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Apache OpenOffice Lagging Behind LibreOffice In Features
An anonymous reader writes "If you are looking for small niche features such as interactive word count, bundled report designer, or command line filtering etc – LibreOffice beats OpenOffice hands down. 'Noting the important dates of June 1, 2011, which was when Oracle donated OOo to Apache; and Apache OpenOffice 3.4 is due probably sometime in May 2012; Meeks compared Apache OpenOffice 3.4 new features to popular new features from LibreOffice: 3.3, 3.4, 3.5. It wasn't surprising to find that LibreOffice has merged many features not found in Apache OO given their nearly year long head start.'"
Can anyone refresh our recollection as to why we need these two competing projects?
I guess I've been out of touch, I thought Openoffice died with Sun and Libreoffice was forked and is the continuation of that product.
Seems like a lot of duplication of effort in maintaining both OpenOffice and LibreOffice and the community would be better off picking one. But then again, the same has been said about KDE versus Gnome.
I have LibreOffice downloaded, but only use it once every few months...so I haven't followed too closely (or really care too much about how efficient it is). But I thought one of the first things the LibreOffice team planned to do was remove the Java dependency everyone had been complaining about for years for causing bloat and slowing things down.
I'd like to see AOO succeed. But its leadership dooms it. As I've said before:
He's not the only one either. Few people who aren't on the IBM payroll want to contribute to a project with that kind of leadership. People from the open source community in general and from the LibO camp in particular are reluctant to do anything to cooperate with Weir and co. By the time AOO actually gets a release out it will likely be too late to revitalize any interest in the project.
the community would be better off picking one
You say that as if you have the money to pay them to pick just one.
No, I say that as someone who has spent years waiting for Linux on the Desktop to be ready, and I keep seeing so much software that is almost, but not quite there. Along with many competing software applications that do nearly the same thing, so it just seems like there's often alot of dilution from competing packages when there could be more cooperation to make one project more polished and usable.
And before you say "It's open source - write it yourself!", I have contributed to Open Source projects, but my contributions have mostly been on the systems tools side, I'm not a desktop applications developer.
I do run Linux on my desktop (both at home and work), but I keep a Windows VM handy for when I need to run a Windows application. I just can't move my boss over to Linux and say "Sorry your spreadsheet macros aren't working in OpenOffice. Here, download Libre Office, maybe it will work better. Wait, no, here's Gnumeric, I heard it has better macro support. No? Well someone online said KSpread might work better, try that one. Here, maybe I can get MS Office to load in Wine, the Wine website says most things sort of work"
Number of features is the Dr. Strangelove "mineshaft gap" of the software world. Microsoft Word: 1000+ features. Seriously. Google Document: maybe 50? Which is expanding marketshare? Microsoft's barely-tolerated "ribbon" UI was a direct response to Too Many Features.
How about user count as a metric of success?
LibreOffice incorporated the Go-OO patchset on creation, OpenOffice still hasn't and likely won't. The Go-OO patches were all of the features (with a few exceptions) that are listed. If AOO adopted the patches, they would be nearly on parity.
My Linux provider dumped LibreOffice onto my laptop as an alleged "security" fix. It claimed to be full of fixes. But the little things, like broken horizontal scroll bars in Calc, graphs that wouldn't update and a Base that corrupted the database I had used without any problems for several years, were rather a nuisance. The corruption recurred each time I restored from backup, and did not occur with OO on another system, so I can, fairly safely, presume that it wasn't a one-off.
With AOO's recent release, I finally went to the trouble of reinstalling OpenOffice, and I can do all sorts of work that got put on hold thanks to LO's new bugs. Rapid change is only as good as the quality of the testing that verifies if it is fit for release. It is not a virtue in itself, especially if it is just a proxy for carelessness. Stability and reliability, however, are virtues, if you actually want to use these applications, and keep on using them.
Both LO and AOO still have plenty of flaws. My plaudits are reserved for the diligent developers who genuinely improve the product and keep on making useful contributions.