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LibreOffice Now Available On Apple's Mac App Store
sfcrazy writes: It's an event of historical magnitude: One of the most popular Open Source projects, LibreOffice, is now available directly from Apple's Mac App Store. You can get LibreOffice on OSX with automatic updates, long-term maintenance, and optional professional support, for the first time. There are two editions of LibreOffice available on the Mac App Store: LibreOffice from Collabora and LibreOffice Vanilla. While the Vanilla edition can be downloaded free of cost, LO from Collabora has a price tag of $10.
"Free through the App store" is an implicit endorsement that plain old "free" can't beat, even taking open-source licensing out of the picture.
Now let's see it on computers straight from the factory.
Bullshit!!! Mine needs to reboot about once a week for updates.
Seems like Collabra basically ship more or less vanilla open office but you get professional support for your money and they might be more responsive to bugs you file or something. Not 100% sure.
As for free through the App Store, well, I've had that thruogh my "apt" store (ho ho ho) for as long as LO has existed. Yet another leading innovation from the world of Linux :)
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Typical Windoze idiot comment there AC.
Reality Check: You can install all the software you want on a Mac without having to go through the Apple Apps store. But since you've been drinking Windoze Koolaid for so long you probably are not aware of that. The vast majority of the software we use on our Macs did not come via the App store. The App store is just one of many ways to get software on the Mac. Chill out.
If there will be in app purchases.
Thanks for the memories -- it's been a long long time since I've seen that troll.
Here's the earliest version I could find with a zero effort search: http://kottke.org/98/11/my-mac... Maybe there is an earlier one?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
This is "historic".
I recommend that the people whose Macs I support only purchase software from Apple's Mac Store. This means that a very good office suite can be had through the Apple eco-system.
This is very good news.
(It also saves time for those who never update third-party software because updates will come through Apple Updates.)
HooRay!
Perhaps you meant...EXTRAORDINARY magnitude.
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
It's possible that these versions come bundled with less crapware than sourceforge versions
I can't tell if the comments here are serious or if everyone is making some kind of subtle joke that is going swoosh over my head.
I demand this be corrected immediately for false advertising.
It's actually not called "GratisOffice."
Or, in this case, "Free as in speech, and free as in... well, it costs as much as a couple beers."
You overestimate people who use Apple products. I never said it was the only way. I just mentioned that the least of Apple users - the ones who use the mac app store - can now install something that is extraordinarily popular, and previously missing.
The LibreOffice spreadsheets crash on me all the time.
... helps that I have an MSDN subscription, though.
I'm not going near that stuff anymore
Windows 95?
Yeah, the trolls seem to be out in force today.
I just performed two copy tests on my 2013 MacBook Pro, 2.7 Ghz i7, 16GB RAM. I copied the exact same file (3.78 GB) from one location to a different location on the same disk drive. The test was performed under two operating systems on that machine:
- The latest beta release of Yosemite (10.10.4): 32.69 s
- The latest insider preview of Windows 10 (build 10130): 19.56 s
This isn't a full benchmark suite by any means, but if I can copy a 4GB file orders of magnitude faster than you can copy a 17 MB file on your MacBook Air or on your Windows PC, then you have some very screwed up stuff going on.
I don't want to start a holy war here
Yeah, that is precisely what you were attempting to do.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I do realize you just forgot the Sarcasm tag here... but in The Freaking Article it says there are two versions. A free one, tagged Vanilla, and the $10 Collabora one has support.
Besides that, Libre is more Free as in Speech than Free as in Beer.
I have a Windows 2000 system still in non-stop for almost 15 years. We're talking 6 9's up time.
That would be far beyond 6 9's uptime if true that's it's never had any downtime in 15 years.
This, right here.
At work, I normally find myself either at the command prompt or a text editor. Outside of the corporate-imposed Lync, Office, and Outlook, I'd have no use for Microsoft's products at all.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Very few people using a Mac probably even care now.
I have a Windows 2000 system still in non-stop for almost 15 years.
