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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.'"
No, we lost Ed in 2009, four years after Johnny in 2005. C'est la vi.
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.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
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.
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.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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.
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.
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)