's a homonym of "FUBAR" ?

Oh wait, never mind. Most of the reasons I need to leave the comfort of the shell and emacs and pick up an office suite are FUBARed already. Sounds like a perfect fit to me...

Re:Please rename it to FOO

[clickclickdrone]

Did you just hear a wooshing sound?

Re:Please rename it to FOO

[H0p313ss]

Did you just hear a wooshing sound?

Heck, even I did and I had that whole chain in summary mode.

Re:Please rename it to FOO

[Wolvenhaven]

No, the office suite would be named FOO. The FUBAR part would be the MS ribbon clone; which was, fucked up beyond all reason, so the name would be a literal description of it's function... I also figured everyone on /. would get the joke because everyone uses "foo" and "bar" when writing test/pseudo code.

Re:Please rename it to FOO

[dkleinsc]

I'm not sure, I pity the FOO.

Re:Please rename it to FOO

[Per Wigren]

I think it should be called Office Sweet, dude.

Re:Please rename it to FOO

[dkleinsc]

That's a name that would effectively compete with Microsoft's Word.

Re:Please rename it to FOO

[louic]

That depends how difficult they make it to turn it off. If it is hidden like the autocomplete option in openoffice calc, I will probably not be able to find it in the time it takes to install an alternative.

Re:Please rename it to FOO

[Kamineko]

I don't think anybody here needs telling that the MS Office Ribbon is fubar.

Re:Please rename it to FOO

[JasterBobaMereel]

...or not ... go and look at how many people prefer OpenOffice/LibreOffice because it does *not* have the Ribbon ...

If they do implement one please please please give us the option of turning it off ....

They urgently need a new name

[juancn]

I can't believe that the name LibreOffice stuck.
I'm a native spanish speaker, and it sounds so goddam awful. Specially when mispronounced by pretty much everyone.
I know this is a personal opinion, but still.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Atzanteol]

Same. WTF. As much as I hate to admit it sometimes a crappy name turns people off from trying something new...

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Herve5]

This is because you don't understand they pronounce it the french way, without rolling the r ;-)

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Ltap]

"Libre" (which has now been included in OSS ... oops, FOSS, oops ... FLOSS, for all those free software-loving dentists) is generally used as an alternative to "free" and "open". Despite all of Stallman's efforts, many people associate "free" with cost, and "open-source" has been partially turned into a buzzword by companies. "Libre" is used by others since it implies freedom (liberty, etc.) without really being a term from either "camp". However, I agree that it makes a poor name for a piece of software; while many programs have somewhat descriptive names, "LibreOffice" and "OpenOffice" don't really give much room for competitors and appropriate a term to describe a type of software for themselves (similar to MS Office simply being called "Office").

OpenOffice was really only renamed that because it would be incongruous for it to continue to be named StarOffice (since StarOffice fit into Sun's astronomy theme with Solaris and such). I think it makes a good introduction to FOSS (heh, here we go again) for users who might not know anything about it.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[fotoguzzi]

How would pretty much everyone pronounce the name the way it is?

Re:They urgently need a new name

[tonique]

Perhaps they could consider... Loffice? Flossfice? OpenWorker? Productivities? Chopped liver?

Re:They urgently need a new name

[muckracer]

> "Libre" is used by others since it implies freedom (liberty, etc.) without really being a term from either "camp".

So why not LibertyOffice instead?

Or...since people usually call MS-Office simply 'Office', we could call ours 'THE Office' or somethin' just to mess with them.
"Dude...you got Office?" "No man...better. I got THE Office! ;-)"

Re:They urgently need a new name

[thisisntme]

No, the french r is completely different, nothing like how english-speaking people pronounce it.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Merk42]

Just because something is (F(L))OSS doesn't mean you have to say so in the program name. Microsoft's version isn't called "Closed Office" or "Commercial Office". The majority of people don't care that a program is open source, and those that do, already know.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm already looking forward for stories of LibertyOffice!!

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Qubit]

we could call ours 'THE Office' or somethin' just to mess with them.
"Dude...you got Office?" "No man...better. I got THE Office! ;-)"

Sure, but then some smartass would include an animated "Clippy"-type character that looked like Dwight Schrute.

"It looks like you're writing a children's book. Would you like some tips from the author of Struwwelpeter?".

Re:They urgently need a new name

[jejones]

Might as well go whole hog for "LibreOficina"... or should they keep LibreOffica and call Spanish language version be "FreeOficina"?

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. It's a shame it stuck, and they missed their opportunity to change it. It'll be like GIMP... too much history and product identification to change, but bad enough to be a continuous impediment to adoption. Even 'FreeOffice' would have been better, or "LibertyOffice' as somebody else suggested.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a native french speaker, and I don't mind it at all. Maybe they're french?

Re:They urgently need a new name

[realityimpaired]

That actually depends on whether you're listening to Parisian French, or Colonial French. There's hundreds of dialects around the world, and some of them have a rolling R that's very similar to the way I've heard anglophones pronounce it.

Of course, Libre Office is still a stupid name.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Anonymous Coward]

I know. Seriously. They should have just called it "Office Free". It works on so many levels.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Anonymous Coward]

Could be worse. Some well known company named it's new OS "Vista" - in Latvian it means "Chicken".

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Migala77]

"Libre" (which has now been included in OSS ... oops, FOSS, oops ... FLOSS, for all those free software-loving dentists) is generally used as an alternative to "free" and "open". Despite all of Stallman's efforts, many people associate "free" with cost, and "open-source" has been partially turned into a buzzword by companies. "Libre" is used by others since it implies freedom (liberty, etc.) without really being a term from either "camp".

I'll probably be modded troll for this, but I think about 0.5% of all office software users in the world care about this 'freedom' version of open source. The cost aspect is much more interesting. Personally I would gladly give up my right to ever change or even see the Open Office source code for one free beer.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[jejones]

Sigh. I'm unencumbered by grammar this morning...

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Anonymous Coward]

One's too American, the other is a TV show.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[johnslater]

That's what she said.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[ocdscouter]

Even 'FreeOffice' would have been better, or "LibertyOffice' as somebody else suggested.

Is there any precedent for localized naming(/branding?), perhaps? Or would that just create more problems?

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Nimey]

Freedom Office, of course. :{P

Re:They urgently need a new name

[kodomo]

> "Libre" is used by others since it implies freedom (liberty, etc.) without really being a term from either "camp".

So why not LibertyOffice instead?

Or...since people usually call MS-Office simply 'Office', we could call ours 'THE Office' or somethin' just to mess with them. "Dude...you got Office?" "No man...better. I got THE Office! ;-)"

nice... "Da' Office 'n Stuff"

Re:They urgently need a new name

[blind biker]

Or...since people usually call MS-Office simply 'Office', we could call ours 'THE Office' or somethin' just to mess with them.

I fully support this, though I'm not sure how it would go down if challenged trademark-wise. But it would be oh so sweet.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why, but the use of "libre" makes me think of middle class kids who thinks they're cool pretending to be revolutionaries. Or Woody Allan in Bananas. Not a good name.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[ocdscouter]

I'm already looking forward for stories of LibertyOffice!!

I can use it while I enjoy my Liberty Cabbage and Liberty Sausage!

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, LibertyOffice isn't much better. When I hear that name I think about a tool that crazy Michigan militia gun nuts would use to put together their racist newsletters and emails.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[steelfood]

I'd personally perfer FaireOffice.

-It is one syllable.
-It is an archaic English spelling of "fair", which means honest, legitimate, and good-looking.
-It brings up connotations of "laissez faire."
-Faire in French means "to do".
-Faire is French. Faire Office sort of mean "replacement" in French.
-It is easy on the tongue (much easier than "OpenOffice" or the god-awful "LibreOffice").

How much more appropriate can a name get?

Re:They urgently need a new name

[nine-times]

I know that's why they've named it OpenOffice and now LibreOffice, but I still think it's bad marketing. My reasoning is that the people who care about it being open source know that it's open source, while those who don't care about it being open source *don't care*. Therefore, there isn't a lot of point in making it's libre-ness the primary selling point.

They'd probably do better to call it "Pro-Office X" or some crap. Hell, even "Awesome Office: Kick-Ass Edition" would probably get more users. Market it on the idea that it's a fully-functioning and powerful office suite.

I've often thought that FLOSS software should consider posting on their websites that you can buy the software for $50, while still putting it in the license that you absolutely don't have to buy it. Let them download, never make them pay, and let them think they've gotten away with something. There are still people who don't trust anything free, but they're happy to steal things.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[tobiah]

Ahh, like The Calculus

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Anonymous Coward]

"Dude, we got sued!"

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Anonymous Coward]

How about Offizzle?

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Ltap]

Depressing but true. It reminds me of the supposed survey that said that most Americans would give up their right to vote forever in exchange for a pizza lunch.

People see themselves as having very little individual effect, particularly software users who see themselves as having little effect on development or design decisions, despite the fact that they're the whole reason the software exists in the first place. One of the important parts of free software is that, at least to some degree, the users should give feedback and participate in the development of the project by submitting bug reports and patches, something that was severely lacking in OpenOffice development.

Remember, it wasn't so long ago that only 0.5% of all people in the world used computers at all. There is such a capacity for rapid change that something like the free software movement has the power to take hold when it would fail in other areas. We should give it support and criticize it if it goes astray, not give up right after we've started.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Anonymous Coward]

Libre is also the french for free (as in speech).

Responding to GP : that's so bad.
In my language, it sounds good.

