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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."
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.
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?
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.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
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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.
"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.
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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.
-- $G
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?
Pirate Party UK
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.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
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.
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.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
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?
My work here is dung.
--
"The facts of life are conservative." Margaret Thatcher
--
But reality has a well-known liberal bias.
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.
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).
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
+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
Only if you beleive that a comedian really understands the world better than a politician who remade a nation.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.
--frank[at]unternet.org
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?
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.
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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.
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