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SUSE's LibreOffice Core Team Moves To Collabora
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Meeks has announced that the core of SUSE's LibreOffice team is moving over to Collabora, which will now be providing commercial LibreOffice support. 'It seems to me that the ability to say "no" to profitable but peripheral business in order to strategically focus the company is a really important management task. In the final analysis I'm convinced that this is the right business decision for SUSE. It will allow Collabora's Productivity division to focus exclusively on driving LibreOffice into Windows, Mac and Consulting markets that are peripheral to SUSE. It will also retain the core of the existing skill base for the benefit of SUSE's customers, and the wider LibreOffice community, of which openSUSE is an important part.'"
I figured a libre-office hater would be the first post. Just to counter it, here's my Open/Libre Office experience. In 2000, I started a software company in NC, and bought every employee (we were all big geek programmers) Linux laptops. I didn't pay for a single Windows Office license (though we paid for a bunch of Visual C++ pro seats). It's been 13 years, and even though I have been in a CTO role all that time, I've not once had to install Windows Office. I see co-workers, mostly in biz-dev, marketing, sales, or management roles who get squished by people who send them documents in a more recent Office format. Management hates paying for new software simply to load new file formats. LibreOffice has loaded and edited every file I ever had to deal with since 2000, for free, while my Office addicted co-workers have put out a lot of $$ just to keep up. You're upset about bugs in file recovery?!? Get a real job!
Now I have to give Microsoft some kudos. They've actually managed to continue to innovate in this space, and the PowerPoint presentations I see from co-workers who are PowerPoint fan-boys beat anything I've seen from the LibreOffice geeks. From a visual presentation point of view, they win. That's worth some $.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
without a robust mail and calendaring client that can co-exist in a microsoft exchange environment (even with full and absolute 100% compatibility and feature match with other office components)... and preferably with a true drop-in replacement for exchange server. exchange is the driving force behind most major deployments of microsoft office and windows server products. because of that large, captive user base, it will remain the de facto standard in business, even among those who don't use exchange for mail or calendaring. libreoffice, openoffice, gnumeric, abiword, and all the other open source alternatives to some (never all) microsoft office components will NEVER be more than a niche product with an insignificant (by comparison) number of users.
google is the main threat to the microsoft office ecosystem... why? because it has mail and calendaring in addition to alternatives to the most-used office components. the open source stuff doesn't. businesses aren't going to piece together a mess of open source products to kinda sorta, maybe get most the features of exchange and exchange server -- and then trust it to run reliably.. they'll pay the microsoft tax and get it all in one place because they're dumb sheep, and 20+ years of following microsoft is a hard habit to break... even if maybe, with the right person in charge of deployment and administration, it might just be the same or less cost overall. google offers a similar one-stop shopping experience but is new and has its own issues such as publicized outages and break-ins, government snooping, questionable data retention/usage, etc.
hate on this post all you want.. but facts are facts. microsoft is king of the enterprise, and ain't goin anywhere anytime soon.
"Open office .. it'll overwrite you're auto backups"
From what I've experienced OO prompts the user and asks if they want to recover any lost documents.
I'm not a LO hater, and actually want to see them do better. But when using it, I can't seem to shake the feeling that I'm using something that is inferior in many ways to MS Office, partially due to an immature and slow interface in some aspects, not to mention there's a tangible benefit in using the same tools as everyone else and hence not having to even worry about file formats so long as you have an up-to-date version. That of course and the templates, and the fact that I know MS Office will have every possible feature I'm looking for, whereas LibreOffice MIGHT.
In the end I can't justify the concern when I know I can immediately just use what everyone else uses, and not add to the daily stresses of life purely for ideological reasons. Sure MS Office costs money, but I pirate it anyway so its cost level is still on-par with LibreOffice. About the only think LO has going for it then is it runs on Linux (quite well I might add), but since Linux has failed completely to make even a measurable mark on the desktop/laptop scene, it's not exactly a crowning achievement or benefit.