---
Pleutre Anonyme

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer the Productivity Interactive Software Suite.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[petit_robert]

Seconded.

LibreOffice instead makes me think of the French revolution, which was a grand idea in very obscure times, just as open source software is.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[juancnuno]

Eh. I'm a native Spanish speaker too and I think the name is fine.

On an unrelated note, I noticed your username. It's eerily similar to mine.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[turing_m]

I'm a native spanish speaker, and it sounds so goddam awful. Specially when mispronounced by pretty much everyone.

It sounds just like the first two syllables of Joe Lieberman's surname, right?

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Anonymous Coward]

So why not LibertyOffice instead?

Oh, God no. That sets off my BS detectors like crazy.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[rjstanford]

You've got to admit though, calling it Oo.org or whatever the product name was supposed to be for a while was just plain silly.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[sdguero]

Specially when mispronounced by pretty much everyone.

Not in Southern California. But yeah, stupid name.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know about anywhere else, but Libra are a brand of tampons in New Zealand, so the first thing that pops into my mind when I heard Libre....

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Anonymous Coward]

To the native Spanish speaker: Libre is also Italian - don't get stuck in your own native language.

To the person that wants Liberty Office: why stick with English?

The funny thing is that I never knew OpenOffice was related to StarOffice. I first heard of StarOffice when I was doing developmental work in a 3rd world country. Therefore, having an international name for this productivity suite makes perfect sense to me.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[JasterBobaMereel]

Most people use MSOffice at work, they do not make the choice ...the same as they have no choice in running Windows ...

The IT people who implement it, do it for either an easy life, or because they were told to by someone who did not know there was an alternative

People at home are the initial target ...

Re:They urgently need a new name

[tehcyder]

"Libre" (which has now been included in OSS ... oops, FOSS, oops ... FLOSS, for all those free software-loving dentists) is generally used as an alternative to "free" and "open"

But it's not an English word, which is why LibreOffice is a mistake, as it only makes sense to peoople who already use "libre" in this way, i.e. less than 1% of Office suite users.

Re:They urgently need a new name

[Ltap]

Of course, but most people only have a fuzzy idea of what "liberty" is, anyway. Do you think that many Word users know why their word processor is named that?

completely missing the point

[tverbeek]

"What is more puzzling is what the existence of two camps creating such huge codebases for a fundamental application type says about the whole state of open source development at this time. It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as."

How bloody clueless. This is like questioning the fact that we have more than one set of automobile designs and assembly plants, or more than one political party, or multiple soft drink bottling and distribution networks.

Re:completely missing the point

[PeterBrett]

How bloody clueless. This is like questioning the fact that we have more than one set of automobile designs and assembly plants, or more than one political party, or multiple soft drink bottling and distribution networks.

Clearly the submitter believes that a planned economy is the best economy!

Re:completely missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

How bloody clueless. This is like questioning the fact that we have more than one set of automobile designs and assembly plants, or more than one political party, or multiple soft drink bottling and distribution networks.

For some people, this would be an ideal world.

Re:completely missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

But don't you get it? Every Open Source developer must be conscripted into the fight against the evil enemy! There can be no dissent in the ranks or else this project will surely fail!

Re:completely missing the point

[tverbeek]

Yes, for the owners of The Car Company, The Party, and The Soft Drink Corporation.

I'm no Free Market absolutist, but I have problems with that scenario.

Re:completely missing the point

[VortexCortex]

"What is more puzzling is what the existence of two camps creating such huge codebases for a fundamental application type says about the whole state of open source development at this time. It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as."

How bloody clueless. This is like questioning the fact that we have more than one set of automobile designs and assembly plants, or more than one political party, or multiple soft drink bottling and distribution networks.

Uhh, what's even more puzzling is that the article ignores the fact that since the codebases are both open source, they can both adopt eachother's improvements if they desire. It's not as if the LibreOffice codebase was completely rewritten after the fork -- There is now two major projects working on the same base code.

There's no reason OpenOffice can't backport fixes from LibreOffice, or vise versa.

Don't forget that forks can be consolodated as well.
(Beryl was forked from Compiz, now Compiz + Beryl = Compiz-Fusion)

In the close source world it's far more devastating for key developers to leave and start their own project. However, In the FOSS world it's not nearly so bad -- The original project leader looses control of what the forkers commit, but can still take advantage of the work they do (unlike in close source). Additionally, when devs leave a closed source project they can't take the original codebase with them, they have to start from scratch!

Closed Source apps frequently re-implement eachother's features from scratch, whereas FOSS can just fork or incorporate other FOSS code.

Riddle me this O puzzled article author -- Is it not even more puzzling that you don't find the multitude of closed source camps (that are not reusing eachother's code) even more puzzling than the FOSS camps that do?

Re:completely missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

This is like questioning the fact that we have more than one set of automobile designs and assembly plants

On the contrary there is always need to question that fact.

Copyright, patents and trade secrets ensure that the best of breed solutions have as minimal an impact on the economy as possible. As a bonus they guarantee mediocre but different solutions are rewarded.

  We have these whole systems dedicated to ensuring that new automobiles and new plants have to be different. They are completely artificial systems to fight the natural behavior of world. Their operation is expensive and the side-effects are often wide-spread in the culture.

Oh, you thought the IP systems were designed to reward people for creativity? No, that's a funny idea but it sadly is at odds with what they actually do. The IP system of Industrialized nations rewards the status quo and sometimes enriches the already established, usually the middle-men and not the actual creators. And I use the term men loosely since most are now companies - fake people - who 'own' this stuff under the artificial monopolies created by all this paperwork. It does not matter that this is direct opposition to the justifications used to support creation of these systems in the first place.

Political parties are just a fine example of false dichotomies and oversimplifying the world. It's easier to demonize a group if you first label them. It's easier to make people stupid if you first make them into a group.

I will agree that people shouldn't complain about a dozen different editors, IM clients, music players when people don't blink at the latest FPS-on-some-custom-engine when it's just a slightly prettier clone of Doom with more guns and less blood.

Re:completely missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

We only have one party that wins elections.

Re:completely missing the point

[tehcyder]

How bloody clueless. This is like questioning the fact that we have more than one set of automobile designs and assembly plants, or more than one political party, or multiple soft drink bottling and distribution networks.

Clearly the submitter believes that a planned economy is the best economy!

Whereas having multiple soft drink bottling and distribution networks is the key to our fucking freedom?

Official links

[Anonymous Coward]

Article links to some blog with copy/pasted content. Here are the right links:
- Official announcement
- Download

(Posting anonymously to avoid karma whoring allegations)

Fork Makes Sense

[salesgeek]

I'm not sure what Oracle's intent was with OpenOffice, but their actions sure caused a lot of very good people to leave in a hurry. Between this and the Android situation, it seems like Oracle really doesn't get free software, or worse, sees free software as the enemy. I'm not sure which. Regardless, I'm thankful that I get to use OpenOffice and now LibreOffice.

Re:Fork Makes Sense

[HarrySquatter]

Between this and the Android situation, it seems like Oracle really doesn't get free software, or worse, sees free software as the enemy.

And yet they sponsor, help develop and are part of the boards of a number of open source projects. That sounds pretty much the opposite of viewing free software as an enemy. But hey, don't let those pesky little facts get in the way of your Oracle bashing.

Re:Fork Makes Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

They seem to be playing nicely with VirtualBox at least.

Re:Fork Makes Sense

[salesgeek]

Being on the board and sponsoring projects doesn't reveal what Oracle is trying to get out of the situation.

WRT LibreOffice, at first I thought the situation was caused by miscommunication with Oracle or was simple developers wanting to get rid of the handcuffs on development that were imposed by Sun. Now I am not so sure because of the Android lawsuit.

Re:Fork Makes Sense

[DaVince21]

Maybe Oracle sees open source as the enemy because they don't get it. It seems like a corporate structure of the worst kind.

Fault tolerance != Faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

"It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as."

This confuses a world in which things never go wrong with a world in which there are methods available for mitigating the damage when things go wrong. Creating a fork might look like a duplication or splintering of effort, or some other non-ideal outcome, but it neatly solves the problem of lock-in, or any other development difficulty: if you don't like it, fork the code and off you go, best of luck.

Unless this is meant to suggest that the existence of Oracle is non-ideal? While I'd be tempted to agree, I'm not sure the Open Source community deserves the blame for that one.

     

Eh what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The split of a large open source office suite comes at a time when it isn't even clear if there is a long term future for office suites at all. What is more puzzling is what the existence of two camps creating such huge codebases for a fundamental application type says about the whole state of open source development at this time. It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as."

To be honest I've seen a few applications where a fork was impulsive, or a bad idea because no-one knew the application and the dev-pool was very small.

Forking OpenOffice.org into LibreOffice, though, is like splitting your Mazda down the middle and getting a Lamborghini (Oracle only gets ½ a Mazda, though, we get the Lamborghini).

Re:Eh what?

[Anonymous Coward]

But if I know Oracle, they'll wind up with a snazzy European ride, too; rumor has it they're already hard at work converting their ½ a Mazda into a Yugo.

Re:Eh what?

[tehcyder]

Forking OpenOffice.org into LibreOffice, though, is like splitting your Mazda down the middle and getting a Lamborghini

Worst. Car Analogy. Ever.

Pros and cons?

[sapphire wyvern]

So, what are the differences between OO.o and LibreOffice?

I've read the new features page. Are there any OpenOffice.org features or bug fixes that won't be included in LibreOffice? Does Oracle still have anything useful to offer or is OO.o effectively obsolete?

