LibreOffice 4 Released

Titus Andronicus writes "LibreOffice 4.0.0 has been released. Some of the changes are for developers: an improved API, a new graphics stack, migrating German code comments to English, and moving from Apache 2.0 to LGPLv3 & MPLv2. Some user-facing changes are: better interoperability with other software, some functional & UI improvements, and some performance gains."

Comments

Damn!

[Skiron]

I just pre-paid £140.00 for MS Office on Gnu/Linux! :(

Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS?

[Desler]

OpenOffice/LibreOffice is like 90+% C++. The Java bits are mostly irrelevant.

MS Office mewlers and shills, queue here!

[Dystopian Rebel]

For the sake of order on this sadly degenerating News for Nerds site, please add your post to this parent if the essence of your "thinking" is one of the following:

= LibreOffice is not MS Office, therefore it's crap.
= LibreOffice uses Java, which everyone know is not as fast and portable as .NET.
= LibreOffice lacks MS Office proprietary features and misfeatures, therefore it disappoints me terribly.
= LibreOffice doesn't read or write the constantly mutating, rubbish file formats of MS Office the way only MS Office can.
= LibreOffice isn't backed by a large corporation that Only Wants The Best For Me.
= LibreOffice is bloated, and I insist on the lean responsiveness and stability of MS Office!
= LibreOffice doesn't have ribbons to help me not find features that I used to use.

Re:MS Office mewlers and shills, queue here!

[Enderandrew]

That started happening as soon as they forked.

Sun made it really hard to get some changes made upstream, and some developers were unwilling to hand over copyright on their code contributions. So OpenOffice stagnated for many years.

There was a cleaner, more feature-rich version called go-oo (which many Linux distros shipped, without really telling anyone they were getting the fork). That fork because the basis of LibreOffice. Once they weren't tied to staying close to the OpenOffice base, they started cleaning cruft like mad.

In case you didn't notice, they added a bunch of new features, while the size of the installer dropped from 200 MB to 183 MB in this latest release.

Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Admitting that you don't understand the difference between a plugin and Java itself brings you closer to actually knowing what you talk about.

Re:Why this dilution?

[denis-The-menace]

Oracle tossed OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation after LibreOffice took-off in terms of features, bugfixes and mind-share.

OpenOffice is about 2 years behind thanks to Oracle.

Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS?

[swillden]

OpenOffice/LibreOffice is like 90+% C++. The Java bits are mostly irrelevant.

To be precise, as computed by sloccount, libreoffice-4.0.0.3.tar.xz contains:

cpp: 3990644 (87.04%)
java: 400958 (8.75%)
ansic: 91036 (1.99%)
perl: 42456 (0.93%)
python: 17392 (0.38%)
sh: 17256 (0.38%)
yacc: 8228 (0.18%)
cs: 6648 (0.15%)
asm: 3269 (0.07%)
objc: 2602 (0.06%)
lex: 2030 (0.04%)
awk: 907 (0.02%)
pascal: 800 (0.02%)
csh: 235 (0.01%)
lisp: 115 (0.00%)
php: 104 (0.00%)
sed: 7 (0.00%)

However, as Desler said, the Java bits are actually optional.

Re:Why this dilution?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look on the bright side: LibreOffice is about 2 years ahead, thanks to Oracle!

Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS?

[TsuruchiBrian]

They probably had a surplus of parentheses that they needed to stash somewhere.