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OpenOffice Is Now, Officially, Apache OpenOffice
rbowen writes "Apache OpenOffice has graduated from the Incubator, and now is officially a top-level project at the Apache Software Foundation." From the announcement: "As with all Apache software, Apache OpenOffice software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Information on Apache OpenOffice source code, documentation, mailing lists, related resources, and ways to participate are available at http://openoffice.apache.org." (Download mirror on Sourceforge, too.)
we all moved to LibreOffice
The problem with F/OSS office suites is that their audience tends to be uncritical, so much as in the fairy tale "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" (but in inverse), professionals have stopped listening.
I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents. Their main strength was that it was often easier to export data from them than it was in certain commercial products.
The point of this is that in order for one of these FOSS office suites to survive, people who are critical and have use requirements beyond short documents get involved. For these packages to be competitive, they need to rise to a higher standard than Grandma's recipes, Son's book report, a weekend memo to the boss, etc.
The big news with OO over the past couple of years have been a fork and a name change? Great.
This could be a fantastic thing for the Opensource Community.
Providing the OpenOffice (OO) and the LibreOffice(LO) developers can get past the bad blood of the past, they could merge their to projects back together and focus their efforts.
most of the openoffice devs are now libreoffice devs, so most of the recent development happens there. libreoffice is working on an android version.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/libreoffice-for-android-advances-document-viewer-is-on-the-way/
Well, maybe I can clear this up. You see, they're both Open Source, but OpenOffice.org required code writing contributors (like me) to jump through hoops and assign my copyright over to the OpenOffice.org folks (Oracle), or else my contributions were denied. LibreOffice doesn't require copyright assignment to accept my contributions. So, that means it's easier to contribute to LibreOffice, and it gets updates faster. So, OpenOffice.org is missing some things that LibreOffice has. Bonus, because they're both from a common code-base, LibreOffice can just pull in anything that OpenOffice has -- The requirement of OO.o's copyright assignment meant that they could not incorporate LO code though. When Oracle decided to kill off the development of OO.o, instead of just gifting the name / trademark over to the newly forked LO folks (where most of the developers went) they gave us all the finger one more time for good measure by making OO.o an Apache project. I don't know if the Official Apache oversight of the project now means they're doing away with copyright assignments, nor do I care at this point. The name itself brings back infuriating memories of frustration and wasted efforts squandered on bureaucracy. LibreOffice already exists, so if it weren't for the older install base, it would be complete waste of time to re-do the work of merging the code back into OpenOffice.org... From a developer's perspective it IS a complete waste of time. That and there's the trademark issue where OpenOffice is owned by someone else, so you have to say OpenOffice.org when you're talking about it.
TL;DR: Stay with LO, it's actually better and not a waste of time like OO.org is.
I heard there was a little button thingey you could click to run it without Java. And I heard there was a website called "portableapps" that has portable versions of OOo and LO that you can put on a thumbdrive and run on any computer. I heard all that - but I'm quite sure its all lies - nasty, nasty lies.
Speaking of names, is it actually "Apache OpenOffice" now? That would be an improvement over calling an office suite by the name of its website, "OpenOffice.org".
I mean, did anybody ever call it "Open Office dot org"? Judging by the comments in this thread, no.
Same for Postgres / PostgreSQL ("post greh ess queue elle").
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
To clarify: - Sun took earlier work to create OpenOffice.org. They added the .org so they could register the trademark around the world. Oracle bought Sun, and after a while, someone internally said "why are we funding this thing", and essentially stopped their corporate development on the code. Some long-term contributors (from various companies) forked the code, and started a GPL licensed fork called LibreOffice. LO folks went on to create TDF = The Document Foundation as a non-profit to keep building their office suite.
At that point, Oracle in all it's wisdom (ha!) decided to transfer the trademarks to the ASF and licensed their code (from their last build) to the ASF under the Apache license. Since a bunch of volunteers (yes, many of them are from IBM) showed up at Apache to work on the code, the Apache Incubator accepted them as a podling, or potential project. Today's news story is about this podling graduating to be a top level Apache project, meaning that as long as there's a community to keep building it, the ASF will provide it a home and support. While the ASF is now the legal owner of the OpenOffice.org trademarks, the product will be called Apache OpenOffice going forward.
- The ASF has never required copyright assignments; in fact, we don't really accept them. We require that you license any contributions to us under the Apache license, so that the ASF can then re-ship our Apache projects under our Apache license. Once we ship a release (any project), the world is essentially free to take the code and use it whatever way they want. It's unfortunate that people keep bringing up the Sun/Oracle era copyright assignments in the context of Apache OpenOffice.
- I have to laugh when various commenters ask about merging the projects. First, it's clear that the people in the projects - i.e. the volunteers (or $bigco employees paid to work on them) mostly have made it clear that they have some different objectives and ways of working. So for the actual developers working on AOO and LO, it's unlikely the communities will merge. Many people would certainly like to see more code and idea sharing. In fact LO is welcome to incorporate any released AOO code in their project. However since Apache projects don't ship GPL code, the reverse is not always true, unless someone specifically licenses the code under the Apache License to AOO.
Fundamentally, AOO is happy to share code with anyone. LO will only share code with people who use the GPL. Which world seems like it would be a larger set of developers?
The official name of the new ASF project (and the software it ships) is Apache OpenOffice. While the ASF now legally owns the trademarks associated with OpenOffice.org, going forward we'll be using Apache OpenOffice as our trademark. While normally we require Apache projects to live at an *.apache.org domain name, given the broad (non-technical) end-user base of AOO they will still provide a user-based homepage at openoffice.org. Developers should probably go to openoffice.apache.org for technical info. ---- I'm not a lawyer, but I was an Apache OpenOffice podling mentor
we all moved to LibreOffice
My main document producing software is now LaTeX, using TeXShop on my Mac. It does everything I need, and the documents look pretty. Most especially, I love the ability of LaTeX to typeset equations seamlessly. Perhaps there is a slight learning curve, but it wasn't bad. And when I need to do something unusual, I use the google manual.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
That's a great idea! Let's think it through, however. I don't own the data; that belongs to the client. Thus, I have to be somewhat vague.
You couldn't modify the example enough to use the documents already examined in your tests? Or, if the problem was a missing feature instead of a bug, you couldn't explain it without that specific set of spreadsheet data?
I'm available for consulting at my usual rate -- my contact should be on my user page.
So you're saying that you don't volunteer your time to someone's project. Pay to play, right?
From your journal post earlier today:
Despite having other demands on my time, I've begun spending a half-hour or so every day making submissions to Slashdot and trying to write quality comments. I am doing this because I think Slashdot is an important part of the internet, which like other forms of media, for good or ill is a part of our "culture."...It's not perfect...I've been modded -1, Flamebait for a post I thought was insightful too. Nothing is perfect...Support Slashdot. With your energy, time, money, whatever. It's worth it.
Hold on now. If you're willing to take that stance regarding Slashdot, why not just be honest about F/OSS office suites? You don't care about them and have no interest in seeing them succeed. There really is nothing wrong with that position.