There should be a future for office suites

[unity100]

even if in the form of interfaces interfacing to clouds. google cloud, amazon cloud, this cloud that cloud - dont you think there will come a time when portability and interoperability in between crowds will be required, or even mandated by countries and standards boards ?

naturally there will be apps fulfilling that multiple-cloud interfacing task.

Re:There should be a future for office suites

[segin]

That application already exists, it's called the web browser. Also, the same lack of future also exists for file managers, anti-viral software, and the act of 'downloading', in the traditional sense. The future of client computing (both in the home and the office) is web browsing thin clients that are useless without a permanent Internet or intranet connection. "Traditional" software will only continue to exist if it's server software. Desktop software as we know it, is dying. The OS wars are pointless, Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X are soon to be footnotes except as the OSes running the websites that enable us to use our dumb web browsing kiosks. With the advent of entire x86 PCs being reduced to an SoC, including GPU and RAM, 3D accelerated graphics through webGL, web applications that can fully replace everything traditionally done on the client machine, there is no need whatsoever for an OS. All you need is a web browser.

And there will be tyranny as your data is no longer held by you.

Re:There should be a future for office suites

[unity100]

these forecasts are way too far fetched. people will not just leave their sensitive data on private, third party corporations' hands. its not government, its not charity. its a private corporation owned by private citizens which can go bankrupt or even go nuts. anything's possible.

Re:There should be a future for office suites

[tehcyder]

I'm not sure that there will ever come a time when companies will want all their office data (including accounts, payroll, personnel and marketing data) floating around in "the cloud" instead of secure on their own servers.

But I'm probably just being old-fashioned.

Re:There should be a future for office suites

[unity100]

no they wont.

Hacking on LibreOffice is fun ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure - it makes sense; finally it is fun to work on LibreOffice - I for one, am enjoying seeing my work actually get included, and become useful to people without lots of dumb paperwork, and Oracle control-freakery.

What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[Attila Dimedici]

This, once again, makes the question of what Oracle was trying to accomplish when they took the actions that lead to the fork. There are as far as I can see three possibilities.

1. 1.) Greater control over the development of OO.o
2. 2.) Gradually convert OO.o into a fully propietary prject
3. 3.) Kill off OO.o without being obvious about it

If the first two were their goal, this release means that for all intents and purposes they have failed. If the third was their goal, they have succeeded; OO.o is dead. If they wanted to kill it to get rid of a successful OSS office suite that is a failure. However, if they wanted to kill it because they didn't want to be running an OSS Office sute project, then they got what they wanted.

Re:What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[openfrog]

--
"The facts of life are conservative." Margaret Thatcher

--
But reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Re:What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[Attila Dimedici]

Only if you beleive that a comedian really understands the world better than a politician who remade a nation.

Re:What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle was in the position to inherit a lot of good will from the FLOSS community. They decided they didn't want any of that- they killed OpenSolaris, threw a wrench in Java, killed OpenOffice, alienated MySQL. Ellison is such a nice fellow! Thank god for forks!

Re:What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[Anonymous Coward]

We've had thousands of years of the court jester doing exactly that.

Re:What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[Anonymous Coward]

I got a chance to see Simon Phipps vs Gilles Gravier on 18th of January during LATA conference (http://lata.org.lv/?page_id=378). First question from auditory was about Libre/OOo future. It was fun to watch both of guests exchanging their views and kind phrases about free (Sun)/Oracle way with smiles on their faces ;)

In short:
Oracle is not planning to build any community around OOo. Period. You can get commercial support etc. but don't expect any community project features (transparent development etc.).

Re:What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[elygre]

Did Oracle take any actions at all, or did the just continue with the current status quo?

It is my impression that there was a long standing disagreement inside the community, who was unhappy with Sun and stayed equally unhappy with Oracle.

Oracle is getting lots and lots of bad press on how they mishandle open source. Some of it, I'm sure, is deserved. Often, though, they just keep doing stuff the same old way as Sun did. Sun was a good guy, and could get away with it; Oracle is a bad guy, and does not.

Re:What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[Attila Dimedici]

My impression was that Oracle changed something in the way they dealt with the OO.o community, I no longer recall what and so may be mistaken.

Re:What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[Anonymous Coward]

--
"The facts of life are conservative." Margaret Thatcher

--
"But reality has a well-known liberal bias."

"Only if you beleive that a comedian really understands the world better than a politician who remade a nation."

Many polititions have remade nations - Stalin, Mao, Castro. The trick is, did they make the nation better. (No axe to grind - I'm an American, so I have no clue whether Britain is better off for Thatcher. And, I'm an American, so I really don't care,because American Exceptionalism says it has no importance anyway.

Re:What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[elygre]

I think you're wrong, and since you wonder "what Oracle was trying to accomplish when they took the actions that lead to the fork", it's probably worth looking up.

I believe the story goes like this:
* The community was long unhappy with Sun.
* With Oracle taking over, the community hoped for change, which didn't happen. Also, with lots of uncertainty around the project (nobody really knew what Oracle wanted), it was a good time for a fork.
* The LibreOffice foundation was established. Oracle was invited to donate the OpenOffice brand, and yield control to the new foundation.
* Oracle rejected the request. While Oracle as such never spoke publicly, project members in OpenOffice requested that people involved with LibreOffice step down from their OpenOffice positions.
* This last part was seen as particularly rude, and helped fuel the already heated discussions.

From my perspective, Oracle/Sun has invested a lot in OpenOffice, and should be given a lot of credit. It may be that LibreOffice is a better path forward (it still remains to be seen), but I think the animosity would be better spent elsewhere.

Re:What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[BitZtream]

Hard to believe as it may be, there is a perfectly valid 4th option that has no malice:

4) Stop wasting money on OpenOffice which generates no revenue for Oracle yet does have a cost.

The problem is, while it takes a massive amount of work to create an Office suite, especially one thats going to try to compete with the big boy, when you give it away for free in the way that Sun did, it doesn't generate enough good will or customer appreciation to justify it.

If Larry isn't benefiting from it, he ain't pay'n for it.

Re:What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[Attila Dimedici]

If your suggested option was correct, why would Oracle have not given the OO.o brand to the new organziation that started the fork? They asked Oracle for it when it began to appear that Oracle had no interest in continuing OO.o.

Re:What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[Anonymous Coward]

--
"The facts of life are conservative." Margaret Thatcher

--
But reality has a well-known liberal bias.

And people parrot quotes from anyone as if that makes it valid. Neither of those quotes have any evidence behind them and neither are they clever.

Re:What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[An Onerous Coward]

Thatcher? The union-busting, Pinochet-coddling, unpopular politician? The one who went to war over an island with three people and twenty goats, just to juice her poll numbers? The one who sold the assets of her countrymen to the superwealthy at firesale prices?

I'm okay with crediting Mr. Colbert with equal or better understanding.

Re:What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[tehcyder]

A lot of us would say that Thatcher "remade" the UK in the same way that Hitler "remade" Europe.

Re:What was Oracle trying to accomplish?

[Attila Dimedici]

Well, I'm sorry you are such a poor student of history.

This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[HikingStick]

Just as I was getting senior staff comfortable with the idea of giving OpenOffice a try on some of our machines, this fork happened and someone brought in news of it. Now it doesn't matter that both can write to the same formats, and that you can have the programs save by default to MS formats. It introduced uncertainty, and many business leaders associate uncertainty with increased costs. Do you blame them? There's no confidence that a selected open source solution will provide a stable, long-term platform.

Now, I'm just happy I've been able to get some of our workstations moved over to FF. The entire open source movement has plenty of benefits, but those benefits are viewed as drawbacks by much of the traditional business community.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[ledow]

How does this affect an in-place system?

You carry on as normal, call it an "update", and then push it to desktops after appropriate testing. Why this should create a problem on a managed system is beyond me. Office changes the ways it operates every year. Windows changes the way it operates with every update. At the very most, all this is is an update provided by a group of programmers - that the programmers aren't the same as the original ones is an ADVANTAGE - it means the software kept moving instead of died.

If you don't know how to handle that situation, it means you're not responsible for managing such changes. I moved a school to OO.org in a fortnight. LibreOffice is just a new name to them, they don't care, because they can see in a second that it's a damn sight better than MS's constantly-moving offerings involving staff-retraining every time.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[Anonymous Coward]

Now it doesn't matter that both can write to the same formats, and that you can have the programs save by default to MS formats. It introduced uncertainty, and many business leaders associate uncertainty with increased costs.

Facts be damned, OMG, it has a new name, oh the uncertainty!

If they are so easily swayed by a name change, with no technical consideration whatsoever... it means they were not convinced to begin with and likely never will.

Stick to MS Office, it's great for you. They delight in clueless customers who pay just to be able to say "we use brand name".

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[drooling-dog]

but those benefits are viewed as drawbacks by much of the traditional business community.

Which is why we should all welcome "much of the traditional business community" as our competitors.

You say what you do knowing full well that you'll be paying forever to keep your office suite up to date, which will hardly be optional as file formats change, often gratuitously.

The worst case scenario for OO/LO and other FOSS is that a day will come when it's no longer actively developed by a community with critical mass. In that case the code base doesn't disappear, and nothing that you rely upon becomes unavailable. The same cannot be said for when a closed-source software vendor goes belly-up, or sells out to a different company intent on driving a harder bargain with tied-in users.