Cool - what's the IP addy? An almost completely unpatched SP1/2 level box should be awesome to play with, assuming it actually works. ;)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You do realize uptime dick size wars are now considered passé right? Regular patching is good for your soul.
VMS had this 25 years ago.
2 Gigs of RAM
Well, there's your problem, sonny!
Obviously, from my Username, you might guess that I'm no Windows fan; but fair's fair.
How much RAM does your MBA have?
And the IIfx was a BLISTERINGLY-fast machine... in 1990. Quite the impressive architecture.
br> But RAM-starve ANY machine, and it will make you want to claw your brain out, waiting.
Sadly, you're right.
Too little too late - the latest Office 2016 preview that MSFT has been distributing for free is fan-fucking-tastic. It is orders of magnitude better than the 2011 for Mac release, and even Office 2011 on the Mac was a better option than LibreOffice.
LO got on the store too late for anybody but a handful of cheap bastards to care. This will make fuck-all difference in LO's market share versus MS Office, as people who want to get real work done will still choose to use the far-superior Microsoft Office.
And before I get called a shill, my daily work is conducted on a Mac, and most of my time is split between the Mac command line and the command line of my Linux (Ubuntu) vm doing development. I also have a Windows VM, but that runs primarily for the corporate-mandated Lync software and a few other "only-Windows" packages. I love Linux, and much of the software that runs on it is great - and I get paid decent money for developing software for it. My gripe is confined to a few packages, such as LibreOffice. Hooray - it's open source. It's still a fucking abortion, and deserves no serious consideration for anybody needing to get stuff done in an "Office" type of application.
Unfortunately some people must use PCs for some tasks.
Fortunately there are Macs available for those who would rather not use PCs.
Even better, you can run Windows software on your Mac if you have Windows software that you must use. There are many solutions for doing this that work very well.
Windows is a limited environment that has a lot of problems. The MacOSX a larger environment that solves those and other problems and sub-sets the Windows environment within it.
Life is good.
...and Linux. Don't forget Linux.
In fact, Macs remain the ONLY PCs that can legally run (I think) ANY OS.
It's 6 9's including planned downtime for updates. Meaning I treat planned updates like crashes.
Kudos to Apple for allowing a direct competitor to their iWork suite into the gilded garden, though to be fair iWork is bundled for free with new Macs.
It will be real news if Microsoft puts LibreOffice in the same space as their precious Office 360. Let the Ribbon go head-to-head with a free alternative with a pre-Ribbon UI.
does it still require x? i'm too lazy to look. Yawn.
127.0.0.1
But it's totally up to date and safely behind a firewall.
Masterful trolling combined with lotsa newbs. I would not be surprised to find out that these comments are pulled directly from a message board 7 or 8 years ago. It is probably a subtle commentary on what this discussion is going to turn into. the fact that so many people are taking it seriously means there are a lot of troll detectors in the off position.
If the Mac app store is anything like the iOS app store, it would be a GPL violation to put LibreOffice in there:
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/lice...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
VLC was kicked out of the AppStore due to GPL violation (not Apple, but he publisher pulled it). What's to prevent the same from happening here?
Regular patching is good for your soul.
Valar aptgetis.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
LOL. Of all people, someone named "macs4all" ought to recognize a variation on this ancient Mac troll post. As a couple others have commented in this subthread, I'm amazed and how many people it's hooked.
Are you running Windows 98?
Missing? Don't know about that. My Mac mini came with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. As did my iPad Air 2. With continuation and hand-off that's hard to beat (in my case). As for LibreOffice/OpenOffice I've always considered a major pain in the neck to use. But that might be very well just me. Most of the stuff I write I do on Emacs in org mode. Mac users who need LibreOffice know someone who can install it for them. Same story as for Windows.
Perl Programmer for hire
LibreOffice is MPLv2 license so binaries are fine in app store
Is this App Store version missing functionality? I checked the existing (manually installed) LibreOffice, and the Finder says: "616.2 MB". But the App Store says it's 213 MB.
That's a pretty big difference in size. Can anyone explain?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
The free LibreOffice Vanilla version on the App Store is "Prerelease" version 4.4.4.2 while the Collabora supported LibreOffice is the "Still" version 4.3.7.