"Microsoft .. actually managed to continue to innovate in this space, and the PowerPoint presentations I see .. beat anything I've seen from the LibreOffice geeks"
..
Googling on 'graphics example filetype:odp` brings up some very interesting results, see these examples
Stereoscopic vision workshop
Open Source Productivity Tools
I'm a bit skeptical of ms office's greatness too. My company and I do support and having been the one to get the company off the ground I did a lot of it until a few years ago. My recollection is people fear stuff that is different, but in reality MS Office requires significantly more maintenance. There are lots of bugs in it. For instance I had a employee (way overqualified and extremely knowledgeable all around) spend 3-4 days on one customs outlet because of a bug. The most recent MS Outlook was doing something much worse than the auto-recovery bug this person speaks of. Had my tech not done the smart thing and backed everything outlook related up before he upgraded the customer would have been screwed. If you wonder why it took so long too- it's a business customer who lives off email.
Now I had another similar customer a few years back. Same thing happened. The difference is I didn't waste 3-4 days. I hack'd it and the hack involved gmail. Turned out gmail does everything most people really need and was a much better solution than Outlook. It was pretty hilarious. There is this fear that only Outlook / microsoft Office can do what you need it to. It's just not the case though.
And personally I've only ever run this business (substantial size now; 5 years and many employees) off GNU/Linux, Thunderbird/Evolution, and LibreOffice. Ohh we do have imap setup and webmail. Nothing is even outsourced (well, I do use gmail for contacts/calendar actually although we are going to eliminate that shortly).
While we started off doing support for mostly MS Windows users about 90% of our business is now GNU/Linux and it in part due to people purchasing our solutions. The other part is an increase in customers simply going GNU/Linux on there own initiative. About 50% of non-technical local customers who were on MS Windows when they started with us have gone GNU/Linux. It could be 80% if we had a solution for quickbooks.
"not having to even worry about file formats so long as you have an up-to-date version"
..
It's understandable why you would want to remain anonymous
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better, hater, ideological, immature, inferior, interface, pirate, slow, stresses, tangible
Truth isn't always easy to accept. Stop abusing the parent.
I would love to junk MS Word in favor of Libre Writer, but it can't even do a search and replace on a manual page feed (^m in MS Word).
I think that Powerpoint is good but the problem is that the gloss of Powerpoint can detract from what you are trying to say. I have seen a lot of presentations where people are really impressed by the speaker's Powerpoint presentation and are not listening to what is being said. You should learn to present and put the main points, your boardwork, on the presentation in a simple and plain form. Do not use too many different fonts or flashy graphics, they take the audience's attention away from you. They hide your message. If the audience wants to see a movie they have better options.
If you want to create a stand alone presentation that does not have a speaker then Powerpoint is great but for normal presentation, learn to present.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
I had a client specify a database in openoffice because they were cheap. It crashed continuously.
They couldn't afford PostgreSQL?
"Libre Writer .. can't even do a search and replace on a manual page feed"
...
Install the AltSearch extension and search for \p
Dontcha know? Emacs also comes with a life.
Table-ized A.I.
Michael Meeks has announced that the core of SUSE's LibreOffice team is moving over to Collabora
Is that in French Polynesia?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The OpenOffice Alt Find & Replace extension can do that -- I've been using it for years to supplement the built-in find/replace dialog, and it's really rare that I encounter something that it can't actually tackle. That said, while it works fine in the latest OpenOffice despite the extension's age, I have no idea how LibreWriter will handle it.**
**On my computers, OOWriter can handle much larger documents without slowing down or having 'issues' than LibreWriter can -- I'm fairly sure that this is because OOW lets me choose which extensions I want (basically just Alt F&R), while LO has a bunch of science/math addons (which I don't use) coded into the program now.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
Thanks, you must be the best presentor.