As others point out here, this response to the takeover by Oracle is a demonstration of the strength and resiliency of Open Source, not a harbinger of risk.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[SargentDU]

Why aren't you bashing MS for not writing to OOo files? When Word Perfect was the leading word processing software, Word could read Word Perfect files, but now, many years later, you have to use OOo or now LO to open Word Perfect files to convert to MSWord or the open file formats.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it feels like one step forward, two steps back. For whatever reason, people can't wrap their heads around open source.

My anecdotal example: We had many many many problems with IE and finally got approval to investigate Firefox. We went through the list of corporate sites and all tested OK. We rolled it out to 300+ employees. Once deployed, we heard from a handful of people who used a (not on our official list) single site which required an ActiveX control which of course would not run under Firefox. There was a business case for using the site. As a result, we withdrew Firefox and moved everyone to IE 8. They didn't want us to spend any time checking anything, they didn't want to hear about potential issues, and they didn't care that some things wouldn't work in IE8. They didn't even want us to migrate the users' bookmarks or passwords. It was hurry up and switch back to IE regardless of the cost or disruption.

Then we had complaints that users couldn't manage their passwords, that some travel sites didn't work, that their bookmarks were gone because techs simply deleted Firefox without migrating any settings, that certain sites were very slow etc etc. But because of the one site that literally affected half a dozen people management did an about-face. And we've been suffering with IE ever since.

(BTW I think ActiveX is a huge security hole and am glad Firefox doesn't allow it; this is more a rant regarding stupid business decisions than a technical comparison of Firefox vs IE).

I don't feel like getting fired today so I'll just sign this anon. And sit back and watch stupid decisions like this hurt the company because let's face it I won't stick my neck out like that again here.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[gr8_phk]

Totally agree except the part where you the programmers aren't the same - the original fork was done by a bunch of people who left OO.o for Libreoffice, so really only the name has changed.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[Americano]

How does this affect an in-place system?

It's not a concern that's specific to FOSS software, but in fairness, a change in direction for a product that is a fairly important component of your workplace infrastructure *should* be cause for a re-evaluation.

Is the software going to be actively supported, upgraded, maintained? Is it going to be left to die a slow, languishing death-by-neglect? If it's going to be actively supported, is the strategy for the product in line with your intended use for it? Are their suitable replacements for it if that vision diverges from your intended use? How much time and effort will be spent on the rollout & training associated with the software?

There's more to it than just "If someday the company goes out of business, you still have the source code" - this is not a winning selling point for a lot of businesses, simply because they don't have the expertise in-house, or the money to hire expertise, to support it and continue development themselves, meaning that they're in the same boat with open source if the project just simply dies due to apathy. Major shifts in ownership/stewardship of a piece of important business software is always a reason to review your own strategy with respect to that software's function.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[MikeBabcock]

What does this have to do with stability of the platform? The software is free and open. It would be cheaper to pay for programmers to help you maintain the source code yourself than to pay Microsoft for licensing of MS Office for any large organization. As such, LibreOffice is likely to do just fine, and OpenOffice may as well.

Both support the same formats. Its like worrying that Ford would go out of business when GM opened its doors. Who cares? You'll have a car either way.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[Anonymous Coward]

many business leaders associate uncertainty with increased costs. Do you blame them?

YES! If someone real (I mean, out of your own fantasy) really thinks like this, it would be because you did not take the time to clearly explain the situation.

There's no confidence that a selected open source solution will provide a stable, long-term platform.

Just show them the actual life-span of open source projects. UNIX and Linux have been around like forever. GNU tools, CVS, Apache, Perl, MySQL. All pretty old projects that will not go away as long as there are people using them. Do not forget to show the _real_ cost of maintenance, specially tacking into account upgrading to newer versions when your chosen vendor decides your version is not going to see another year. Tell them how upgrading some people to Office 2007 basically means buying new licenses for everyone. With OSS you migrate continuously (always have the latest and greatest) at basically zero cost.
So, if you have no confidence, it can only mean you've seen too many commercials instead of paying attention to the real world.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[VortexCortex]

How does this affect an in-place system?

It's not a concern that's specific to FOSS software, but in fairness, a change in direction for a product that is a fairly important component of your workplace infrastructure *should* be cause for a re-evaluation.

I agree, look at migrating from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2010 -- Did you re-evaluate MS Office when they adopted a different direction (ribbon)?

Is the software going to be actively supported, upgraded, maintained? Is it going to be left to die a slow, languishing death-by-neglect?

You mean, like how older versions of closed source applications are left unsupported, and unmaintained?

If it's going to be actively supported, is the strategy for the product in line with your intended use for it?

Guess what? In FOSS or closed source you have the option of sticking with whatever version you like. However, in FOSS, you can actually pay coders to keep a fork of the product in line with your intended use. In closed source you don't even have the option of hiring coders to support a legacy project.

Are their suitable replacements for it if that vision diverges from your intended use?

That depends, if you're using a closed source app with proprietary file formats, then the answer is probably, "No." If you are using open doc formats and/or open source software then the answer is most likely, "Yes."

How much time and effort will be spent on the rollout & training associated with the software?

RIBBON! In closed source you are forced into upgrading because older products no longer receive updates. In open source you can pay coders to bring a product into compatibility with a new OS or to patch bugs; Thus, allowing you to use the same product for longer and avoid the whole training issue altogether.

What's the difference between adopting new versions of a closed source application vs migrating to an open source application?

There's more to it than just "If someday the company goes out of business, you still have the source code" - this is not a winning selling point for a lot of businesses, simply because they don't have the expertise in-house, or the money to hire expertise, to support it and continue development themselves, meaning that they're in the same boat with open source if the project just simply dies due to apathy. Major shifts in ownership/stewardship of a piece of important business software is always a reason to review your own strategy with respect to that software's function.

I'd be wary of having a "piece of important business software" that you are in no position to support or maintain. If it's truly important enough to the success of your business then it's insane to not have the option of supporting it in house or creating a community driven fork that you, along with other businesses in the same boat can support.

Bottom line: It's not really that big of a deal. If you're paid to micromanage such cost & time details then it looks like a big deal, but it's not really (How many have survived the UI shock of Ribbon or Vista/Win7?).

Business will continue even if MS Office dies tomorrow due to some massive exploit. Having options is good. If your business is not ready to change the option, then why push to change the option? No, seriously, ask yourself WHY. Those are the important reasons -- not this BS about UI and training, or document compatibility...

There's always a period of adjustment, but it's no more expensive than the adjustment of going from one proprietary product version to the next. (look at XP to Win7).

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[cronius]

There's no confidence that a selected open source solution will provide a stable, long-term platform.

If they want a stable, long-term platform, they sure shouldn't choose Microsoft software. How often do Microsoft come out with new "game changing" versions of their software, forcing users to upgrade? I remember my sister complaining to me when she got a new laptop with Windows Vista on it (before W7 came out), how she "had to learn everything all over again".

The traditional business community might not get it. Perhaps someone who does get it should use the knowledge and software so easily available and get dirty rich after e.g. starting a web site where people can message each other and share pictures and movies or something.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[Americano]

I agree, look at migrating from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2010 -- Did you re-evaluate MS Office when they adopted a different direction (ribbon)?

Yes, actually for the company I work for, the retraining and support costs associated with migrating to newer versions of Office has specifically been the factor cited in delaying that upgrade to investigate alternatives. It's also the reason we skipped upgrading to Vista and decided to stay on XP while pushing more Linux adoption across the enterprise, and also the reason why we *just* got upgraded to IE8, but have been able to download and install a corporate-sanctioned (and, in fact, "recommended except for the internal intranet sites that require IE") version of Firefox 3 for nearly 2 years now.

I know you're trying to make some point that FOSS is somehow less subject to these things than proprietary software, but that's simply not the case. When there are major changes and shifts in the technology and the strategy of ANY piece of software you use, you should re-evaluate its use to make sure that you are still going in the same direction strategically.

If you notice, I *did* say in my first sentence that all of these caveats are "not concerns that are specific to FOSS software."

I'd be wary of having a "piece of important business software" that you are in no position to support or maintain. If it's truly important enough to the success of your business then it's insane to not have the option of supporting it in house or creating a community driven fork that you, along with other businesses in the same boat can support.

Yeah, because hiring developers to work for you on customizing and supporting that software long-term isn't expensive at all. Building a consortium of "other businesses in the same boat" is also not a zero-cost operation. FOSS doesn't solve all of the problems of software any more than proprietary software does. So you choose the best tool for the job you need to do, and you re-evaluate whether or not the hammer you've been using for a few years is still the right solution when somebody suggests that it's going to be turned into a sledgehammer soon, and you do the same when somebody suggests that the sledgehammer you use today should be redesigned as a 16-ounce claw hammer next year.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[bhcompy]

Obvious troll, but anyways, how many corporate IT folk do you know that have control over what applications are purchased or supported internally? The answer is none. Oracle and MS are nice familiar names to the beancounters and clueless executives that make these choices. They may even know RedHat, because RedHat provides professional services to support their products. They don't know "The Document Foundation" or "LibreOffice", and TDF doesn't provide any enterprise support, so you've already struck out. You may know that LibreOffice is essentially OO, but they don't and they don't want to know because they won't consider an unknown company to provide a product of such importance without any enterprise support whatsoever.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[HikingStick]

Sure, recent versions have changed the GUI, but that's not what really mattered to anyone here. They've been sending .DOC, .XLS, and .PPT files for over a decade. Sure, we have .DOCX and the like now, but everything they save is still readable by all customers and vendors without requiring instructions on how to "Open with..." or on how to set up file associations. Soon, all will be .DOCX and the like, too, and unless they start changing things more frequently, it will still look like stability.

