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Apache OpenOffice Reaches 100 Million Downloads. Now What?
We're thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word, and that's in large part thanks to the success of the OpenOffice family of word processors. "Family," because the OpenOffice name has been attached to several branches of a codebase that's gone through some serious evolution over the years, starting from its roots in closed-source StarOffice, acquired and open-sourced by Sun to become OpenOffice.org. The same software has led (via some hamfisted moves by Oracle after its acquisition of Sun) to the also-excellent LibreOffice. OpenOffice.org's direct descendant is Apache OpenOffice, and an anonymous reader writes with this excellent news from that project: "The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache OpenOffice has been downloaded 100 million times. Over 100 million downloads, over 750 extensions, over 2,800 templates. But what does the community at Apache need to do to get the next 100 million?" If you want to play along, you can get the latest version of OpenOffice from SourceForge (Slashdot's corporate cousin). I wonder how many government offices -- the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft's biggest customer -- couldn't get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they're stuck with for now.
Libre Office is much better, IMO.
I thought LibreOffice was the true descendant of OpenOffice.org?
With so many people experiencing issues with Microsoft Office 2013 activation and random requests to re-activate which result in error codes, or issues where "A problem has occurred" with no log entries or error codes when you try to install the software, it's quite possible Microsoft has strongly encouraged people to seek alternatives.
Since experiencing so many reliability issues with Microsoft Office 2013, issues that did not exist with Microsoft Office 2010, I've become a vocal advocate for making the switch from Microsoft to either OpenOffice or LibreOffice.
I often encourage OpenOffice for older folks that are looking for a more reliable experience while I suggest LibreOffice to those who want a feature rich experience and don't mind the occasional glitch or updating the software as regularly as they release updates. I feel both are great projects.
I think the bigger problem will be the Excel to Calc transition. Because Calc is still lagging behind in functionality, especially in the matter of dealing with formulas and macros.
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you are funny, the miniscule percentage of government spending that goes to Microsoft is a budget rounding error
And if Microsoft fell, those people would do other things for a living, maybe even get a few good companies while losing one giant crappy one
If that were true then there would not have been 100 million downloads of Apache OpenOffice, would there? Therefore...
We're thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word
Sadly that isn't really true. My company has standardized on LibreOffice and we use it for most things. However I get Word and Excel files all the time that cannot be accurately read by OpenOffice or LibreOffice. Particularly .DOCX and .XLSX files. Many are just fine but the more complicated ones tend to have moderate to severe formatting corruption. Sometimes to the point of unreadability. Google Docs and other doc viewers frequently don't do any better of a job of it. I have to keep a seat of Microsoft office available for those documents that I can't read any other way even to this day.
I've tried over the yrs to download the latest ver of OpenOffice and to give it a try and I always end up moving back to MSFT Word within a few days/weeks.
It's not missing features per se, it's layout/UI awkwardness and smoothness.
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I actually have been looking into that question and tracking it via surveys. Of those who tried OpenOffice, 78% continued to use it "sometimes" or "regularly":
See: http://www.robweir.com/blog/20...
Unless you are a business user you are unlikely to use any office application daily.
I use Apple's Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
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For most users that I've known who were willing to try OpenOffice, Calc worked fine for them.
The problem is Outlook and Exchange. The users see the mail client, calendering, and the like, as essential. The word processor and spreadsheet are secondary to that. Once some exec starts talking to sales about getting just Outlook, they are sold on the wonders of getting the whole MSOffice suite.
There are enough users who refuse to even try OpenOffice for the word processor. "I can't because...". I've tricked some users into switching, by just giving them shortcuts on their desktop with the MS names instead of the OO names, and changing the default save types to the MS counterpart. When they ask about why it looks different, I just tell them "oh, this is the newer version.", and they're fine.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I wonder how many government offices -- the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft's biggest customer -- couldn't get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they're stuck with for now.
That's because Microsoft Office has long ceased being the proprietary alternative to OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Nowadays, any typical organization use Microsoft Office + Active Directory + SharePoint + Exchange et. al. complete with compliance with bullsh*t like HIPAA and FIPS 140-2, and OpenOffice/LibreOffice cannot simply become a drop-in replacement anymore.
Microsoft is probably counting every OEM that ships with the trial version of Office, and all the bundled licenses, even if they aren't used.
Most companies buy too many licenses, so they can be sure they have enough. So if we buy 50, and use 30, but only 10 use it on any sort of regular basis, MS will still count it as 50.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Find me a replacement for Excel then. A real replacement, not some crappy OpenOffice thing that has 80% of the features.
Due to the way MS products are licensed, and the cost of training, and the fact that the average person gets confused easily with software, it is cheaper for large organizations to buy the MS products for use by the minority of users that actually need it.
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You are describing my experience with home users, e.g. people who use Word to type out a school assignment or a project report and then print it.
.htaccess magic going on or are relying on mods which exist only for Apache - well, you are out of luck and you are probably not going anywhere.
