Apache OpenOffice Lagging Behind LibreOffice In Features

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Apache OpenOffice Lagging Behind LibreOffice In Features

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 27, 2012 @06:01AM from the healthy-competition dept.

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.'"

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Why? by glrotate · 2012-04-27 06:03 · Score: 4, Interesting

Can anyone refresh our recollection as to why we need these two competing projects?
1. Re:Why? by masternerdguy · 2012-04-27 06:06 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  One is controlled by a company (Oracle and OO) and one by the fsf peeps (Libre). Competition is good for innovation.
  
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2. Re:Why? by Ded+Bob · 2012-04-27 06:13 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I think OpenOffice is under the ASF. Oracle is no longer involved is my understanding.
3. Re:Why? by gbjbaanb · 2012-04-27 06:15 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  no, Oracle donated OOo to the Apache Foundation (I guess they couldn't be arsed with it once they realised they couldn't sell it and no-one liked them) so it's noow back to being properly open.
  However, I don't think the world needs 2 open office suites, they should merge them together, then they can take the best of LibreOffice (the code) and the best of OpenOffice (the name).
4. Re:Why? by HarrySquatter · 2012-04-27 06:23 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  But the point is this is under a more permissive license which some companies, IBM for example, want. Also, if no more than one office suite is allowed you better notify the Caligra people to shut up shop, too.
5. Re:Why? by rtfa-troll · 2012-04-27 06:36 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  The developers for Open Office mostly come from Oracle. However, most of the team was fired or had quit so now that's a much smaller group than the ones working on Libre Office. Also, given Oracle's recent record of attacks on former Sun open source even when it had a supposedly independent "community process" it doesn't seem like a safe bet to most people. It's embarrassing that the Apache foundation got involved in such an obvious act of vandalism.
  
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6. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-04-27 06:50 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  The issue is licensing.
  Apache OpenOffice is APL, LibreOffice in LGPL. This means that they can't cross-port features or merge, even though they are 90% the same code base. Oracle owned the full copyrights of OO.org (originally released as LGPL), so they were able to donate it to Apache allowing them to relicense to the APL. Apache will not use a non-APL license for anything under their umbrella.
  According to Apache, Libreoffice may be able to port from APL->LGPL, but Apache will likely not be able to port from LGPL->APL.
  https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html
7. Re:Why? by Bruce+Perens · 2012-04-27 07:04 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  It's embarrassing that the Apache foundation got involved in such an obvious act of vandalism.
  
  I think so too.
  
  --
  Bruce Perens.
8. Re:Why? by ThePhilips · 2012-04-27 07:16 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  That's not going to work in long term. Probably it already doesn't.
  LO folks have spent about a year converting the code base to use standard libraries (most notably STL) instead of the old home-brew stuff OO.o still relies upon. That was a major clean-up done by LO people which allowed them to make code cleaner and accessible to new developers. But also made LO quite incompatible to OO.o.
  Due to that, many features already cannot be ported between the two without some effort.
  
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9. Re:Why? by mwvdlee · 2012-04-27 07:39 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  But Oracle kept a stranglehold on it long enough to very nearly kill OOo.
  Unless OOo can gain some serious traction with new developers, it's still just a matter of time before LibreOffice replaces it completely.
  
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10. Re:Why? by hey! · 2012-04-27 08:03 · Score: 2
  
  I think it does, because the world *seriously* needs a decent alternative to MS Access and neither OO nor LO have it.
  