Open Office looked like an unsupported third option to senior managemet here (and at other companies where I've worked). Now that it has been around long enough for some of those folks to realize it is not going to die away, we have this fork... The perception of stability was eroded when that news swept through. Whether the perceptions are true or not matters little. The fact remains that those who have the most say in such decisions now have the perception of instability again. It means those of us who want to push for open source are back to square one, and need to fight many battles over again.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[magus_melchior]

Perhaps it then falls to us IT guys to propose OSS in a "risk-mitigating" wrapper-- "What if we set up a workstation or two for some of the IT guys that uses Linux|LibreOffice|etc.?"

Sure, they'll probably say "no" to that regardless, but at least it shows the traditional business folks that we are conscious of business risk.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[HikingStick]

As soon as you show them evidence that it has been around a long time, many of them revert back to the old stand by of "This other company is still using Microsoft products". Some will find any excuse the can to maintain the status quo.

Let's face it. Many senior decision makers already have a strong opinion (or even have their minds made up) before anything comes before them for consideration. It is the rare individual who is willing to step out and make a change. Spending hours and hours trying to educate senior management might work on someone on the fence, but it will not work for someone who already has his or her mind made up, for whatever reason.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[HikingStick]

No,at a mid-sized employer, getting that pre-installed OEM schlock is far cheaper than having someone on staff (even part time!) who can handle customizations, programming, and/or training. The cost of such software is amortized along with the cost of the PC, giving the employer a tax deduction. Any employee just means more overhead (e.g., employer's share of taxes, benefits, administrative costs, office space, PC).

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[HikingStick]

You know what I'm talking about, then. There's what would be best for the company's technology infrastructure, and then what some people want. All too often, those people with the wants are close friends with those who can approve, veto, or reverse any decision.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[HikingStick]

I do bash M$ for not adopting (or fully adopting) open standards (or pushing for their own to replace exisiting ones). The fact remains, however, that Microsoft's Office products are the de facto standards based on what people know and use on a daily basis. Hell, I've had a hard time with the local school system requiring that my kids' assignments be turned in only in *.DOC format versus the near universally-readable *.RTF format. It's all politics!

The only reason why school systems and businesses stick to Microsoft products is because they believe that those formats (*.DOC, *.XLS, and *.PPT) are largely ubiquitous.

Well, until more places (more places that matter) start using (and requiring) other formats, the Microsoft formate will be ubiquitous.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[Just Some Guy]

Do you blame them?

Yes. Did they freak out when they learned that there's more than one Linux distro? And if so, what do they think about Windows Phone 7, which has little to do with Windows?

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[HikingStick]

It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who can bridge that divide--between understanding a topic from the IT side and understanding it from the business side. That's not saying that what is is what should be. It's simply an acknowledgement of the reality that is present in so many workplaces.

We got a specific CRM tool pushed into production because a friend of the President told him that's what we really needed. It didn't matter that we already had a CRM tool purchased and in place, or that the annual subscription fees for the new SaaS CRM tool would nearly make the company collapse during the downturn. It was his decision, daggummit, and we could either abide by it or try to find jobs elsewhere...

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[HikingStick]

Everyone seems to think that all businesses run their IT operations the same way. Some businesses are either too small (or too cheap) to allow for such overall management of the workstations--they get their office suite via the OEM, the OS the same way (thus, no master image can be used since the license key for each install is tied to vendor OEM builds). When we migrate office suites, it's because the version installed on the new PCs is newer than what we have installed already. So, yes, that means we may have two or three versions of MS Office installed at any one time. No, it's not the ideal--I'd change it in an instant if allowed--but it's the only environment for which senior management is willing to pay.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[melikamp]

I guess the "business leaders" prefer the certainty of being locked-in, price-gouged, and spied-on by Microsoft. Oh, and an occasional raid by armed law enforcement officials for making an honest licensing mistake can't be that bad. Yeah, that's much better than the "uncertainty" associated with other flagship FLOSS products like GNU/Linux, Apache, and Firefox.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[takowl]

You miss his point. If you understand what's going on, you can happily switch over to LibreOffice and carry on without worrying. When you're management, and you don't follow open source software in your spare time, you hear "Most of the developers are jumping ship, and attempting to create a separate codebase in competition with the company that owns OpenOffice", and you think "that's not something we want to rely on for now. Let's just upgrade to the next version of Office. Maybe we'll give it another look in a few years." If you've got a particularly non-techy manager, they might even be wondering if this "forking" is entirely legal.

There's a lot in a name, and Microsoft know that. That's why they still release Windows and Office, even when they undergo a real change as dramatic as Office 2007. Libreoffice is a new name, so it will be considered as a new thing. And in a sense it is: the codebase isn't new, and many of the developers aren't new, but the process of writing it and releasing it is.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not refer to it as re-branding? Happens all the time, as do companies selling a product line to another company.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact remains, however, that Microsoft's Office products are the de facto standards based on what people know and use on a daily basis.

Neelie Kroes: "I know a smart business decision when I see one - choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed."
Read the whole speech here: http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/08/317&format=HTML&aged=1&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[rjstanford]

Is it just a new name? Or is it a new direction with new ideas?

Just because something is re-evaluated it doesn't follow that it will therefore be rejected. Usually when a project has a new name with a new sponsor/lead, its a pretty damn good sign that things are changing.

More to the point, if that series of events didn't cause you to take another look at it, what on Earth would?

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[bhcompy]

I totally agree. It blows my mind what some people say on here, but that mentality is rampant and hurts the future of the cause. It makes me wonder how many of the people here are naive college kids/basement dwellers rather than industry professionals.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[tehcyder]

I moved a school to OO.org in a fortnight. LibreOffice is just a new name to them, they don't care, because they can see in a second that it's a damn sight better than MS's constantly-moving offerings involving staff-retraining every time.

Unless LibreOffice freezes their entire UI as of now, there are bound to be changes requiring staff-retraining at some point too.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[tehcyder]

The worst case scenario for OO/LO and other FOSS is that a day will come when it's no longer actively developed by a community with critical mass. In that case the code base doesn't disappear, and nothing that you rely upon becomes unavailable. The same cannot be said for when a closed-source software vendor goes belly-up, or sells out to a different company intent on driving a harder bargain with tied-in users.

If Microsoft went bust tomorrow, Word, Excel and the rest would go on working as they do now.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[tehcyder]

UNIX and Linux have been around like forever.

Microsoft was founded before Linux existed, that is a stupid argument.

Re:This is precisely why we haven't left MS

[MikeBabcock]

I said large organization on purpose. Its in my argument. Your point is moot because at a small office, the hassle of changing software is the same whether using Office or OpenOffice. My point was directed only to large organizations who actually find the long-term stability of a platform to be an issue.

...No, they don't

[frps25]

No, they don't, you just hate the fact that you don't like it, you would have love it if it didn't had an Spanish word as many people do The point is that English language doesn't have a word that describes the sense of the project as "Libre" does, just consider this: I have heard people who speak English AND Spanish pronounce Linux as "Line-uks" and not as "Leenooks" which is the right one, it is Ok to expect people who does not speak a language to mispronounce it and eventually learn how to do it.

Re:...No, they don't

[HarrySquatter]

The point is that English language doesn't have a word that describes the sense of the project as "Libre" does,

Actually it does and it's a directly derived from the Latin "libre" it's called: Liberty.

Re:...No, they don't

[PeterBrett]

The point is that English language doesn't have a word that describes the sense of the project as "Libre" does,

Actually it does and it's a directly derived from the Latin "libre" it's called: Liberty.

That's a noun, "libre" is an adjective. Off the top of my head, I can't think of an adjectival form for "liberty".

Re:...No, they don't

[David_W]

That's a noun, "libre" is an adjective. Off the top of my head, I can't think of an adjectival form for "liberty".

Thank you for that... I've been trying to figure out why LibertyOffice sounds so bad in my head. Now I think I know why.

Re:...No, they don't

[Ibiwan]

"Liberated"

Re:...No, they don't

[tehcyder]

That's a noun, "libre" is an adjective. Off the top of my head, I can't think of an adjectival form for "liberty".

Duh, "libertarian".

LibertarianOffice would presumably come with additional "hunting weaponry" and only be purchasable under the Gold Standard.

Now with Double Standards!

[eldavojohn]

I was trying to keep my mouth shut as the end of this summary nearly caused me to fly off the handle. I agree with your post (after all, I recently moved to LibreOffice after inquiring that same question about Oracle). But I would like to add that the author of the summary seems to apply a different standard to FOSS than they apply to closed source or COTS applications. Nowhere does the author comment on the hundreds of proprietary 'camps creating such huge codebases for a fundamental application type' in word editing software or any other multitudes of software whether they be Microsoft, Apple or Google.

The logic applied here amuses me greatly but more so the Glenn Beck-ish puzzlement about what this says about open source:

It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as.

Define 'clearly' because having tons of options sounds really really awesome to me. You make it sound like everyone has to throw their lot in together or this effort is for naught. Everyone knows that isn't true. Secondly, who presents open source to be 'idealistic?' And how do you figure that people working on what they want equates to anything sub-optimal?

Re:Now with Double Standards!

[Ltap]

Indeed, the "splitting up" is part of how free software is (theoretically) supposed to work -- instead of a one-size-fits-all bloated suite, have small, specific programs for usage circumstances. The point of forking is supposed to be to provide a new design direction or to aim your software at a slightly different userbase. However, forks often attract bad legal issues and disputes, as the developer of the original software (especially if they are a commercial outfit) might want to hold onto it and control it even if it was GPL'd.