:)
People who do "serious" work with Office have real problems migrating. Excel formulas will not always successfully transfer to Calc, which means old spreadsheets can't be used and they can't be shared with people still using MS products.
Write and Word do have incompatibilities. E.g. one bug lingers around for years: when a header is saved in OpenOffice format and then saved as a Word document, it will appear on all pages and not only on the first page.
I never tried to open a MS Access database in OpenOffice Base, but Base does have stability and bug issues, at least on Mac (just yesterday I had problems with it crashing).
I won't even go into macros, templates, etc.
Switching from MS Office to OpenOffice / LibreOffice is not easy at all for power users. To put into geek terms: imagine switching from Apache to Lighttpd. For most things, it will be great. But, if you have some serious
Fresh start with OO/LO, on the other hand, is a breeze
I wonder how many government offices -- the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft's biggest customer -- couldn't get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they're stuck with for now.
Microsoft positions MS Office as part of an integrated solution for clerical work that scales to an enterprise of any size.
Microsoft Office 365 for Health Organizations
Microsoft has entered into a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with Texas, a pact that carries much more weight these days after the HIPAA omnibus rule was released in January.
Implementing Office 365 for such a large network should serve as a sign that the state is comfortable enough with cloud computing that 100,000 employees, including the state Health and Human Services System, will be using the services.
What will Texas Office 365 deal mean for healthcare security? [Feb 2013]
...collaborate and listen. LibreOffice has ~10 times the number of developers involved ( https://www.ohloh.net/p/libreo... , https://www.ohloh.net/p/openof... ), and it's a better project in every possible way. The only thing you have going for you is that name you inherited for Oracle. By carrying on with this project you're just continuing a fork that serves no purpose to the community. In fact it harms the community, because new-comers try AOO and think it's the best that the community can do, when LO has shown we can do so much better.
The only upside, is that LO can import your work and benefit from what little improvements your small team are able to produce.
In the context of everything else that is available (R, etc), yes.
Just bought a new laptop with Office 2013 Home / Student edition included. Went through the Office licence activation fine then got an obscure error message that Office installation cannot be completed because it is already partly installed. It gave a link to the MS website which gave no help at all; essentially it was an unknown problem. Tried rebooting and going through the install/activation process again a few times but always the same useless error message. In the end I thought "f*ck it" and completely unistalled Office. I'm now considering whether to install LIbreOffice or Apache OpenOffice; Microsoft had their chance and blew it.
Macros are the main problem keeping back a switch to LibreOffice or OO.o. Also, paid commercial support (so that Joe Smith can call up an "engineer" at 3 AM on a holiday Sunday with an urgent issue and get a hotfix issued by 7 AM).
The macro problem is bigger than most people (i.e., those outside Corporate or Public Sector America) realize. On many large enterprise systems, the computer is so locked down that to develop almost any kind of automation, or work productivity software, is nigh impossible. So, assuming you know some basic stuff about software development and you're tired of clicking and dragging on the same cells in Excel 500 billion times, you have two choices: either suck it up and click until you get a repetitive stress injury, or break out the VBA.
Most enterprises (at least, those I've worked at) don't restrict the use of VBA macros, so they've become a sort of "programming environment of last resort" for worker bees in companies that are either too cheap, or too stupid to deploy actual development software like Visual Studio or Eclipse. And even those employees who decide to go off-roading and fly in the face of corporate policy to install "un-approved" software (heretics; how dare they!) will run into major roadblocks related to not having administrative privileges on their system.
VBA code does not port seamlessly without major changes to the LibreOffice/OpenOffice environment; it basically has to be rewritten, depending on the complexity. Long story short, there are entire enterprise systems implemented in VBA (typically based on MS Access or MS Excel), often with copious use of Win32 API functions, which include networking, databases, custom file formats, custom GUIs (UserForms), and so on and so forth. These systems can save hundreds of hours of manual labor and improve the quality of life for people who work for a living and are just trying to get shit done, despite cloistered "departments" impinging from all sides, trying to impede their progress to the fullest extent possible due to NIH and general paranoia about software that they themselves didn't select (but when one of the IT guys who pulls the strings decides they really like some cool new program that helps THEM in THEIR job, of course it gets immediately installed on everyone's systems without so much as a security sniff-test).
Hiring an intern to work on one of these for a summer or two, or hoping and praying that you recruit someone who's willing to work for near-minimum-wage with a background in programming, is often the only thing separating corporate drones from RSI-inducing repetitive work. And don't go to the IT department and ask them to develop or buy a system, oh no; they never have the budget, and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to sit down with your boss's boss's boss for a Project Scope Agreement meeting until July 2017.
VBA, from a pragmatic perspective, is a loophole that skunkworks people have been gleefully exploiting for close to 20 years now. If you propose to do away with it by removing Office from peoples' computers and putting OO.o or LO in its place, you'll incite a riot. If you do it anyway, your business will grind to a halt as productivity and efficiency drop by a factor of 100.
