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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.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Windows fanatics? 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. At home, on my MacBook Air, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this PC, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, IE will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even MSPaint is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various PCs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a PC that has run faster than its Mac counterpart, despite the Pcs' faster chip architecture. My Mac IIfx with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this Dell machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Windows PC is a superior machine.
Now let's see it on computers straight from the factory.
Apple retards who can't install anything without begging for their overlords blessing will have the opportunity to use one of the most popular office suites.
I think thats good for them.
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.
Modern app appers app apps using App Apps, not App Stores!
Apps!
If there will be in app purchases.
I demand this be corrected immediately for false advertising.
http://www.lgdb.org/game/chaosesque-anthology
It has an OSX build included.
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 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."
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
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.
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.
VMS had this 25 years ago.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.