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  Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
11. Re:Why? by Xtifr · 2012-04-27 08:23 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  We need LO because it's a better product in every way. It incoporates all the GoOO patches created by Novell and Debian, and has undergone a massive cleanup that made the code smaller, faster, and easier to understand, without removing any functionality, and, since the cleanup, has had a steady stream of improvements added.
  IBM needs OpenOffice because they had a separate license from Oracle to use OO code in Symphony, and the LO folks aren't offering the same deal--LO is GPL, take it or leave it.
  Apache needs OpenOffice because it promotes their preferred license. Which isn't much of a reason, but it's something.
  OO seems likely to become an IBM product in all but name. A handful of developers may feel motivated to contribute for whatever reasons, but unless OO undertakes a cleanup like the one LO already accompished, the complexity of the code is likely to discourage casual contributors. A cleanup of OO would likely put them even farther behind LO in features, but without a cleanup, it's going to be harder to add features, which will make it harder for them to keep up in the long run, and will mean that OO's performance will continue to suck compared to LO.
12. Re:Why? by augustz · 2012-04-27 08:58 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  It did make me wonder how the Apache Foundation tries to steward open source objectives.
  The donation to the Apache Foundation seemed primarily a result of the initial traction around LibreOffice, and it was odd that Apache didn't look at Libre and feel that they would be good stewards of the effort.
13. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-04-27 09:48 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Seriously? 'I think so too' 5, interesting.
  With all due respect but just because your name is Bruce Perens and you have a four digit id doesn't mean 'I think so too' is more interesting than it normally would've been.
  Posting AC for obvious reasons (Slashdot's typical 'don't touch my hero' atmosphere in case it's not so obvious)
14. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-04-27 11:27 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  OOo pretty much lost the race within the first month or two of Libreoffice forking from it. They merged in the code changes from go-oo pretty much immediately and most of the developers fled to Libreoffice, at this point, we're talking about OO.org and honestly, it's a zombie and has been for over a year. They may release a few more versions, but anybody that's using OO.org, ought to realize that it's basically dead in the water and falling further and further behind.
15. Re:Why? by hey! · 2012-04-27 14:15 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  I am an professional with many years of experience with relational databases, and I recently did a thorough review of Base for a client. The client needed a file-based database management system that could be easily deployed to casual users who would only be connected to the Internet occasionally. After spending a solid week studying Base and putting it through its paces, I reluctantly recommended MS Access, a product which I loathe which would limit the customer to Windows only.
  I can say without reservation that the only "database" system I've seen that was worse than Base was ACIUS 4th Dimension.
  What's wrong with Base? Three things.
  (1) It uses HSQL -- good, but doesn't include all the jars -- bad. In effect is uses and *undocumented subset* of HSQL, and many key features like using java method calls for triggers simply don't work, even through a database console window.
  (2) There is no reference documentation. There is no way to know what Base is supposed to do and how it is supposed to act; there's only walk-throughs and how tos. Those are valuable of course, but no substitute for fundamental documentation of what the product's capabilities are and how the product is supposed to behave. Without real documentation the utility of Base is largely limited to the kinds of "catalog your CD collection" toy examples in the documentation, despite having (a randomly chosen subset of) quite a powerful relational engine under the covers.
  (3) The report writer GUI makes simple things like putting fields and text where you want them so difficult and fiddly it's physically painful to use because of the frustration involved -- and there's no alternative to the GUI as there is in something like JasperReports.
  Access wins over Base hands down, on either documentation or user interface -- take your pick. The one clear lead that Base should have -- using HSQL instead of Jet -- is nullified by shipping a bastardized and undocumented subset of HSQL.
  Base is nowhere near as robust as the rest of the OpenOffice suite; in fact I'd say it's so amateurish that it's a positive embarrassment. How they could ship something that poorly managed and implemented along with the rest of the suite is beyond me.
  
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Openoffice still exists? by hawguy · 2012-04-27 06:06 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.
1. Re:Openoffice still exists? by SurfsUp · 2012-04-27 06:58 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Openoffice was progressing more slowly than it should have. A lot of good contributions ended up in an infinite state of non-acceptance. That said, Openoffice is still a wonderful thing. But LibreOffice is even better.
  
  --
  Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
2. Re:Openoffice still exists? by Lumpy · 2012-04-27 07:09 · Score: 2
  
  "f you need a high level of shared editing and some programability, and are online with broadband, Google Docs is it. "
  Fixed that for you. Google docs has a tiny flaw in that it don't work when you are not online.
  
  --
  Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
3. Re:Openoffice still exists? by sdnoob · 2012-04-27 08:09 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  give apache some time and openoffice will rebound. it has taken considerable time and effort to migrate a project of this magnitude over to apache's infrastructure. i expect things to pick up after the initial apache release (which is the upcoming 3.4).. so 3.5 or 4 or whatever the one after that will be.
4. Re:Openoffice still exists? by Xtifr · 2012-04-27 17:37 · Score: 2
  
  You mean give IBM some time. Apache has a mild interest, but it's not exactly their main focus, and they haven't exactly got huge resources to spare. At this point, community interest is probably at an all time low. If Oo rebounds, it's going to be because IBM wants to keep Symphony proprietary, and has plenty of money and resources to throw at Symphony's open-source core. I don't see any other way for Oo to climb out of the pit that's been dug for it.
  But backing from IBM is definitely nothing to sneeze at. It'll be interesting to see how things go from here.
Bloat by SirGarlon · 2012-04-27 06:08 · Score: 3, Insightful

Adding features is not necessarily a good thing.

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1. Re:Bloat by Doogie5526 · 2012-04-27 06:24 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  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.
2. Re:Bloat by dkleinsc · 2012-04-27 06:30 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  The trouble is that one man's bloat is another man's absolutely essential feature.
  
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3. Re:Bloat by moderatorrater · 2012-04-27 07:28 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  It takes a bit of manual work to remove it and verify that it was unused, that it's no longer being linked to, and that there wasn't another thing that was only being used by what you just removed (and is therefore unused). The graph shows that in 5 months they're removed 3000 of these things. That's pretty damn impressive if you ask me.
4. Re:Bloat by kyrsjo · 2012-04-27 07:59 · Score: 2
  
  Well, with recent versions of LO, I noticed that it now ONLY gobbles a few GBs when loading a big animation - instead of a really really big number of GBs and throwing your machine[*] into swapping like in the "good old days of Windows 95" as it used to...
  [*]: I've got 8 or 4 GB, depending on which machine - and I think that should actually be enough to run an office suite. It is enough to do some semi-heavy number crunching...
Late night word processing will never be the same by jabberw0k · 2012-04-27 06:17 · Score: 5, Funny