If you're an IT director with a hand in a decision like this, I urge you to survey ALL your employees -- not just the managers who have no clue what their employees do -- to see what impact a transition from MS Office to LO/OO.o would have. I'm not saying a move is impossible, but you need to do it in cooperation and coordination with your employees. Yes, even the inconvenient ones who like to download zipballs with those "Open Sauce" EXEs that you don't trust. They're the good guys; they're helping your company; and they're just trying to get their work done as efficiently as possible.
People who do "serious" work with Office have real problems migrating.
I'm one of those people who does "serious" spreadsheet work. By and large switching between the Excel and OOo/LO works pretty well. Occasional formatting issues and the odd formula incompatibility but mostly it works fine. I try to use macros as little as possible so I can't speak to compatibility there but I would expect it to be something of a creeping horror.
Write and Word do have incompatibilities.
Sadly yes. Quite a few of them in fact.
I never tried to open a MS Access database in OpenOffice Base,
I have and it generally works but probably not exactly the way you expect. Base isn't really the same thing as Access. It's more of a connector application than a standalone database product. I use it primarily to do ODBC connections between spreadsheets and a database. Unfortunately they tend to break their ODBC code between versions so I've been stuck on a pretty old version of OO for quite a while.
Switching from MS Office to OpenOffice / LibreOffice is not easy at all for power users. To put into geek terms: imagine switching from Apache to Lighttpd. For most things, it will be great. But, if you have some serious .htaccess magic going on or are relying on mods which exist only for Apache - well, you are out of luck and you are probably not going anywhere.
Bingo. If you have a heavily macro'd set of Excel spreadsheets or the like you probably aren't going to want to switch. Just way too painful. But most people could probably switch with only modest problems here and there.
Excel is fantastic for exploring small sets of data... "quick and dirty" stuff. When you want rigorous statistics or a more formal analysis of data, R and friends are far superior. And anything even remotely repetitive should be done in something with a better scripting language. But I'd hate to lose Excel just as much as I'd hate to be forced to use MATLAB or Python to plot results from some small screening experiment.
And of course, we are completely deviating from Excel's forte as a financial tool, where it is much stronger.
Sometimes I'll even use it to clean up data for insertion into a database or some other such task. It has some nice built-in "Filter" functions.
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I'd *love* to ditch MS Office for any version of Open Office, but none of them give me MS Word's Outline Mode, an integral part of Word since Word for Windows back in the '90s.
For you real old-timers, it's not KAMAS (a CP/M based outliner that I maintain has never been surpassed), but it's the only thing current that comes within shouting distance
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Calendaring is one a business task that is critically important to many businesses, but is quite widely ignored in the open source world, at least with respect to easy setup.
In my small office, we use Apple's open source Darwin Calendar Server: http://trac.calendarserver.org... It'll serve calendar data to the mac calendar client, as well as Mozilla's Sunbird client, probably others too.
It works great and it has been extremely stable (I have it running on a debian VM), but it isn't totally trivial to set up. Not hard exactly, but certain OS defaults don't work (e.g., requires extended atrributes, which requires editing fstab, and if you don't, it will never ever work): https://wiki.debian.org/HowTo/...
Anyway, a simple to set up calendar server would be a substantial contribution to the open source business software stable.
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The problem is Outlook and Exchange. The users see the mail client, calendering, and the like, as essential. The word processor and spreadsheet are secondary to that. Once some exec starts talking to sales about getting just Outlook, they are sold on the wonders of getting the whole MSOffice suite.
If you look at Microsoft's pricing, it's fairly obvious why. If you're first getting Outlook for 135 euro then another 135 euro to get everything else is an easy sell-up, particularly since I'm guessing the sales reps will give you a volume rebate on the Office suite but never on Outlook alone. For at least a decade I've heard product after product being called "Outlook killer" but they all seem to fizzle and my impression mostly because they focus on being POP/IMAP clients. Calendaring is probably more essential to an organization, and I don't mean the simple one-off meeting.
When are people available and what meeting rooms are available. Setting up recurring meetings (like say a weekly staff meeting) that lets you easily modify single instances (because this week is easter), calendar sharing, forwarding events with proper notification to the meeting owner, overviews of who will/will not attend or haven't answered, including the agenda or attachments, corporate directories, personal directories, all that practical stuff like that if I start writing a mail to someone in-house it warns me right away they're going to send an away message instead of waiting for me to send it, get the auto-reply, realize what I just send won't work, then another email to say forget that, let's do something else when you're back on Monday.
Geeks hate meetings and scheduling, every one of them myself included. Good calendar software which makes it easy to drown people in meetings is just begging to be swamped with them so it's not exactly an itch we'd like to scratch. We're very busy trying to invent and push non-meeting solutions like email or IM and claim we're solving it better. I'm not going to fire up debate, but the fact of the matter is that getting all of the people involved in the same room at the same time to discuss/decide matters is still a very popular idea. And if you want to get rid of Office, you need to get rid of Outlook and if you want to get rid of Outlook you must handle this well. I'm sure there's lots of people who'd like to drop Exchange and the CALs, using non-MS products despite still sending around MS documents so it should be easier than taking down all of MS Office at once.
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