Conditional formatting, fix it please, even when starting from scratch with a new Calc document, it's horribly broken - starts off ok, but after a bit of copying and pasting such as when making shift patterns, it all goes completely haywire and becomes unusable :-(. Every time (v 4.1.0.2.0 Sept 2013)
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Yeup. The real competition for MS Office is Google Apps, and LibreOffice for stuff that is too fat or fancy for Google Apps.
We use Google Apps at work. It is schweeeeeeet. Excel for the serious spreadsheet jockeys because it is the best spreadsheet (LibreOffice admits it's bad and Kohei Yoshida is trying to make it suck less, 4.2 should be a lot faster).
LibreOffice is replacing the shitty HSQLDB database with Firebird, which actually works, is actually maintained, and is not written in Java, so this stuff will not happen any more.
Apache OpenOffice of course is trying to cover up just how shitty Base with HSQLDB is.
It sounds like SUSE, the largest contributor to LibreOffice, is ending their investment in LibreOffice, and their engineers are looking for new employment. This echos the way they got out of the Mono business a few years ago. But taking the same people and putting them in a much smaller company, with far less enterprise sales experience, is not something that will cause Microsoft to lose any sleep.
There are drop-in replacements for Exchange Server, it's just a question of figuring out how to do it...
"DROP IN" means there's a readily available "Downloads" page at some website, where you go to download some 250MB executable file with a free 2-user licence, and once you download that file, you double click on it, and it brings up a choice panel between "Basic" and "Advanced" installation, and 99% of all n00b users can choose the "Basic" installation, and within 5 minutes or so, you're up and playing around with the system and getting a feel for how it works and how your users could benefit from switching to the system.
"Drop-In" does NOT mean that you have to spend a week at Amazon, reading through thousands of product reviews, deciding which stack of softcover programming books with pictures of bizarre esoteric mammals on their covers you will need to purchase, and then spending about three or four years of your life actually reading the stack of softcover programming books with pictures of bizarre esoteric mammals on their covers, until you have a PhD-level understanding of C-Compilers [and a worthwhile opinion as to whether you should compile with the GNU compiler or Clang/LLVM or the Intel compiler or the M$FT compiler or the WTFE compiler], and which libraries you will need to compile against, and the theory of BASH shells, and the theory of prime numbers & elliptic curves and LDAP authentication, and the theory of sector-level hard-drive replication living beneath WebDAV and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
And then five or ten years later, when you've finally earned your "PhD" from the "School of Hard Knocks", you've still got to spend six or eight weeks at various internet forums, from Palo Alto to Bangalore, trying to figure out WTF line of code you need to add to some configuration file to get it all to work together reasonably "seamlessly", when finally some poor fat bearded dude, working for free from his mother's basement in Bulgaria, finally points out to you that your corporation can't do this because your 1,000 client computers have a known "issue" involving their 3Com ethernet chipsets in combination with their ATi graphics chipsets, but that no one has been able to chase down where that particular bug might live in the total code package, and so you're SOL.
At which point you learn that no one ever got fired for purchasing M$FT.
I had the displeasure of having to use libre office and open office and I can say that I would rather pay for Microsoft Office which I do, then use free Libre/Open office.
Why?
Wasted too many times with the bizarre quirks of libre/open office. Time is money. Stability is important and these application as about 1 yr ago, weren't all that stable. I had to work with training material which had text and graphics, etc., nothing to major, but can be large docs and I had a hard time dealing with all kinds of issues.
Now there will be a for profit version? LOL.. can't even get me to use the free one.. This should be interesting to see where things will lead.
I wrote "Nobots" in Open Office (mcgrew here, can't log in on this computer). I use MS Office at work, and to tell the truth, I like Oo better, mostly because it doesn't have that damned ribbon and of course because Microsoft's proprietary file formats are, IMO, garbage. I hate vendor lock-in.