Collabora is not doing LibreOffice any favors by putting a version that is not ready for the mainstream out for public consumption. More likely, they're using the Vanilla as a means to drive people to their $10 version.
Seems a bit underhanded.
My manually installed LibreOffice has a file size of 616.2 MB, or so Finder reports. I check out its page in the App Store, and it says "213 MB". Then I install that one, and on disk it now says 868.8 MB. Anybody knows why there are such large differences?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
A year from now, nobody will remember or care when this was added to the app store. I've ripped farts that people have remembered for longer.
Very few people using a Mac probably even care now.
Sorry, I'm confused. You mean they don't care about his farts or about LibreOffice? Be clear, man! How are we supposed to have an intelligent conversation otherwise??!
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
The free LibreOffice Vanilla is the "Prerelease" version 4.4.4.2 while the $10 LibreOffice-from-Collabora is "Still" version 4.3.7.
Collabora isn't doing LibreOffice any favors by putting a prerelease version that is not ready for prime time out for public consumption. More likely, they are introducing the public to a buggy experience, and then offering to fix the experience using a non-prerelease version that costs $10.
Seems a bit underhanded.
Even the free one would require that you be on the Mac App store to get it, which requires you to be tracked by having an Apple ID. Far better to bypass the store entirely and get libre office directly.
In fact, Macs remain the ONLY PCs that can legally run (I think) ANY OS.
What you say?
It can run andriod?
Yep. Android for x86, or indeed any other version that someone wishes to build for the Mac hardware.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
Even the free one would require that you be on the Mac App store to get it, which requires you to be tracked by having an Apple ID. Far better to bypass the store entirely and get libre office directly.
Which you have always been able to do on OS X and still are able to do.
What this does is open up LibreOffice to a whole new demographic who wouldn't have done that before.
I'm not seeing a downside here, other than "apple bad, lolz". More exposure for large open source projects is a good thing, surely.
The fact that this is just happening now illustrates the fact that the app store model just doesn't work to bring you reasonable content. A walled garden is always still a walled garden.
I may have different requirements than you, but I dumped MS Office for OOo about 10 years ago and then switched to LO when they forked. I work every day with text and spreadsheet documents, and send things back and forth with other employees and customers.
The problems tend to be with complex styles that aren't often used in "normal" business communications. We don't do page layouts in text documents. That's what Publisher and their ilk are for.
I have never pined for the days of MS Office. OOo works and does everything I require. And I keep my budget down. I also file bug reports, follow-up on the fixes, etc. no need to pay $200 to leave a bug report via voicemail and have it never get addressed.
VLC was kicked out of the AppStore due to GPL violation (not Apple, but he publisher pulled it). What's to prevent the same from happening here?
Wrong. Apple did not kick anything out because of the GPL. GPL zealots sued Apple despite the fact that users could get the source and do whatever they wanted. It was this lawsuit that caused VLC to be remove. GPL zealots had it removed. What was the "crime"? The binary could not be used on multiple devices, the binary had DRM that restricted it to one account. It didn't matter that source was available and anyone who cared could build their own or have one built for them by someone technically inclined.
LOL. Of all people, someone named "macs4all" ought to recognize a variation on this ancient Mac troll post. As a couple others have commented in this subthread, I'm amazed and how many people it's hooked.
You attempt to berate me; but at least I had the balls to hang my Karma out, MR. AC.
Yep. Android for x86, or indeed any other version that someone wishes to build for the Mac hardware.
Who on God's green earth would want to run THAT OS on ANYthing but a mobile device?
Cute, but requiring a reboot after patching is passé my friend.
