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LibreOffice 4.1 Released
An anonymous reader writes "The latest major release of the LibreOffice office suite has just been published, including an experimental improved sidebar based on the work of Apache OpenOffice, embedded fonts, better Microsoft Office compatibility (improving their exclusive capability in the free software world of not only being able to read but also write .docx and .xlsx files) and many further Improvements."
LibreOffice already does this pretty much every release!
The licensing for the two allows LO to take any of Apache's changes that they'd like (and they frequently do!), whereas the reverse would require Apache to change the OpenOffice licensing.
Honestly though, as long as they both support the same file format, having two separate suites isn't a bad thing.
According to the LibreOffice Bugzilla, 2937, if you don't count NEW bugs.
LibreOffice is free to take everything OpenOffice releases under the Apache license and release it under GPL/LGPL 3.0 of their release. Unfortunately, OpenOffice can't do the reverse without switching their license.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
You need to consider that it's a suite of applications, with each one at a different level of maturity.
Three thousand would seem like a big number. Except if you break it down, it might (hypothetically) be a hundred in Writer, a hundred in Calc, and two thousand in Base. And, I wonder how much of these are behind-the-scenes fixes, like changing exception handlers to do something useful instead of logging and then throwing the exception away.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Uhhh...the creation of Libre Office came about because Oracle was being their usual dickish selves, I doubt you are gonna see that same attitude anywhere in the Apache foundation so that isn't the problem. The problem is that Apache is more of a BSD license and Libre is GPL, no point in starting up THAT old flamewar so lets just say they agree to disagree and move on.
Now that said I think we should all give the Libre Office team another year and a half before we even start judging their work, because frankly Sun left that code in pretty damned bad shape and when you are talking about a project THAT size? Well its gonna take a good while just to clean out the cruft and straighten out the messes. Considering the short amount of time they have had it its already getting better, its just a shame the LO guys can share improvements with the Apache guys but due to license incompatibilities I just don't see that happening.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.