The fact that this is a major project that has been successfully forked is very significant and shouldn't be ignored.

Re:Now with Double Standards!

[dkleinsc]

The logic applied here amuses me greatly but more so the Glenn Beck-ish puzzlement about what this says about open source:

It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as.

Define 'clearly' because having tons of options sounds really really awesome to me.

One of the rules of writing that my mother (who teaches college-level writing) taught me: When an author precedes a conclusion with words like "clearly" or "obviously", expect bunk. If it were that clear and obvious, they wouldn't have to tell you.

Re:Now with Double Standards!

[electrofelix]

I was trying to keep my mouth shut as the end of this summary nearly caused me to fly off the handle. I agree with your post (after all, I recently moved to LibreOffice after inquiring that same question about Oracle). But I would like to add that the author of the summary seems to apply a different standard to FOSS than they apply to closed source or COTS applications. Nowhere does the author comment on the hundreds of proprietary 'camps creating such huge codebases for a fundamental application type' in word editing software or any other multitudes of software whether they be Microsoft, Apple or Google.

Submitter was quoting from the article, which is obvious, once you read it. But then again where would we be if we didn't all "fly off the handle" without reading the article, certainly not on slashdot ... :)

Re:Now with Double Standards!

[cronius]

Indeed, the "splitting up" is part of how free software is (theoretically) supposed to work

Like healthy competition in a free market.

(The fact that people can't grasp that open source == free market just shows how poorly people actually understand open source.)

Re:Now with Double Standards!

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a professor who explained to me that 'clearly' and 'obviously' are synonymous with 'I have no justification for this statement whatsoever.'

Re:Now with Double Standards!

[MBC1977]

Perhaps if I didn't feel the "wheel" was being reinvented over and over again for no real purpose other than to say, "I don't like you, I'm taking my ball and going home" I might feel like open source was worth something.

Of course this is the same stuff that is given away for free, without consideration that the cost of designing, writing, testing, and marketing software definitely is not free (but, hey don't let me ruin anyone perceptions or feelings.)

If enough people drink the feel good kool-aid, perhaps we can all live in star trek land or some shit like that.

Re:Now with Double Standards!

[cronius]

Perhaps if I didn't feel the "wheel" was being reinvented over and over again for no real purpose other than to say, "I don't like you, I'm taking my ball and going home" I might feel like open source was worth something.

I don't really care precisely what every single entity is doing. What's important is that they *can* reinvent the wheel *if they so please*. Free market for producers. And then it's up to users in that market to decide what they want to spend time on. That wheel, or that other wheel? Or maybe that caravan over there? Free market for consumers. It's wonderful, may the best software win.

Forking Oracle

[RulerOf]

this way we can just fork Oracle and move on.

With all the bullshit Oracle has pulled since their acquisition of Sun, they've turned a massive set of what is, for better or worse, extremely popular, open source products into nothing but a toxic mess of insanity.

Oracle can go fork themselves.

...crashing MS Word

[coats]

I had a DOC that was crashing my Word 2007 and I got it opened with ...LibreOffice.

MS Word's doc-parser has been flaky for <drumroll>...decades</drumroll>.

Both I at my office (environmental modeling) and my wife (corporate legal) have had abiword and Openffice save the day many times when MSWord declared documents to be corrupt. Frankly, the opensource doc-parser library is much more robust than the one from Redmond. Do you know how much fun it is to be 8 hours from an NSF grant-deadline and have MSWord declare your proposal corrupt when yoo go to do the final printing? Abiword saved us that time -- way back in 1996! (and the situation hasn't improved much since.)

Re:...crashing MS Word

[Inda]

Sorry but I disagree.

The fault lies with the hidden "Open and repair" feature. It will open 99.9% of corrupted Word documents and list the errors (which are normally referencing errors)

Re:...crashing MS Word

[Will.Woodhull]

Parent post should be rated up.

The reason many of us first adopted Star Office (before it even became OpenOffice) was to regain access to older Word documents after the company upgraded us to the latest MS Office.

Microsoft has improved things somewhat, but if you need access to a set of complex MS Office97 legacy documents, you will still have a much easier time of it with OpenOffice than with a later version of MS Office.

I fully expect that LibreOffice has inherited that ability to handle legacy documents.

Re:...crashing MS Word

[cain]

You really should stop the drumroll before you say the word or else no one is going to be able to hear it.

Re:...crashing MS Word

[demonbug]

I had a DOC that was crashing my Word 2007 and I got it opened with ...LibreOffice.

MS Word's doc-parser has been flaky for <drumroll>...decades</drumroll>.

Both I at my office (environmental modeling) and my wife (corporate
legal) have had abiword and Openffice save the day many times when MSWord declared documents to be corrupt. Frankly, the opensource doc-parser library is much more robust than the one from Redmond. Do you know how much fun it is to be 8 hours from an NSF grant-deadline and have MSWord declare your proposal corrupt
when yoo go to do the final printing? Abiword saved us that time -- way back in 1996! (and the situation hasn't improved much since.)

Lol, had a similar experience with OpenOffice. Well, almost. I was putting some finishing touches on a grant application in OO, hit save one last time before PDFing and electronic submission... and OO crashed. Re-started it, and it tried to do it's automatic file recovery - and crashed again in the middle of this. Completely killed the document - which, uncharacteristically, I had only been working on on my laptop and didn't have a backup copy (yikes!). The file was toast, couldn't open it in anything - OO had actually overwritten it with junk, and the abortive recovery attempt apparently killed the working backup. Fortunately it wasn't a huge proposal, so I managed to re-write it in the ~6 hours before the deadline (stuck with OO for the re-write and everything went fine - I haven't had a problem before or since). Happy to say it got finished on time, it was probably actually better than the original document, and my grant got funded. I've never actually had Word kill a document to the point where it wouldn't recover automatically.

Re:...crashing MS Word

[Anonymous Coward]

The fault lies with the hidden "Open and repair" feature

So, instead of blaming the program, or its manufacturer, you expect us to blame a hereto unknown feature (a hidden feature no less)? Do you work for Microsoft?

Re:...crashing MS Word

[Anonymous Coward]

You do grant proposals in a word processor? You must be in one of those fields that doesn't use LaTeX.

Re:...crashing MS Word

[Anonymous Coward]

No, its *drum drum drum* WORD *CRASH*

Re:...crashing MS Word

[tehcyder]

If I had a set of complex MS Office 97 documents that I had to ensure I could access, I would keep a copy of MS Office97 installed on my/another computer, as well as having a backup, before trying to open them in another program and corrupting them a few hours before an important deadline.

Just a thought..

Re:...crashing MS Word

[Will.Woodhull]

That is one approach (maintaining working copies of MS Office97 to work on legacy documents), and simple enough to implement now, since anyone could afford the hard drive space. Maintaining an appropriate firewall between the old and vulnerable stuff and current activities would be a bit of a pain, but possible.

But maintaining the old skill sets with the ancient software and the contexts that they need to run in (the old OSs, file systems, etc) DOES limit the wetware resources you can devote to staying current in your chosen field. You cannot continuously add to the baggage your brain is carrying forward without starting to drop stuff. If you want to keep on top of tomorrow's technology, you need to purposefully choose which of yesterday's skill sets you should allow yourself to forget. For most of us, Office97 skills are better forgotten, especially since Star Office and its descendants have always been better at managing well-formed Office97 documents. (The keyword being "well-formed": nothing is going to work on those old documents that oh so cleverly depended on bugs and glitches in the original code.)

Short answer: everyone who has been successful for a decade or more in contemporary technologies understands exactly what the phrase "I used to know all that stuff" implies. And is smarter for that now.

Installation

[Daetrin]

Multi-stage installations aren't all that unusual, but it's interesting that the first stage says:
"The LibreOffice 3.3 installation files will be unpacked and saved in the folder shown below. If you would like to save LibreOffice to a different folder, click 'Browse' to select another folder."

but when you click "browse" the new window says:
"Select the folder to install LibreOffice 3.3 in:"

When i saw that i had to go back and double-check that it was indeed an unpacking and not the actual installation. It may seem like a minor quibble, but this is the first thing new users are going to encounter, you should try to put your best foot forward by making the installation clear and precise. (Also the actual folder browsing was painfully slow, but that might have just been due to the peculiarities of this computer. It always locks up windows explorer for 20-30 seconds whenever you try to access "My Computer".)

And of course i still think the name is dumb, but i can't really think of a better one myself. Hopefully they'll eventually be able to buy back the "Open Office" name from Oracle. Perhaps we should try to convince Oracle that a branded "Oracle Office" would be much better for them for brand recognition purposes (since clearly they don't believe in open software) and therefore they don't need the old name anymore?

Re:Installation

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Oracle is famous for giving stuff away out of the goodness of their hearts.

You can't even get the sweat off Ellison's balls without signing a service contract.

Re:Installation

[tonique]

You can't even get the sweat off Ellison's balls without signing a service contract.

And an NDA as well.

Re:Installation

[wilderg]

Multi-stage installations aren't all that unusual, but it's interesting that the first stage says: "The LibreOffice 3.3 installation files will be unpacked and saved in the folder shown below. If you would like to save LibreOffice to a different folder, click 'Browse' to select another folder." but when you click "browse" the new window says: "Select the folder to install LibreOffice 3.3 in:" When i saw that i had to go back and double-check that it was indeed an unpacking and not the actual installation. It may seem like a minor quibble, but this is the first thing new users are going to encounter, you should try to put your best foot forward by making the installation clear and precise.