I tried LibreOffice and uninstalled it within an hour. It's really limited; not being able to do full justification is a deal breaker for me. Since Oo and Lo are both open, I'll stick to Oo. Like Linux vs Windows, I'll choose the one with more useful features and better useability (that MS ribbon is is a useability clusterfuck). Which is Linux; Windows has lagged Linux for years in features and useability.
If Lo surpasses or even catches up with Oo in features and useability I'll likely switch. I was disappointed in Lo, from what I'd read I expected it to be the better of the two.
I have no idea what the guy you responded to was talking about. I've never encountered or even heard of the problem but frankly, he sounds like an MS shill.
My experience has been similar, I started with StarOffice in '98 (before Sun bought the company that made it), even asked my dad to send the registration by fax to Germany to get my non-commercial license (home use). I think this was version 5.0....but later I did try a 4.something on a linux box I had.
On my first job the company used MS Office, but at one point someone sent a document made in the then latest MS Word for Mac and I could not, no matter how much I tried, open it on the Office for Windows I had... but it was no problem in SO at home.
Later I worked at Sun..so StarOffice was a given...except for a few laggards that still stayed on Applixware for a while. And then it all became OpenOffice and it got rid of that heavy and laggy desktop environment alternative/replacement thing it had and it was smooth(er) sailing from there.
Then came Oracle...yuck
I did give LO a glance, but switched back to OO when Apache got it.
Powerpoint is actually the one bit of MS Office where Microsoft doesn't completely dominate the market, because a lot of people use Keynote.
Quote
'It seems to me that the ability to say "no" to profitable but peripheral business in order to strategically focus the company is a really important management task
unquote
no SH** Bosco; learning to focus on business with higher margin is something you should have engraved on your forehead on like, the first day of work.
Anyway, aside from the fanboys, everytime i try librre/open office, the don't work
I know, ymmv
About two months ago, I downloaded the latest open office clone and tried something real simple: paste a bitmap into a word document
this works sort of ok in MS office; doesn't work at all in OO
The whole thing is idiotic: the money is in corporate; if they want features they will go for MS suite, which OO will never touch; if they want cloud, google
If you want cheap, you can get last years MS suite off of ebay at very low cost
I just don't see why anyone bothers with OO
My recollection is people fear stuff that is different, but in reality MS Office requires significantly more maintenance.
Fear is great in your cow-orkers! I've been told not to distribute Document.docm files because the Word2010 default is Document.docx and "people will be nervous about getting something different." The weird thing about that is most of these same people don't know how to tell WindowsOS to display document suffixes, so how would they even notice?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I'll give almost ANYTHING the benefit of the doubt.
But there is a very finite upper bound to my patience, and as soon as that foreboding "Not Ready For Primetime" feeling starts to sink in, I'm outta there.
Again, though, my larger point would be that there is MASSIVE value-add in simply "getting it all to work together seamlessly", and unless and until the FOSS/Linux/BSD community [-er-, non-Apple BSD community] starts stepping up to the plate and actually putting in the elbow grease and peforming their due diligence on customer relations and making the whole process more or less "seamless" - until that time comes, M$FT is gonna keep eating their lunch in the Enterprise space.
Folks in the real world simply do not have the spare time to do the whole "poor fat bearded dude living in his mother's basement" routine for very long, before they actually STARVE to death [for lack of sufficient income stream].
I have no idea whatsoever about this bug, but if you know about it then it should not bite you again - you should always keep a backup, preferrably on another computer or at least on another HD or if even that can't be managed on some system a backup copy even on same HD is better than nothing. It sounds like a bug that should be flagged critical and fixed as quick as possible, but if this was needed to teach you to backup (and not trust the applications own auto-backups it manages and keeps in same disk) your important data then there is at least one good thing resulting from it.
And no, that is not trying to paint the bug as feature - just like I'm not saying that it was good when I burned my HD and lost most of my data back in the days because it taught me the importance of keeping backups ;) It was awful, but it did have one minor positive effect :)
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
This almost works. It can find a page break but not replace it. It reports replacing the page breaks, but the page breaks remain in the document.