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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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]

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

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?

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)

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.

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

[VGPowerlord]

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

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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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: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.

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?

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: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.

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

[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

[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.

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.

...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

[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: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: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.

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.

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* :)

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: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.

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.