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a PC (a Dell Dimension with 2 Gigs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes
I know this is a troll I'm replying to, but I do have a similar complaint about Windows. This includes Windows XP, 7 and 8. Some of the software that I have to support in my job creates directories with tens of thousands of image files. Something I frequently have to do involves remoting in to a system, opening one of these directories (in detail view) and trying to list the files by date. It takes sooo long. Ten minutes or more in many cases. I can literally go into a command prompt, cd to the directory do dir > filelist, pull the filelist over to my own system over the network, open a spreadsheet program, import the filelist into the spreadsheet program as a space-delimited file, then list the files by date, filename, size, etc. well before windows itself is done ordering the files. This is pretty much always faster. It's ridiculous. What kind of hideously inefficient sorting algorithm are they using? Or what completely unneccessary data is it trying to process in order to sort a paltry thirty-thousand or so items with a few fields of meta-data?
You must have one of those Windows systems that's so slow, even the malware crashes.
"Even better, you can run Windows software on your Mac "
In this more enlightened era, most Mac fans no longer consider running Windows on a Mac a stoning offense. You just have to be stoned to want to do it.
dumb. and here's why:
firstly: Apple's pretty crazy about their data retention & privacy policies, and not just externally. Of all of the gigantic corporations out there that have tons of my info, I feel relatively safe with fruit land. Work there some time & you'll see what I mean.
secondly: the app store allows people to:
a) easily get feature/stability/security updates with the rest of their software
b) easily reacquire software that they've picked up in the event that they need to reinstall or they get a new computer.
thirdly: This has already been mentioned, but it gives libreoffice some much needed visibility.
LibreOffice has everything to gain by being in the app store & only 99 bucks a year to lose.
Don't dumb here.
There is no dumb here.
How times have changed. Someone posts and old copypasta troll and gets dozens of serious responses. If any post deserves a +5 Troll mod, it's this one. Beautifully done sir, though perhaps a sad reflection on what's left of this community.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Well played, sir, well played.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You're confused. A copyright holder informed Apple that they were distributing a version of VLC in violation of the GPL terms. They told Apple to either conform to the license, or stop redistributing. Apple chose to do the latter.
There will always be some situations where a reboot is required after patching. If it's the kernel that gets updated there is no way around it that I know of. A weakness of Windows is that it often requires a reboot for updates that DON'T involve the kernel such as updates to Windows services; on other OSes, including anything Unix-based like OS X or Linux, you can just restart the service.
An Android developer. I also know of some video player appliances that use Android. Not much point otherwise for now. I believe that Chrome OS and Android will eventually unify, at which point there might be more reason to run the combined OS on a laptop or desktop.
Even the free one would require that you be on the Mac App store to get it, which requires you to be tracked by having an Apple ID. Far better to bypass the store entirely and get libre office directly.
Paranoid much?
Apple doesn't sell, or give, personal information to anyone.
And seriously, why in the fuck would the NSA be interested in which Office Suite you run?
has been on the Mac App Store for years. It trails OpenOffice development a bit, but incorporates lots of Mac specific tech, eg. it was Retina friendly first.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Macintosh...
That's true, but many people dislike it because Uninstalling non-App Store applications on a Mac is a major PITA since it has nothing comparable to a Linux Package Manager or even Windows Installer to manage application installs. The easiest way to install and remove them is to get sandboxed apps from the App Store that install from there and then you remove them, literally, the same way you would uninstall an iOS app on those devices (long click and press and 'x', then confirm you want to delete the app).
Office 2016 is Sandboxed for that reason. The earlier versions were a massive pain to uninstall. The detriment to that is that they have to duplicated a lot of data within each application package (Shared Libraries, Fonts that take of hundreds of MB due to duplication, etc.). But it takes seconds instead of dozens of minutes to cleanly uninstall it - and that's worth it to a lot of people (including me).
I'm using Office 2013 on Windows even though I hate using a 15.6" Notebook for everything because I don't want to install 2011 on my Mac (don't use Beta software) and then have to do the manual uninstall when 2016 finally releases (I've done it before, never again). Also, it does some funky stuff to fonts on your system, due to Duplicates, etc.
Isn't the real GPL violation that the sources don't include the keys that are needed to obtain the binary? The sources are essentially intentionally crippled, and are not the full source necessary to obtain the binary as distributed through the app store. IIRC, mac app store doesn't do DRM of any sort.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Context is everything. I'd be interesting to see how you patch a windows 2000 server without needing reboots.