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.'"

Comments

Re:Nasty doc recovery bug fixed?

[WaywardGeek]

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 $.

Re:open source office suite will never succeed

[guruevi]

Both the mail and the calendaring part has been figured out a long time ago. It's called CalDAV and IMAP. Get with the times, Exchange/Outlook is only king where the subjects want it to be. There are drop-in replacements for Exchange Server, it's just a question of figuring out how to do it and get your stuff out of the proprietary cycle. Microsoft has itself abandoned Office and Exchange in favor of it's cloud (pay-per-view) offering, there is nowhere to go but open.

Re:Not A Troll

[Mitchell314]

Okay. Having gotten this far in the page, I've seen more comments bitching about the stereotypical slashdotter bashing microsoft than actual commenters bashing microsoft. And this is not a new trend. Now, I may not be the sharpest shed in the tool, but seems to me that 'truth' is highly subjective here.