This is no different that it has been since before 2.0. Not that I don't agree that it should be improved upon.

Not so different from any other development model

[Rolman]

What is more puzzling is what the existence of two camps creating such huge codebases for a fundamental application type says about the whole state of open source development at this time. It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as."

How exactly is this different from, say, a developer or team of videogame developers, leaving a company they were fed up with, to create their own with new and fresh ideas for innovative and competitive products? Happens all the time.

Ah, yes, almost forgot this tiny difference: with open source software, the LibreOffice guys didn't have to start from scratch...

What's so odd about it? Oracle bought OOo

[Maxo-Texas]

Oracle basically bought OpenOffice so now that line is in jeopardy of abandonment, monetization, etc.
The community detected the risk and is routing around it.

I am still on Openoffice but I'll check Libreoffice out.

Re:318 pixels wide? really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have video goggles with 320x240 res from 2005 connected (at various times) to my laptop, desktop and handheld -- you insensitive clod.

Not that I use them for browsing such stuff, but still...

More realistically, wide text means narrow ads, and we can't have that, can we?

Hasty generalization

[WD]

Can we keep the logical fallacies out of this? Making any accurate generalization about the robustness of software would require extensive testing. For example, one could perform a fuzz testing campaign against both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice and compare the results. And even then, the conclusion would be an extrapolation of the functionality that you tested.

Concluding that Microsoft Office is flaky because Abiword saved you once in 1996 is naive to say the least. I'm not defending Microsoft or Oracle or LibreOffice or Abiword, etc. But to rate software robustness based on a small amount of anecdotal evidence is irresponsible.

Re:Hasty generalization

[gr8_phk]

But to rate software robustness based on a small amount of anecdotal evidence is irresponsible.

Normally I'd agree with that. However, we're talking about opening a largely undocumented file format. MS office should be the gold standard in opening their own files. You save it in word, it should open in word - end of story. For any application to fail that test indicates a lack of something. The fact that people are often able to open their "corrupt" files using another tool indicates that part of the something missing is robustness.

Re:Hasty generalization

[Migala77]

But to rate software robustness based on a small amount of anecdotal evidence is irresponsible.

Normally I'd agree with that. However, we're talking about opening a largely undocumented file format. MS office should be the gold standard in opening their own files. You save it in word, it should open in word - end of story. For any application to fail that test indicates a lack of something. The fact that people are often able to open their "corrupt" files using another tool indicates that part of the something missing is robustness.

Yes, it should open in MS-Word if you saved it in word, every time, you are right. But you cannot conclude Abiword (or OO/LO) is more robust if you have one (or a few) examples where it was able to open a file and MS-Word wasn't. You only tried Abiword when MS failed, you didn't try Abiword everytime MS succeeded, and you might have found some Abiword failures then.

Terrible name

[wcrowe]

I don't know whether LibreOffice is a good application or not, but it is one of the worst names for a product I've ever seen. Why not just name it "AwkwardStiltedOffice"?

Re:Terrible name

[Anonymous Coward]

Libra is a brand of feminine hygene product in Australia

Welcome to LibraOffice - ace marketing

Re:Terrible name

[horza]

Personally I like the name. What do you think is wrong with it?

Phillip.

Re:Terrible name

[Minwee]

The name was very carefully chosen so that the project leaders could stand outside of Oracle HQ and scream "THIS IS NACHO LIBRE OFFICE!"

I read it on the Internet so it must be true.

Re:Terrible name

[wcrowe]

That's okay if you like it. I'm sure the Edsel was popular with some people in its day also.

It just doesn't roll off the tongue. In English, it's an awkward combination of syllables.

Re:Not so different from any other development mod

[tsman]

QFT

I agree with most here, however

[Stepnsteph]

I agree with most here that the blurb was pretty much a failure. However, it does make one good point when it questions the need for a dedicated office suite; for home users anyway. I can't comment on what businesses may or may not need. What I do know is that even my mother uses an online office suite these days, and she has shown open dislike of the idea of installing an office suite on the computer.

OSS, FOSS, FLOSS, and...

[jabberw0k]

Hmm... If it's open and "libre" but you charge for it, that's LOSS software?

Re:OSS, FOSS, FLOSS, and...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's still FLOSS software, since the Free in Free Software never made an assumption about the price. You can perfectly charge for Free Software, at least according to the Free Software Foundation

MS is more uncertain than open source

[cwgmpls]

How does rescuing an app from a company that was going to destroy bring uncertainty? If anything, LibreOffice provides certainty by showing that good opensource apps will always be around, despite efforts by some companies to harm them. If you're concerned about uncertainty in your core apps, I'd be much more concerned about the next "ribbon" that Microsoft will throw at you in a couple years than by the ability of open source app to maintain and improve itself despite the best efforts by others to ruin it.

Re:MS is more uncertain than open source

[HikingStick]

It's about perceptions. It's about brand. What you're saying is that OpenOffice really just changed its name (in terms understood by the casual observer) to LibreOffice. That simple.

It's not that simple.

What would happen if Ford's Mustang group simply announced next week that they were splitting off and forming their own company that will build their own Mustangs: Libre Mustangs (setting aside any copyright/patent arguments for the sake of this illustration). Would anyone trust the new company to produce a real Mustang?

Not without a major ad campaign and huge wads of cash.

Let's face it. The apps may be the same, but the brand is now different. People like me have spent time trying to warm up senior decision makers to open source software, and that often came about by familiarizing them with specific brands, whether they were browsers (e.g., Chrome, FireFox), distros (e.g., Red Hat, Fedora, Ubunto), or productivity suites (e.g., OpenOffice.org). This change simply makes it harder to convice them that any specific open source project is worth adopting (much less, supporting).

LIbreOffice in Ubuntu

[MagicFab]

If you're using Ubuntu, and want to try LibreOffice, I wrote a few details here:
http://www.fabianrodriguez.com/blog/2011/01/25/the-document-foundation-launches-libreoffice-3-3

Most importantly *don't install .debs manually* and *don't reinstall if you already have 3.3 RC4, it's the same as 3.3 final* :)

Why ? [Re:They urgently need a new name]

[Anne Honime]

At first glance, I could understand our fellow english speakers being uneasy about the way to handle this french (and spanish) word, but I then I realized the proper french pronunciation is extremely close to the zodiacal sign "libra" ; one just need to cut short of the 'a' and jump straight into the 'O' of office, like 'librOffice' (in french, terminal 'e' are muted).

Not much to fuss about. And face it, the world of F(L)OSS software is not as much US centered as the computing world generally is. Europe contributes as much as north america to it, and the countries expanding the more rapidly upon FOSS softwares are in south america.

I'm personally quite happy for once to be given a software name I can understand, write and speak about without feeling a bit awkward.

lib-what?

[SMOKEING]

Perusing the new arrivals in gentoo portage this morning, spotted libreoffice, paused thinking: lib-What? Another regex library for some kind of "office"?

Stop the FUD already

[MikeBabcock]

What is more puzzling is what the existence of two camps creating such huge codebases for a fundamental application type says about the whole state of open source development at this time. It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as.

Actually, this action shows off the abilities of open source very well. When a company takes a piece of software and changes it in ways you don't like, you can just do what you want with it anyway. You don't have to scream "omg, this new toolstrip crap sucks", you can just change it yourself, or more likely use the version changed by someone else of the same bent.

The very beauty of free or open source software is that changes can be made by anyone. This is about choice, and freedom not marketing. Marketers love top-down managed simple and stable brands but the populous is better served by openness and choice. Where would we be today if Windows' code base had always been open and Universities and government groups could actually compile and test changes to the source code they're allowed access to? We might have a much better and very different world-dominant operating system. Downside? Microsoft not being as rich.

Basically, what's the problem with the LibreOffice fork? There are hundreds of developers working on it, and that's their right ... you can too if you want, or feel free to fork it again and call it mikejukoffice for fun.

I agree

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'll bet my house that the average Joe will pronounce it "libber-office". Not much forethought went into that one, eh?

What is the author talking about

[JumpDrive]

What is more puzzling is what the existence of two camps creating such huge codebases for a fundamental application type says about the whole state of open source development at this time. It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as.

We have also seen the alternative and it does not lead us to Utopia or Nirvana either.

I don't see what idealisms the author is getting at. Did the author think that Open Source was an extension of some communist ideology and hence marked a formation of Utopia for all?

Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Spanish speakers can call it OfficeLibre and English speakers can call it LibreOffice. Problem solved.

You don't have to thank me.

Bashing?

[SmallFurryCreature]

He didn't bash, he questioned whether Oracle gets non-closed source software. It seems they don't. Funding open source development while squashing it at the same time would be evidence of that.

Personally I think it is simple. Oracle operates in a different field where its software is not so much bought because of a good name or good community standing but because Oracle is what you use to run databases. End of story. They never had to care about their end-user because their end-user didn't have a choice.

Then they did. Why do you think Linux did such a number on the unixes? Because suddenly all the geeks HAD a choice and that choice might not have been as solid but it had heart. Oracle doesn't.

It is not the enemy of open source, it is the big dog that squeeshes the life out of the rabbit and then doesn't get why it doesn't want to play anymore.

Re:Bashing?