No, we lost Ed in 2009, four years after Johnny in 2005. C'est la vi.
LibO Lags Behind AOO in Folks Acting Like Jerks by jensend · 2012-04-27 06:40 · Score: 3, Interesting

I'd like to see AOO succeed. But its leadership dooms it. As I've said before:

Rob Weir, who is basically running the show and who seems like a perfectly reasonable person from his blog, acts like a caustic, sarcastic, and poorly socialized adolescent in communicating with other developers. He's alienating people right and left. People have tried to get him to stop, but he either ignores it or just acts like it's those he's offended who are to blame for any unpleasantness.
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.
It's actually slimmer by jensend · 2012-04-27 06:46 · Score: 2

The LibO download size may look bloated, but that's because their default download includes all the languages rather than having separate installers for each language. I switched to LibO 3.5 recently and my install uses ~75MB less space than my OpenOffice 3.3 install did.
Re:Pony up by hawguy · 2012-04-27 06:56 · Score: 4, Interesting

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"
Once Oracle Touched OOo... by RLU486983 · 2012-04-27 06:57 · Score: 4, Insightful

I walked away from OOo as soon as LibreOffice began and never looked back.
Stopped using OpenOffice by wiegeabo · 2012-04-27 07:08 · Score: 2

I stopped using OpenOffice months ago. It was really taking forever to load documents or get anything done. I tried LibreOffice and it was much faster at everything. As has been said many times before, competition is good.
Re:Merge! by SurfsUp · 2012-04-27 07:19 · Score: 3, Informative

IINM LibreOffice forked form OpenOffice because issues under Oracle's stewardship. It made sense at the time. But, now that Oracle has "released" OpenOffice I really don't see why there needs to continue to be two branches. Indeed, I think that it depletes the developer base and dilutes the user base for both projects.
It's time those forks merged.
The Open Docuement Foundation does not hold all the copyrights to the code base as Oracle did, so is unable to relicense work done since the fork under the Apache license. The only way to merge is to add any new code from OpenOffice.org to the LibreOffice codebase so that the aggregate work remains under copyleft licenses wherever that applies. Do you think the Apache foundation will be ok with that?
If so, then merge away and everybody be happy.

--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Feature count! by metrometro · 2012-04-27 07:20 · Score: 4, Interesting

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?
Re:Late night word processing will never be the sa by jd2112 · 2012-04-27 07:22 · Score: 4, Funny

No! C'est la emacs!
(sorry, wrong flamewar.)

--
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Re:Highly subjective comparison by SurfsUp · 2012-04-27 07:54 · Score: 2

Try importing a SVG file in OpenOffice and LibreOffice, or just doing some serious editing. Then you will see how biased the review by Meeks is. He's just protecting his job.
The project contributer figures are from ohloh, and show ten times as many developers on LibreOffice as OpenOffice. Do you think ohloh is biased?

--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
It has nothing to do with "head start" time by loftwyr · 2012-04-27 08:16 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.
1. Re:It has nothing to do with "head start" time by Palestrina · 2012-04-27 09:04 · Score: 2
  
  And of course, that makes your wonder. If LibreOffice truly has 300 developers, and has been working on this code base for 18 months, and started with all the Go-OO code, as well as all the unintegrated Oracle patches and the OOo 3.4 beta, then what the hell have they been doing?
  With that starting point, that amount of lead time, and 300 developers, they should be rocking our world with their dazzling features. 300 frickin' developers and the best they have is, "uh, I turned a modal dialog for word counts into a modeless dialog". Really? That is an embarrassment. Either they do not have anywhere close to their claimed 300 developers, or they have the least productive 300 developers known to man.
  I'm putting my bet on the 30 developers who do a lot with little, over the 300 that only draw charts about their own superiority to cover up their lack of actual achievement in 18 months.
Re:Highly subjective comparison by Palestrina · 2012-04-27 08:56 · Score: 2

Actually, I do think the Ohloh numbers are biased. A project that uses distributed version control, like LibreOffice, and accepts patches from contributors that way will show one result, but another, like Apache, that uses Subversion and accepts patches via email, will see something else.
Essentially, depending on your patch policy you may not have any non-core contributors acknowledged in your version control.
Openoffice still exists and works (well enough) by formfeed · 2012-04-27 09:14 · Score: 2

The original article is equally puzzled:
"One of the most curious things about the OpenOffice.org brand, is the loyalty that users have to it, despite the 3.3 feature freeze being twenty-two months ago, having lost much of its development community, and having had no new release since January 2011 - users are still downloading this increasingly old and creaky release at top speed."
I don't know whether I would be downloading OpenOffice for a new install. But I'm still running OO. Not out of "loyalty" but simply because it works. And if you rely on it, "things that work" have a very strong argument for not fiddling with it. At least on a computer you really need.
"Upgrading" to LO might go bad and break things, or it might go well and give me new features I don't need or already have through ubuntu't go-OO flavor. Very easy risk assessment. For the same reason I'm still on ubuntu 10.4.
And at some point I will switch to 12.4 and LO -but on a secondary computer first.
Thank for Apache OpenOffice by Anonymous Coward · 2012-04-27 09:24 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.