[tehcyder]

Oracle operates in a different field where its software is not so much bought because of a good name or good community standing but because Oracle is what you use to run databases. End of story. They never had to care about their end-user because their end-user didn't have a choice.

There are no competing companies in the field of database software? Really?

So?

[SmallFurryCreature]

You seem to be laboring under a mis apprehention, NOBODY CARES.

Go tell MS to get rid of the ribbon.

Go tell Apple you want OS9 back!

Do they listen? No? You just swallow their changes? Then why should opensource listen?

You still don't get a fundemental part of life. Consumers do NOT have a choice in the direction of the product they buy.

Seems funny, you buy MS Office that has problems reading its own old formats, doesn't read other formats and has gone through countless overhauls breaking backwards compatibilty.

OpenOffice does a name chance and you are crying foul.

Notice a difference?

Fork Oracle

[h00manist]

...I kinda wish we could just "fork" Oracle (in the a**) and move on. If you know what I mean ;)

Amazing how much of a bad rap they managed to get themselves over the years.

Re:Fork Oracle

[h4rr4r]

If you ever dealt with them you would know why. Their support site, is more an abuse site.

Re:Fork Oracle

[RockDoctor]

...I kinda wish we could just "fork" Oracle (in the a**) and move on. If you know what I mean ;)

Amazing how much of a bad rap they managed to get themselves over the years.

Why are you assuming that Oracle (corporately, or it's employees individually) don't like taking it up the arse? Enough men and women like "a bit of the brown" that surely some of them work at Oracle.

Cut-down version?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm waiting for the cut-down version, LibreOffice Lite, or LOL.

OK, I'll get my coat.

"...long term future..." Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...it isn't even clear if there is a long term future for office suites..."

Uh-huh. & every business on the planet is going to immediately embrace the so-called "cloud" way of doing things? I think not. They might as well publish their IP on their web site, considering how secure the cloud will inevitably be for it's first umpteen years.

Dumb statement...

I'm not sure I really understand...

[wb5bbw]

about the assertion "... it isn't even clear if there is a long term future for office suites at all". Does this refer to the movement to the Cloud for office applications? There will long be those who are not willing/able to "Cloud" their operations for various religious, organizational, or practical reasons. Thus, there will be a "long term future". Or so my flavor of Kool-Aid tells me.

Installation?

[wilderg]

Why is it, on the initial release of what is a potential replacement for OpenOffice, there is no mention (that I can find) of OpenOffice in the FAQ or documentation? Does it not seem likely that many people will want to install LO and already have OO on their system? It would be nice to mention that we have to remove OO first. Or not? Does it install over top (replace)? Or will I end up with two almost identical office suites side-by-side? Will it give me the option of replacing OO? Or at least tell me that I need to remove OO?

NO KIDDING

[jensend]

From what I understand this has been brought up multiple times and they've basically said "sorry, we made a decision, we're stuck with it." When you've made a decision that causes practically everyone who hears of your product to do a facepalm and/or to groan "OH, THE HUMANITY!" you really need to learn that bad decisions can be unmade.

Is it better?

[antdude]

I still use Oracle's OpenOffice v3.2.1 and MS Office 2000 suite SR3 for their documents, spreadsheet, and slides in both updated, old Windows XP Pro. SP3 and Debian/Linux. Or is it still too early to use it without not much changes?

Confusing idealism with an idealistic state

[Bruce Perens]

It sounds like Tio Paco is annoyed that we actually fight for things that matter. Idealism means that. It doesn't mean that you live in utopia, it means that you fight to improve things.

the Ribbon is the New Clippy

[rubycodez]

nonsense, I've been using that crap for six months now at work, it is the very worst UI I've ever had the misfortune to encounter (e.g. seven insert function not under Insert but References, Insert row in table NOT under Table Tools, etc. etc. ), Half of what I need to do isn't in the ribbon.

The ribbon is only for people who made two page documents with italics and headings as most advanced thing.

one office suite to rule them all

[bugi]

If we must discuss limiting ourselves to one office suite, I for one nominate ed as typewriter emulator, dc for calculator and when occasionally needed, fmt for typesetting. Really, you only need the first two to define a ring but I prefer the three so's to have a ball.

But let's not discuss that. Even emacsians have a place in this world.

Can anyone explain this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Copied from http://www.libreoffice.org/:

> The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by
> the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than
> twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the
> aggressive schedule set by the project.

The news is: "Developers: LibreOffice 3.3 Released Today". How come Slashdot/CmdrTaco chooses to report this by pasting the ramblings of a "clearly" biased FLOSS-critic, instead of just quoting the original source?

Even excess sloth can't explain it in my opinion.

AC

I would be highly suprised if it overwrites it. .

[JSBiff]

The reason I would be highly surprised is that, among other things, I would expect this first release to remove every single occurence of the TRADEMARKED name OpenOffice.org.

Since I would expect OpenOffice to name its install directory, user config files/directory, and binary files using that trademark, and I would expect LibreOffice to rename all those things, I wouldn't really expect an overwrite. Basically, if LibreOffice includes the trademarked name anywhere in their distribution of the software, Oracle can sue them for trademark infringement (even though the code itself is GPL).

Possibly, there could be a library problem. E.g. on Linux, shared library files (.so) are usually installed to /lib, /usr/lib, or a couple other common directories. It might be possible that LibreOffice would ship with the same libraries, but a newer, incompatible version, which then might cause a problem for OpenOffice, but usually, library files include a version string as part of the library file's name, so that you can have multiple versions of the same libraries installed side-by-side.

So, really, they should probably show up to the OS as two completely different applications, even though one is a fork of the other.

Corruption in 3.2 linux to windows exports

[vlueboy]

I'm using Ubuntu 10.10. When exporting my resume's changes, I can read it fine in Ubuntu's OO, including the 9.04 partition with 3.1. Recently my ODT to DOC exports have been a pain because the document is not legible under Windows; perhaps a Q3 update added some odd CR-LF conversion bug and killed it or something; dunno because the preview feature shows binary anyway. I can't force-open it with any converter in Windows.

Anyone else see this? I can't be the only one looking to send resumes to non-linux-using HR officers ;)
As another note, OO databases seem to stop auto-saving and I've lost many-a-page; it doesn't help that the lock files are also rarely deleted. In comparison, this Base problem has only happened once in the pre-Oracle OO version I use on the Linux box. I'm going to try LibreOffice and see if the bugs aren't there... how do I get it in the Ubuntu Package managers?

Re:Corruption in 3.2 linux to windows exports

[vlueboy]

this Base problem has only happened once in the pre-Oracle OO version I use on the Linux box

I meant to say "the Windows box". On second thought, neither windows nor linux did give me more than ordinary trouble with dangling lock-files (must delete by hand to gain write-access even though the file is 5 days old) conversion, auto-save (the DB randomly fails to do the usual disk-writing of changed records while switching out of it, even though they disable any and all Save shortcuts and icons, and the expected on-program-exit prompt) in the past.

I would wager something got messed up with all the rebranding of OO to Oracle motifs, since I've seen no other new features on top of "the hood."

A friend of mine in Australia disagrees

[WillAffleckUW]

She does a lot of the Open Office documentation, and she's not convinced about this fork having "mindshare".

Seriously, tell Germany to meet the EU emissions targets and Kyoto accords and stop trying to fork open source projects.

Yeah, I read the pre-Davos briefing from Angela Merkel.

Number of developers

[h00manist]

Well if the people working on the project went from 20 to 100 something, I think there's little else to be said.

Only four months?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this supposed to be quick for basically a re-branded copy?

Who says forks are bad?

[daffmeister]

Boy, was this phrase ever flamebait:

What is more puzzling is what the existence of two camps creating such huge codebases for a fundamental application type says about the whole state of open source development at this time. It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as.

citation needed

Sick and Tired

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, I am sick and tired of these people who attempt to judge Open/LibreOffice by indicating its compatibility, or lack thereof, with MS Office.

Open/Libre/Office is a comprehensive and versatile office suite and it aims to fulfill the needs of any office environment. It is not intended to be an MS Office clone. The imagination and talent of the user are essential ingredients.

Anyone who is so narrow minded and intellectually limited to be trapped within the MS Office paradigm will doubtless find Open/LibreOffice to be somewhat disappointing. But those who possess true creativity and adaptability will realize Open/LibreOffice to be a welcome addition to any enterprise.

Libre office suite vs Open Office

[lsatenstein]

Are we coming to friendly comparisons, such as which is better, Debian or Fedora, Ubuntu or Susie, etc. etc.???

On par with the norm...

[helios17]

Count your blessings they did not name it something more goofy then plod out an acronym that is far worse... Open Source developers have made some horrendous choices in naming their apps. Trust me, I could sit here and offer dozens of examples but I will leave you with only one. UCK. http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/146863 I'm just sayin'...

The documentation does NOT help compatibility.

[Futurepower(R)]

Look closely. That documentation is NOT sufficient to allow making another program with compatible files. The file documentation I've seen only allows people who work for Microsoft to understand how to continue programming a very complicated file design.

The documentation does NOT allow compatibility.

[Futurepower(R)]

That documentation is NOT sufficient to allow making another program with compatible files. The file documentation I've seen only allows people who work for Microsoft to understand how to continue programming a very complicated file design.

Posting again because the new, BROKEN, Slashdot system does not display my first comment.

Broken?

[Tablizer]

I tried to install it but keep getting "a Java Runtime Environment is required" despite installing Java yet again.

Re:Broken?

[Tablizer]

I installed the Oracle version and didn't have the same issue. Seems Libre still has some installation kinks to work out.